Finding our New Normal

Since we got back from Israel, our home ed has shifted once again. This is something every home educator - and every parent - will recognise. You get into a rhythm that works and then BAM! someone has a massive developmental leap and/or hormone surge and you have to flail about until you find the new normal. We have managed to avoid too much flailing this time, thanks to it all coinciding with our trip away, thus giving us time away from the old routine (I use that word in its loosest possible sense) and space to observe, discuss and plan ready for our return. 

Reading Eggs and Maths Seeds have stayed. These make my life a huge amount easier so I am extremely grateful that Daniel loves them! For those not in the know, they are online programmes that take the child from the very beginning in reading and maths through to the standard levels for age 7 (RE) and age 9 (MS). There is a follow-on programme, Reading Eggspress, for reading at 7+. Each lesson takes somewhere around half an hour and uses games and animated characters to teach the material. Each game has to be passed before you can move on to the next one, and at the end of each ‘map’ (10 lessons in RE, 5 in MS), there is a quiz that must be passed before you can go on to the next one. You earn ‘eggs’ for each game that can be spent in the online shop to buy virtual furniture etc for a house with a little character, though Daniel has largely lost interest in that side of it (he was a bit obsessed for a while but calmed down when we introduced the rule that he could only go to the shop at the end of each map). As an added bonus, the programme sends me regular emails with a progress report so I have a record of what he has done and when; he doesn’t see these, nor the ‘estimated reading age’, but they are interesting for me to see and could be useful if our education provision were ever questioned. 

Anyway... after starting Reading Eggs at the end of last August, he is now on the final map and busy planning what we will do to celebrate finishing it. He will have a go at reading most things now, though has yet to tackle a whole book, but that will come. Maths Seeds he started in January and is now somewhere around the middle of Year 1. He is still finding it quite easy and often decides to do two lessons in a day so by September I expect he will have ‘caught up’ with where he would be if he were in school. I am impressed with how solid his grasp of basic number concepts is and love how excited he is by manipulating numbers just for the sake of it, not just in a practical context. Practical maths is obviously important (he is starting to tell the time and recognise coins, for example) but I also want him to appreciate the beauty of numbers in pure maths, and I am glad to see this programme encouraging that. 

So now to the new things. After years of fiercely resisting any kind of writing or even drawing, Daniel has suddenly started drawing, colouring, and even giving writing a go. At first it was just in birthday cards but gradually it has increased until he was happy to accept my suggestion that we look at how to write each letter correctly (his upside-down e’s were frustrating him). I gave him a choice of using the old write-and-wipe books or worksheets and he chose worksheets, so I have downloaded a free set and he is cheerfully working his way through the alphabet. 

Then there is Hebrew, with the Z’man Likro textbook I have used with many of my Bar Mitzvah students. He already knew the alphabet thanks to a story book we got him in the US 18 months ago, and now he is making great progress putting the letters together with the nekudot (vowels) and learning some very basic vocabulary. 

For the last year or so, Daniel has been desperate to learn Italian. We’re not entirely sure what inspired this interest (possibly a combination of Peppa Pig and the Go Jetters) but he has been impressively insistant about it. We briefly found a class that he loved, but it stopped for lack of numbers. An attempt to set up a home ed class with the same teacher failed for the same reason (we might try again in September). In the meantime, therefore, we are going to have a go at ten minutes each day of the Duolingo app. 

Finally, it felt like time to introduce some sort of music education. That deserves a post of its own. 

We don’t do all these things every day, of course - we are far too busy living life and enjoying all the activities summer offers. Perhaps 3-4 days most weeks we are doing at least some, aiming for a balance over the space of each week. Daniel seems much more settled and happy, and he and Adam fight much less, when he has had some time and space doing work. 

Of course, Adam is now asking to do ‘work’ too, so our new normal is about to change again to accommodate that, but for Daniel we seem to have found what works. For now, anyway!