Two Weeks and Counting

We are two weeks into our new curriculum work and I can honestly say that this is one of the best decisions I have ever made for our home ed. A couple of years ago it probably wouldn’t have worked for us, and who knows where we will be in a couple of years‘ time, but right now, for us, this absolutely hits the spot.

I am one of those people who loves a list. Shopping lists, To Do lists, list of ideas for the millions of things I may explore at some point; they help me collect my thoughts and reassure me that I won’t forget those important things (until I lose the list, of course). I am much, much happier when I am organised. 

With half our house due to be demolished in less than three weeks, we have an eye-watering amount to do. Over the past few months, knowing this was coming up, I have gradually worked through the boxes of random stuff thrown together during house moves, invested in sensible storage furniture and generally got us a lot more sorted than we have ever been. Now it is time to do the last big push as we race to shift things into storage and declutter the few rooms we will have left to make room for a camp kitchen, filthy waterproofs, muddy wellies, and the pile of straitjackets that will certainly be the only way to stop my children hijacking a bulldozer and ‘helping’ to widen our driveway by adjusting the position of next door’s house wall. 

With all of that looming, it is a huge relief to know that we have a home ed routine that is sustainable and will keep the boys engaged and happy whatever else is going on - and that I don’t need to apply too much thought to while dealing with everything. Most importantly, it will carve out a piece of time for me to spend with each of them in the midst of the chaos. 

Daniel is using Build Your Library Level 1, which covers the Ancient World for History. The focus is largely on reading great books together (me reading to him and natural discussion as it comes up) - short bursts of amazing content. There is The Tale of Despereaux for literature, which we are both loving. Daniel was hooked from the first day and is always disappointed to stop reading. We have both learned to leave this until last. The magic of the writing resonates for some time after we finish reading it and immediately moving on to another subject is a complete waste of time. Since Daniel prefers to get his least-liked work over with first and finish with his favourite, this works out nicely. 

History uses sections of Story of the World, which hadn’t exactly gripped us until we were able to get some maps out to work out the region we were reading about. Daniel really enjoys being able to slot together different pieces of information, so I suspect we’ll get into it. Last week we read a fun book about archaeology and made the mind-blowing discovery that US historical eras are completely different to ours. (For any Americans reading, ‘Prehistoric’ for us refers to anything before around CE43, and is divided into eras like the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.)

The week finished with an exciting archaeological dig in an exotic location (a.k.a. squatting on the concrete outside the garage, digging in the washing-up bowl). With Ben’s help, I had snuck out in the morning and filled the bowl from the flowerbed, complete with post holes (compost) and layers of knapped flint (picked up and worked on a walk a couple of weeks ago), Roman jewellery (since adopted by Ben, who loves a bit of bling), a grotty Saxon coin (an old £1 that once spent three weeks inside one of the boys and looks suitably revolting), various shards of glazed pottery (some that fit together), some Swiss coins (evidence of international trade), and a small plastic car that reduced Adam to a state of outrage when unearthed. Everyone got involved with this project. Daniel painstakingly scraped the soil off in layers and I was detailed to sieve every bit of it. Adam dashed off to fetch some water and came back (treading so carefully that several snails zoomed past him) with one of our china bowls full to the brim. He spent three quarters of an hour diligently scrubbing every find. Ben, entranced by the ready supply of both earth and water, mixed mud to the perfect consistency and painted himself from head to foot. Adam was mildly put out that his Very Important Archaeologist’s Brush was being put to such a plebeian use (he may not have actually used that word) but that was soon sorted out with a bit of diplomacy and an extra paintbrush. A few days later, Daniel was able to talk to my dad about the whole thing, and hear the story of the real post holes he excavated on Dartmoor in his youth, which was very cool. 

Science is Nature Studies this year. For all we spend so much time outdoors, Daniel hasn’t tended to enjoy the topic when studied before. However, he seems to appreciate BYL’s combined approach of practical activities in our own chosen area of nature (the allotment, since the garden is shortly to become a bulldozed wasteland) and books that present complex information in accessible but still challenging language. Right now I doubt he will remember all the levels of animal classifications from kingdom down to genus and species, but he enjoys discovering the concept. Now he knows the information exists, he will come back to it when he feels ready for more. 

Art is my real mental block after an appalling teacher in secondary school. I don’t remember ever learning about particular artists there, nor learning any techniques that produced a result I liked or wanted. Even before looking at full curriculums, I was wondering if I could find a guide to teaching Art, as I had absolutely no idea where to start. We have rediscovered watercolours (which I never used at school, only at home, thus bypassing most of the block) and I love how easy they are to get out and clear away. There is also flexibility, though. This week’s picture study was a set of paintings of faces constructed from different materials (fruits, vegetables and plants, in this case, to represent the seasons). As Daniel had already done some painting this week, I suggested he could build a face in Minecraft using different blocks. He ended up creating an engineer using different redstone blocks (for those who aren’t MC-savvy, redstone is like electricity and you can build circuits with it) and giving a full guided tour to a visiting friend. 

Poetry memorisation was a new idea for us. At the start, he was a bit huffy about doing it and really couldn’t see the point. Fortunately, both he and Adam (and probably Ben, as far as I can tell) have amazing memories. As he has realised how easy it is for him (he reads it twice and he’s generally got it), and especially when we have managed to find a bit of humour in each poem, he has started to warm up a bit. 

Aside from the curriculum, we have carried on with Cursive Kickoff for handwriting, Maths Seeds, and Usborne reading books. We were just coming to the end of a Year 2 CGP Geography book about North and South America, and although we liked it, it was still a bit of an uphill battle each week. Seeing the completely different approach of a Charlotte Mason-inspired programme, it occurred to me that we were taking far too much time relative to the amount of content. So far we have had to spend ages negotiating how much reading Daniel will do, and then ploughing painfully through the workbook (which, let’s face it, is really there so a teacher can tell which of her 30+ pupils have taken in anything they they have read with their often-limited decoding skills). Now we have decided to ditch the workbook and just read the main book, discuss it, and look things up in books or on the internet if we want to learn more. The extra busy-work didn’t seem to be achieving anything other than putting him off the subject, so we are going to stop doing it. 

Hebrew is carrying on and I am gathering information and resources to build a whole Jewish Studies curriculum for the kids. We won’t start that until after the High Holydays (end of September) so I’ll do a post about that another time. 

All in all, this is definitely a success. Daniel is so much happier; he is interested in what we are doing, happy to give things a go, and his creative side is blossoming as we do just enough of each thing to spark ideas without getting bogged down in busy-work (which then leaves us time for other things too). Loving the journey so far!