But not got time to do it at the moment. But i’m realising that i’ve got an awful lot of thinking to do about how we home educate, because i’m simply not getting time to give everyone the individual attention i would like to give them and still provide quality and variety as well. I don’t really feel that Fran and Maddy are getting more than an adequate education just at the moment, which isn’t good enough in my view and Amelie and Josie are missing out on mummy time.
Working smarter is, i think, going to have to involve getting back to some sort of structure to our days and weeks and, at least to some extent, involve me getting my head around working with them in 2 groups of 2. Maddy is perfectly capable of working with Fran in plenty of things and it isn’t so very hard to stretch things that little bit further to encompass reading and writing and more detail for Fran.
So yesterday i started with a joint maths lesson on fractions, which worked very well. Fran and i did several more pages of the MEP7, while Maddy sat with us and did some pages on 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4s from edhelper. Fran explained fractions to her and we worked together for a good while and it seemed very successful. I’m thinking that working topically rather than from books for a while might help even up the gap between them and mean they can continue together at some point in the future. Maths is very much Maddy’s strong point, so if i concentrate on getting her up to Fran’s level, without pushing Fran too much for a while (she doesn’t need it really and she’ll enjoy exploring topics in am ore real life way), it might work out.
In the afternoon Fran asked to learn about pandas, so i printed off a booklet, quiz and wordsearch for her from enchantedlearning and she did that. We also used the DK Animal and Life of Mammals book for some extra quality and found a cuddly panda for full effect. Did you know pandas have slit pupils like a cat, rather than round pupils like other bears, earning them their chinese name of giant cat bear? And that bamboo patches are mainly all one plant growing from runners underground and that they flower once every 15-120 years after which the whole patch dies off leaving the resident pandas with a major food crisis?
It’s amazing what you learn.
Maddy wanted to learn about seeds, so i read to her about growing cycles from an Usborne book and then we talked about seed dispersal, pollenisation, fertilisation in general and why daddy needs a willy (as you do!) I’ve got some enchanted learning stuff for her to do today and if i can, i’ll go buy beans today and set up a germination experiment with her.
Amelie was still completely exhausted and vegged most of the day. Tday i am going to do better for her though.
Know exactly what you mean here, the big 3 are at complety different levels, they have different learning styles and have different interests, here we have taken a slow approach, it’s very laid back, which is’nt how I thought it would be, but this way is less stressful for all of us. It’s not perfect thou ;0)
I educate the boys together for all their topics. R is perfectly able to keep up with the work and it makes my time less sparse, so I can spend some time with A each day too.
We’ve been talking about seed life cycles, pollination, seed dispersal, etc, for the past few weeks for our science topic. Love the way you managed to bring willies into it though, rofl!!
Oh, i muist blog the conversation about “girl willies” i had with Amelie last week. She did make me laugh!
Lol! So glad I don’t need to go there just yet!!
Hmmm….that could be misinterpreted!…I mean; I’m glad that I don’t need to have that conversation yet!!!
I was thinking on the fragile Amelie front today. Sb was majorly fragile from when I left to work in huntingdon, throughout most of my mat leave and really for at least months after we moved.
I guess, for some children – and SB and Amelie have a lot in common, environmental changes cause a lot of stress.
your home-ed strategy for fran and maddy sounds great.
I a m contemplating a HE tweak too. Not sure how it will work yet tho. You would think twins would be easy to HE but they are both into completely different things. I might even *whispers* buy some workbooks.
I do think you are right to some extent Helen, well, to a large extent. Trouble is, quite a lot of it also has to do with being overtired and not given enough mummy time, which is not good at all.