Educayshun

Damn. I’m all behind again.

We’ve had a good few weeks anyway; the homework diaries work really well still. Everyone likes it, everyone is busy and occupied (well, except Amelie who is converting education avoidance into an art form 🙄 ) I regularly depress myself with the fact that the girls do not get the amazing, different every day, awe-inspiring education that I thought I would offer but in all honesty, there isn’t time. We can’t do, afford or fit in everything and they are kids who love their sport. So to afford that and get to it all, the education, I think, is humdrum but more or less effective. I wish it was spectacular but it is at least efficient.

Fran finished the biology section of her GP Science 1 book (only actually noticed it was a biology section when Alison pointed it out!) and has moved on to Chemistry. She and I sat down and mapped out the topics she’d covered and compared it to a KS3 and GCSE book, wrote a chart of the corresponding chapters and part of her work for the next month or so is going to be to read across the books and take each topic as far as she feels comfortable with.

Maddy has been working back through her history book and doing a pictorial and craft based round up. She’s pinning it all into a book and I’m going to let her get a visual feel for it and then help her complete it with a timeline at the end. She’s doing 3 or 4 activities for each period, cartoons, fimo models, quick representations, maps and more.

So for example:-

Stone age tools in Zoobs (call it ICT!)

Fimo Stonehenge.

The early civilisations history day we went to (thanks to Helenetc) was brilliant for this.

She was very happy with her bone, tooth and wood necklace. (Love Fimo!)

Today, cuneiform writing on a clay tablet.

Fran is deeply into her Latin and loving doing French. We’re using greetings around the home and she’s got GP to work through with Maddy and Tricolore to do on her own. She’s finished all the Judith Kerr books and moved on to Iva Ibbotson with a plan to read a couple of the slightly more adult ones she wrote soon. She’s very into WW2 literature at the moment. She’s still working on her ballet project and started looking at Degas, knitting like mad and forging through BBC Bitesize English and Science KS3 and Mathletics.

Other times, she does backwards walkovers on the dining room table.

Amelie causes me much despair but as she masters anything I give her effortlessly, it is hard to do anything about it. She’s been doing fractions of various sorts and seems to have no trouble holding a chain of 3 or 4 elements in her head, using it wisely and swapping methods about to suit the sum, she is reading her way through a mass of books she’s chosen on various topics and is working so hard on her music, ready to do her grade 1 violin next term. Sometimes I worry she isn’t being driven hard enough but… well… 🙄 I have to have something to worry about.

Josie is being adorable. She draws and writes constantly and is so full of excitement at being able to “do work”. She is loving Studydog, Education City, Mathletics and the various activities I set up for her and today she found a healthy eating leaflet, got interested in it and carefully sorted out her wooden food into the right sections.

Then she told me all about healthy eating based on what she’d learned from “Arthur” that morning 😆

They all had fun last week researching the Greeks together and planning a project and today they did pen work with sheets from Art Projects for Kids which was surprisingly fun. They did the copy practise but then had fun making the shapes into pictures using their imagination and lots of felt tip pens 🙂