Bells, Bangs, Skulls & Potions.

Regrouped for our WedEd? 😉 meet this week, which was lovely in itself but made even better for me by Fran being on half term and so along with us. I do miss having her about, even if I am pleased she is doing well at school.

The kids started off with a Day of the Dead art thing just to warm up (not sure where Zoe got it, but this also looks good) while a collection of slightly discombobulated adults got sorted out and drank some tea. (Photos to follow but you can see one of the table here). During this HH did a round of conversational French with them which they nearly all joined in with. Loved that.

Once they’d done that, I took a mixed age group off of kids to do poetry; I hit (slightly haphazardly) on the witches speech from Macbeth which I read to them a couple of times first. I tend to prime them now to listen to the cadence, the words, the feel and the rhymes and then try to form a picture in their heads of what is happening and what emotion it is supposed to provoke. I didn’t tell them anything else about it, so they’d have no preconceived ideas.

They did very well with all of those things and then someone said they were sure it reminded them of something… what was it… what WAS it? I KNOW… that episode of Doctor Who with Shakespeare and the witches! I’m not sure if that is a greater testament to Shakespeare or Doctor Who but I thought it was quite a result 😆 That led on to a discussion of the Scottish play, a brief plot outline of Macbeth and so on and then we went back to the poem.

Having no other ideas, I went for the rather adventurous “now write your own” approach – and all the kids did a BRILLIANT job. Below are two photos, of Maddy’s and one I led Josie and BB through but all the kids did really excellent ones, following the basic brief of a witches spell, shopping list or recipe. We also spent some time looking at onomatopoeia and thinking of words which sound like the thing they describe, prompting Maddy to say “I just don’t know how you keep all this stuff in your head!!!!”

I just love doing the poetry with the kids we have; I finally feel like I have found my niche and have something to offer that widens their experience and I can do well.

(No one brought the art in from the car, so I have photos still to take!)

Meanwhile HH revisited the firework/gunpowder experiment of a previous session – I avoided this but apparently this time it worked brilliantly and had lots of bangs and flashes and fizzes.

The kids went of a nature walk and collected ‘stuff’ and made a gorgeous outdoor nature art collage collaboratively.

There was still loads of time for a leisurely lunch and lots of play and bouncing. It worked really well.

Last of all, Em gave them a bells lesson, after first letting them work together (really well) at sorting the bells, making scales etc. It was lovely to watch and hear.

This short video clip does, I hope, help to bust that “how do home ed kids ever learn to do things in groups?” myth.

The answer? Because a group is not often too hard to find and because their parents are generally not idiots and make sure they do! And because, most of all, home ed kids are lively, interested and enquiring and love opportunities to learn new things.

I think all the kids agreed it was an excellent day which ticked all the boxes; Fran said, very wistfully, “I really miss days like that. It feels more real.”