Spring pace

From today we are taking a couple of weeks off, to coincide with the school holidays. As most of my kids' friends go to school they like to treat those weeks differently too.

As another sister recently remarked as children get older you just get busier! Although when busy with little ones and their constant demands you can feel very tied down you do still get to set the timetable. As they get older I'm finding myself busy with accomodating their various activities and  having to work myself around the timetable that brings to me. Its a different sort of busy! Plus, I suppose when they are younger you do get periods of the day when everyone else is asleep, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Now of course that is no longer the case either, as pretty much everyone goes to bed at the same time, and only U tends to sleep a little longer in the mornings.

So, although the weeks have gone by and I have blogged very little here, home education and life in general has been continuing apace, alhamdulillah. In fact, if anything things just seem to get faster and faster, as I try to squeeze more and more in!

Recent good weather saw us taking time in the garden and bringing the books out there too whenever possible. The boys have been doing lots of their usual outdoor sports practice and also cycling, alhamdulillah. The garden is really too small now for them to play "football" in, as their kicks will always send the ball staright into the hedge, and they can only run a few paces before reaching the hedges themselves! However, it is still good for cricket shots, so they can go outside for hours just bowling at eachother, maashAllah! They are getting better at controlling their shots now too, so fewer balls go over the hedge.

Last week I put U on a free trial at Reading Eggs.co.uk, which I heard about via a sister on the IHSAN forum. Clearly this has come along too late for us, as U has really grown out of this stage of reading, maashAllah. She has been enjoying playing the games, as there is plenty of novelty value to the site, however I don't think she has really learnt anything new, as the word level she was placed at is pretty easy. So, I won't be enrolling her after the trial expires. However I think that if I had found this site a year or so earlier I would have been really tempted to sign up. It looks really good for a child of around four to get started with.

Sunny days also saw me return to Ia's science topic on light and shadow. One day last week she spent the day recording the different lengths of the shadow cast by a brick standing on end in the garden. It goes to show what a grey winter we had that I didn't feel we could do a whole day experiment like that until now! Of course the book she was working with told her that the shadow should be shortest at noon, but as we are in British Summer Time, of course it was shortest at around 1pm, by the clock. So, this led to a discussion about the  changing of the clocks.

So, we are still here and still immersed in our life of home ed, maashAllah. Now in these weeks of break I have the delights of spring cleaning (!), next term planning and maybe a little sewing to look forward to!

Reading (again)

Anyone who reads along here from time to time may notice that I have an ongoing theme with sourcing reading materials, especially for the boys. It just gets harder and harder. The library selection of books for the "young teen" age range is very poor. If horror or fantasy is your style, then maybe you are happy with what's on offer. If you are a girl whose interests are gossiping, backbiting and general rudeness then you are probably satisfied too. If you don't like either of those types of books then the library has hidden away the reading stock you'd like in the "reserve store".
You have to be pretty determined to unearth items from the reserve store. To start with you have to know the authors or titles you want to read. This means you need someone who read them to recommend them. If you are a kid then this is quite hard. Your friends can't recommend books they've never seen either. I asked around on a home educator forum full of clever home educators and someone suggested the author Geoffrey Trease.
Since getting this name I've ordered lots of Geoffrey Trease books from the reserve stock and the boys are really enjoying them. Most of these books have not seen the light of day for as long as ten years. They have the price in shillings on the cover. They are historical, adventure stories. The main character is always a teenage boy. I liken it to grown up Famous Five in an historical context. The boys are always "decent", the girls are always no-nonsense with a touch of tom-boy. The history in there is often based closely on real events, but is so wrapped up with the adventure story that it is effortlessly absorbed. It's ideal for my sons at the moment. So good not to be hearing "What shall I read now?" every few days!
Geoffrey Trease wrote loads of books, but the library stock is dwindling. Only the survivors remain in the store. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Geography fieldwork

Today we took advantage of some sunny spring weather to do a little more on our rivers project. Today we did fieldwork on measuring the rate of flow. We found a shallow, but quite fast flowing area to investigate. We placed markers using string attached to either side of the bank, to mark the start and finish lines. On one side we tied the string to plants, on the other we found a piece of wood lying about, which we made into a post. We placed the two lines 10 metres apart.
Next the boys took measurements using a measuring tape. They measured the depth of the channel by either bank, and in the middle, then they measured the width of the channel. They did this at both lines.
Next it was time to measure the flow. We used clementine peel as a float. R put it in the water at the start line and started the stopwatch. J caught it at the other end and called out to stop the timing. I recorded the results. We measured from the left, right and middle three times each.
After that everyone had a paddle in the water (except me), then we came home. InshAllah we'll be putting the results together later this week.

Home ed still going on!

Home education is still going on. In fact, everything seems to get busier and busier, alhamdulillah.
We've been working on a rivers project amongst our other usual activities.
I've discovered that U gets much more motivated when she is given something new to work on. Always a new book, preferably one that can be got through fairly quickly. If working through it takes too long she will lose interest. I'm not talking about working in one day here, but using a book over a period of weeks.
Today I tried her with an Emaan series workbook. I bought some of the reading series years ago, just at the time when it temporarily became harder to get hold of. I just picked up the copies that remained in the shop, these included a level three workbook. For whatever reason I never used the workbook before, but decided to try it with U today, as something different. She read the story " A Home for Fuzzy" then did the few pages on it from the book. It worked out well, alhamdulillah.
These days the reading books are available again. You can find them here.

History, libraries

This week the news talk is all about protests against library closures. Some pompous individuals have been voicing their opinions that libraries are no longer needed as everything is on the internet now, and anyway books are so cheap people can just buy them.
I use the internet a lot, but if I do a search on a topic to find out information to help us with a project I mainly find two categories of sites. If I just put in the topic I get long academic style results, which are too detailed and written in language that is too complex for my children to use. If I enter the same search topic with "for kids" added, I get something bite-sized and superficial, which may do fine as an introduction but which doesn't offer more than that. (And Wikipedia, which is OK for certain quick fact finds but not good for everything.)Maybe its just me being inefficient at searching, but I don't seem to easily turn up material pitched correctly for our purpose.
As I'm currently reading " A Tale of Two Cities" to the boys I thought we'd do some history study on the French Revolution" at the same time. I also thought that I could use a little history study to start developing some new study skills with the boys, as history is a subject area they enjoy.
Of course, the first thing I need is a good supply of information that is accessible to their reading level. I could spend ages trawling the internet trying to find something, or I could just ask the librarian to order in everything in the county's junior non-fiction section on the French Revolution. The librarian finds 5 books. One is a Danger Zone book, which is a bit of fun, they read then we return. I'm left with four good, informative books. Plenty of text, but clearly explained.
Next step, I read to them the introductory sections and we talk about it. I make reference to the way Dickens illustrated some of this information in his novel. Dickens has painted some personalities for us, the boys can imagine the situation better, can imagine the nobility and the poor. It may not be 100% accurate, but it helps them get a feel for the period, which makes it easier to understand.
Next I ask them to write short paragraphs to describe each of the three estates, and another to summarise the nature of society in pre-revoluntionary France. I give them three of the 4 books to do this from. (The fourth book was the easiest one, which they read through the week before last as an overview and timeline). They need to look through the relevant bits of the three books to find where the information they need is best presented and take their notes from there. I could just tell them to look on page 6 of one particular book, but that wouldn't be the same thing at all. The point is to develop a basic level of research skills. So, I need more than one book.
If I didn't have the library I wouldn't be able to afford to buy more than one book on the topic, (even then it would be hard to know from just looking at Amazon which book would be most suitable) and as I said before my internet searches do not yield just what I'm after.
So, the library is invaluable to the way I home educate, and for so many more reasons than those I've used as examples above.

Learning to read

I had a couple of brief conversations today which made me think about the way in which my children have learnt and are learning to read. Often the question comes up about either phonics or look say methods. I can't say my children have been keen on phonics, they usually find it quite dull, and they don't like the silly, often meaningless stories that come in phonic readers. I continue to use the extra old Peter and Jane books, the same edition which can be viewed in a museum case. It works for us!
However this doesn't mean no phonics at all. I do the initial sounds and basic blends, through workbooks generally. But, maybe the main way I involve the phonic aspect is through the way I hear the child read the old Peter and Jane. I don't expect them just to memorise the word, I do expect them to have a go at sounding out the new words as they come up. When a word does not conform to the phonic rules, I just tell them that and they learn it as an exception. If the new word was "shop" and the child hesitated I would not just say shop to them, but rather I would make a "sh" sound and wait a moment, then I'd say "sh" "o", and so on. Often the child then gets it and finishes the word off. This is how I prompt them on words which they forget, so while we use the look say book, I try to show them the methods of working out new words, but I do this as the words occur, rather than teaching the sounds separately.
For us this works because it means that the children get to read books with actual characters and some kind of story, while learning how to use the various tactics needed to get round all the inconsistencies of English!
I also like the fact that the Peter and Jane books quickly have a full page of words to read, rather than just a brief sentence or two per page. I think this gets the child used to having plenty to read, so they don't get put off by lots of text on a page later on. Lots of text, but its easy to read, so nothing to be afraid of there then! Alhamdulillah.

Maps

As part of geography this year with Ia I'm using the book Mapstart 1. Mapstart 1 begins with the different ways we can look at objects and then a room. There are questions on every page and I'm just working through these with Ia orally, as the point is to learn about maps and plans, not to write comprehension answers! Most of the questions at the beginning of the book are very easy anyway, asking the child to find things in the picture and using the language of direction (next to, on the right of etc).
On Friday we reached the page showing the model Lego town and then the plan of the model. To follow from that I asked Ia to make a model of part of a town, which is shown in the picture above. After that she drew out a plan of the model, with labels.
I remember that when I did this with the boys we did a really big model, covering our table. It was a good model, maashAllah, but they tired a bit of drawing out such a big plan, so I scaled things down for Ia!
This is a fun activity, whether or not you are using Mapstart!