Somehow, we’re already through the first half-term of our home education year. We’re tending to follow the local schedule because we attend classes that follow a termly schedule - plus I enjoy having periodic points throughout the year to check in and reflect on what’s going well (and what needs to change).
At the beginning of the school year, I shared a bit about our plans for the upcoming months. How have we been getting on?
Our Daily Rhythm
I tend to set a daily rhythm based on what seems to work for our family, and then adapt it through trial and error until we reach a good and balanced point. The rhythm that I’ve pinned to the wall is completely out of date and will be refreshed over the weekend! I find that our daily rhythm changes seasonally and as Birdie hits different milestones. In these two short months, he’s shifted to a midday nap which has changed everything!
Right now, our days look like this:
Boys wake anywhere between 6am and 7am. I make us all drinks, and we go to the living room to start our morning time reading on the couch. I lay out our morning reading pile on the couch each night before I go to bed. Sometimes the boys sit on the couch and listen, and sometimes they climb or play with blocks or trains while I read. Our morning time books are a mix of seasonal/nature themes, maths, geography, stories relating to kindness/justice, French, and many, many books about tractors for Birdie! On Wednesdays we mostly read French books.
Around 7:30-8 we head to the kitchen to make breakfast. There’s some kind of writing activity or play dough prepared on the table for them (again, something I set out the night before), so they have something to do while I cook breakfast. We put on music - either something by whichever composer we’re learning about, or our Autumn soundtrack. Often the writing activity is a French worksheet.
Both boys will usually draw or do play dough after breakfast while I tidy up and make. Then we all head upstairs to get dressed and ready for our day.
If we are going out, we go out! Otherwise, we head to the garden to get our wiggles out.
Around 11:30, Birdie is ready for a nap. I take him upstairs and while he settles to sleep, A listens to a story on his ‘speakerbox’ that T made for him.
Once Birdie is asleep, A and I have ‘school time’. We work through his maths book and he reads me a reading practice book. We might also play a board game, do some writing practice, or do reading flash cards. We have lunch together and he helps me to prep dinner. This is one of our two points in the day when we focus in on learning new concepts and revising things from previous days.
I wake Birdie up around an hour later, and while I’m waking him and feeding him lunch, A will listen to another story or watch something on the tablet.
After lunchtime, we head out to run errands, take a walk, or meet up with friends locally. If we’re taking a nature walk, we talk about whatever our nature theme is for the week while we’re outside.
It’s teatime! Around 2:30-3, we have teatime each day. Sometimes it’s at home, and sometimes we have a treat in a cafe. We read nature themed books on Mondays, poems on Tuesdays, and a combination of art, geography, and language on Wednesdays.
After teatime, I have focused time with Birdie. A listens to another story while building with magnetic tiles, drawing, painting, or making things out of cardboard and tape. I invite Birdie to do simple works like colour matching, puzzles, or building towers.
After a while, A joins us and I read a chapter book or poems out loud while the boys play
T comes home from work around 4:45 and takes over with the boys while I finish off dinner. Most evenings A will join me in the kitchen and read me another one of his reading practice books while I cook.
The boys have dinner and T plays with Birdie while A and I do a bit more math or play another game. Then it’s upstairs for baths, stories, and bed!
Things I’ve Learned and Adapted So Far
Split morning time
I love the morning time tradition of sitting at the table, lighting a candle, singing a morning song, and working together for a while over breakfast. This was our solid morning tradition before Birdie arrived, and we’ve never found our way back to it. We tried hard for a few weeks but at this stage of life, it’s unfair to ask Birdie (18 months) to sit for that long. Now we’re splitting our morning time into reading on the couch, and table-based work afterwards while we have breakfast. This works better for us all right now!
Introducing ‘Birdie Time’
Although A is the one who’s ‘school age’, as a home educating family we believe that education starts at birth - not when the state decides it’s time for a child to be in school. I’ve started to set aside a half hour each day to work with Birdie on his own activities. This means that A gets an extra audiobook story or some time watching something on the tablet. It’s a compromise for me, because I’d rather us all be reading together or getting outdoors, but having more than one child means that sometimes you have to take a wider view and make sure that everyone is getting as much of what they need as you can offer.
Before Bed Learning
I’d envisioned that we’d do most of our ‘table work’ or more formal lessons during the day, and stop doing anything resembling schoolwork once T got home from work. However, this is the time of day when A is most interesting in sitting down and doing writing or maths. We’ve moved things around so that most days, he reads to me while I cook dinner, and afterwards we do a bit of math or writing. One of the lovely things about home educating is that ‘school’ doesn’t need to happen at any specific point in the day!
The Materials We’re Using
Maths
We started off the year using Maths No Problem as our main mathematics spine, supported with Montessori manipulatives. We are still using it, but not doing every page or following the order religiously. It’s a good sense-check to see what concepts A understands and what he needs more work on, but it is very dull, and full of exercises asking you to count the boys/girls based on trousers/dresses!
We’ve been supplementing with these Usborne addition and subtraction practice pads, which he loves to complete. We also have this Usborne addition and subtraction book, but it’s a bit hard for him yet, plus very visually overstimulating. Short and simple without a lot of busy drawings is what works best for him! We will stick with Maths No Problem and these Usborne books throughout this year, but I’ll be looking for a new maths book for next year. A big change is that we’ve been focusing much more on maths concepts through storytelling. I am making a set of Math Mice based on the Waldorf Math Gnome story, and we’ve been reading a lot of math storybooks. I’ve found the Maths Through Stories website a great help!
Reading
A’s almost finished our initial set of phonics readers. They are ReadWriteInc and I didn’t put any thought into it - they were the set that our local secondhand bookshop had, so I bought them. Like all phonics readers they are very dull and repetitive, but I like how they have a list of all the words in the book printed in the front to read through first. The stories have a mix of phonetic words plus 2-5 sight words per story. I haven’t found a set of phonics readers that I love yet, and with A reading 1-2 of them per day, I may keep cobbling together our set of books from charity shops and the library. It is absolutely amazing to see him make so much progress towards reading fluently - each day, he is more able to read things without sounding them out and remembering more of the tricky phonemes and blends like ‘ight’.
Writing
We haven’t progressed with writing letters as quickly as I thought we would. A has been resistant to it, so we’re finding the balance between encouragement and being unnecessarily pushy. What I have found to be brilliant is these Djeco scratch off boards. They build all the muscles necessary for writing without the fear of mistake/perfectionism that writing or colouring brings on for many children. We’ll be buying more of these!
French
I bought this Skoldo French curriculum to see what it was like, and I can’t say that I recommend it. The worksheets are of a really poor quality and like many worksheet-based activities, the reading level needed to complete them is disproportionate with the activity. I also can’t recommend this French workbook either - again, the reading level is high, but the actual French exercises are too simple. I plan to order a couple of these Cahiers Montessori to see if they’re more what we’re looking for - especially since A has asked to do more maths in French. I’ve also just ordered this set of I can Read French books because A is enjoying sounding out words in French and seeing how they are similar/different to English. We read a lot of books in French, and I complete my French exercises with Avery over lunch so he absorbs some of what I’m practicing. We’ve mostly learned vocabulary about colours, numbers, clothing, and autumn-related things so far, and this upcoming half-term we’ll be revising those while learning parts of the body, names for food, and winter-related words.
Kindness, Values, and Culture/Society
We’ve been using my Growing Towards Justice curriculum alongside some of you, and I love how it’s given A more concrete language to discuss his feelings and talk about gender stereotypes. They’re both things we talk about all the time, but focusing on specific activities has given us time to talk about the concepts in more depth. He regularly uses some of the calm-down tools we introduced in September, which is a huge step for him. We’ve also added in some general ethics discussions about the nature of forgiveness, and what a habit is. In September we learned about Rosh Hashanah and refreshed our awareness of different world religions, which is something we’ll keep talking about right through the year.
Science/Nature
We’re picking one or two themes each month from Exploring Nature with Children. We looked at seeds in September, and this month we’ve learned about leaves, pumpkins, and spiders. We are lucky enough that a garden spider has taken up residence by our front door, and we spend some time every day watching her. We’ve done a number of art and craft activities based on our nature theme. I think following a new theme each week would definitely be too much for us at this stage. I noticed that this month we’ve learned a little about all three topics, whereas last month, we finished up feeling like we had really learned a lot about seeds! The verses and poems we read each day are mostly ones related to our nature theme, and largely from the Wynstone Press Autumn book.
The Arts
I tend to take a project-based approach to our education, so the art and music we’ve been learning about this month has tied into some other activities. We’ve been learning about Vivaldi, because we listen to his Autumn music each morning. This has led to us learning about Venice, his home city, hearing his other compositions, making Venetian-inspired papier mache masks, making paper and foil gondolas to sail in the garden, and making leaf paintings while we listen to Autumn. We have also been studying Camille Saint-Saenz - largely the Carnival of the Animals - as background musical information for introducing my favourite Halloween tune, Danse Macabre.
I love Lawrence Anholt’s artist books, and we read his book about Degas for nearly a month before visiting a cast of the sculpture at the Tate Modern.
I feel I’ve been a bit disjointed about our approach to music recently so I have some new plans for the next half-term. We’ll be studying musical concepts as well as specific composers; first up is understanding what a theme and variations are. I’ll put together a playlist of tunes made of themes and variations, like Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and Copeland’s Appalachian Spring, and some jazz tunes as well. We’ll write our own short theme and try to make some variations of it, and play variations of some very simple pentatonic songs. In December we’re learning all about Tchaikovsky!
Our visual art focus for November (and possibly December - we’ll see how we go) will be William Blake and the pre-Raphaelites that were inspired by his work. I wouldn’t normally present Blake to such a young child, but A has a Blake-connection (his middle name!), and there are some local ties to Blake that I want to take advantage of before we more farther away. We’ll make some engravings and visit the Blake exhibition at the Tate Britain - although we’ll only look at a few things!
Poetry is a central part of our education. We read poems every day, and read even more during our poetry teatime! I draw from all sorts of sources and try to have a mix of seasonal poems, classics, and silly ones like the A.A. Milne collections. We work on memorising a couple each month. One of our favourites this month has been Rachel Field’s ‘Wild Geese’.
Friendships, Reading Aloud, and Everything Else!
There’s so much of our home educating day that doesn’t fit into these tidy categories: meeting up with our mini home ed crew once a week, dance classes, cycling, walks in our local wild space, housework, lots and lots of free play, trips to museums and plays, music classes, and visits to the playground when it’s quiet. We don’t stop home educating over the weekend, and some days we don’t do anything that ‘looks’ like school. Other days, we do lots that a traditional teacher would call schoolwork!
Favourite books for this half term have been:
Ruby’s Worry by Tom Percival
Are you a Spider? by Judy Allen
It starts with a seed by Jennie Webber
Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert
The Apple Cake by Nienke van Hichtum
Degas and the little dancer by Lawrence Anholt
A Place for Zero by Angeline Lopresti
Goldilocks - Gerda Muller
Brambly Hedge Autumn Story by Jill Barklem
The Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair series by Enid Blyton
Looking ahead
Some of the things I’m looking forward to in the next half-term are attending a few music concerts, our Growing Towards Justice unit on kindness, celebrating Thanksgiving in a respectful and inclusive way, and diving into all things Nutcracker as we lead up to the solstice and Christmas.