Pulling Together An Education On The Road

Ok, admittedly, we are not on the road but after so many weeks of being unsettled and travelling up and down the north and south of England, it is a luxury to be staying put for even four weeks. Four weeks is a long time.....enough time for some routine, enough to make plans for work, as such I am grabbing the opportunity with both hands and we're making every effort to get back into our work routine.

So what are we doing? Not having any of my usual curriculum, books and supplies has meant that I have had to improvise. This is the part in which I could wax lyrical about  the beauty of internet access! 

Below is a look at how we are doing school:

Devotions:

We are carrying on with our daily devotions and I am using the character studies from Confessions of a Homeschooler as the basis of our short morning devotions. It has been very helpful for all of us. These last two weeks, we have focused on Arguing (dealing with it rather than actually arguing!) and Peacemaking. We  have all found it very helpful and I have to say that I have noticed a calmer atmosphere at home which is a blessing!  Last week we memorised:

1 Peter 3:8 " Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another, be sympathetic, live as brothers, be compassionate and humble."

(I made up some silly actions to go with it as it helps my four year old remember it better and I have to say it works a treat!)

Some of my personal favourite verses were from Proverbs:

"A gentle answer turns away wrath, a harsh word stirs up anger." Proverbs 15:1 

"Starting a quarrel is like breaching a dam; so drop a matter before a dispute breaks out." Proverbs 17:14

So the week was spent declaring to each other whenever an argument threatened to break out - " Don't breach the dam!" and "Be a Peacemaker!" And it worked (mostly) LOL.

Math:

I was using a combination of MEP math and Singapore Math before we moved but I don't have my workbooks with me and while MEP is available online - I didn't fancy  printing out the materials again and to be honest, it was too time-intensive during our period of family crisis. 


I discovered ConquerMath after joining some UK homeschooling forums. It is a programme that follows the British system right up to the GCSEs and you can buy the CD or subscribe for online access - no books to cart about. It works brilliantly for us as each subject starts with a video of a short 5-10 minute tutorial which is clear and concise afterwhich the kids go on to do a series of exercises online - all independently. Records are kept of their progress and they can go back anytime and do more exercises. This is such a help as it frees me up and they have someone else other than slow-at-math-mum teaching them.

English:

As my girls are at different grades - I am focusing on different things for them.

My elder daughter signed up to do two literary analysis courses with Brave Writer (The Hobbit and Anne Of Green Gables) over the last 4 months. I've said it before and I'll say it again - we love Brave Writer classes. She learnt a lot and enjoyed the classes immensely. She has really come along in terms of thinking about and analysing a text. She is now doing some work towards preparing for the IGCSEs with a UK based tutor called Catherine Mooney. She offers exam support, tutoring and marking of assignments. While I have no immediate plans for my 12 year old to take the IGCSEs just yet - she is certainly ready for the work. So we are using Catherine's course as a way to work through the concepts she will need to know for her understanding. It is written in an engaging and interesting way, so my daughter has been enjoying it so far. I am also thinking about using Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Skill to work on her writing skills - I've downloaded some sample chapters for her to work through and we will see if it works out well. We are also continuing with copywork using Brave Writer's Arrows and Boomerang programmes as well as quotes I am pulling off the internet and books we are reading.

My younger daughter is working on building up fluency with her reading, writing and spelling. A friend recommended Units of Sound ( a programme designed to help dyslexic kids build a firm foundation in spelling, reading, memory and dictation). While my younger daughter is not diagnosed as dyslexic - she does have some issues. So in the period where I haven't had time to sit with her for spelling and copywork - I decided to give the programme a try. She says it is helpful especially the dictation and memory sections. We are also throwing in handwriting practice and more recently, we have started copywork again using our Arrows monthly publication.(I bought a number of different back issues at 50% off during an offer with the Homeschool Buyers Co-op - very happy about that!). She has recently started Catherine Mooney's Word Weavers course which should help her with establishing her grammar and writing skills. It comes with an audio CD which is an extra help. I also purchased in downloadable PDF format Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Ease Level 3 as I think she could do with building up her narration and comprehension skills and with that book I don't have to think - I just print it out and go.

Outsourcing help and using online programmes or computer software has been the key to keeping homeschooling on the road during our time of uncertainty.

History:

As we are in the UK and all our Tapestry of Grace books and curriculum are in storage - I had to pull together a plan for our history studies. Being in England - studying British History seemed to make the most sense. 

As the spine of our lessons, I am using The Story of Britain by Patrick Dillon which I stumbled across in the bookshops. It is an engaging and well-written overview of the stories of british history written in chronological order for children - a little like a modern version of An Island Story by H.M. Marshall (also in storage!) I started reading this aloud and I also purchased from Audible the audio book of An Island Story. Both books give a helpful introduction into Britain's history. We have been reading it through but these few weeks we have gone back to the beginning to solidfy their understanding with more in-depth work.

I did a quick review of early British history including the Celts, Roman invasion, invasions of the Vikings (Danes), the Angles and the Saxons - ending with the death of Edward the Confessor. The girls made a notebooking page on an introduction to Ancient Britain. Click here for the Early British History notebooking page. 

Then we took up our story with the Battle of Hastings and conquest by Duke William of Normandy in 1066 - a crucial turning point for British History.

I found some excellent resources and made some notebook pages:

I used this powerpoint entitled "Who Should Be King?" from this useful website www.schoolhistory.co.uk to introduce the different claimants for the throne upon the death of Edward the Confessor. We then made a notebook page on Who Should Rule England?

  
The Battle of Hastings - I used this excellent website to tell the story of the battle using the Bayeux tapestry and this helpful powerpoint on The Battle of Hastings to go through the events of the battle. The BBC have produced wonderful hands-on resources on the Normans - using their lesson ideas,  I told the girls to pretend to be news journalists in the midst of the battle - one was reporting for the Normans and the other for the Anglo-Saxons. They had notes and then made short reports on the battle as it progressed. It was great fun role-playing newscasters and it really helped solidify their knowledge of the actual events of the battle. Finally, they finished off the lesson by making a newspaper front page on the battle. They used this template . It was definitely one of their favourite things to do.

Other resources:

Perfect for Co-ops - a Battle of Hastings game (the ultimate in hands-on learning) 

Reading list about the Normans from BBC 

Bayeux Tapestry activities from the BBC

Computer game recreating the Battle of Hastings

We shall be continuing a more in-depth look at British history as we go on and I will post more on the resources we use.

I have to mention our favourite show - CBBC's Horrible Histories which is available on Youtube. We all love it. It is very silly and funny (british humour) but it is amazing the little facts that stick through all the silliness. The girls have learnt the sequence of the Kings and Queens of England from this skit. Even my 4 year old is singing it! We love love love the Horrible Histories TV show. Go on Youtube and watch it - I guarantee you'll find it impossible to tear your kids or yourself away from watching.

The Kings and Queens of England Video

Another video on the War of The Roses (just for fun!)

And one more, just because I love it! About the Domesday book. Enjoy!

Science:

Science was hard for me to do consistently without my books.We read a variety science books picked up from the bookstore and started using a borrowed Apologia General Science book - however, I needed something they could work on independently and provided some hands-on work and experiments for them to do. I heard about Exploration Education's Physical Science programme from a friend's blog and liked the sound of it. It allows them to learn independently through interactive text on the computer and it comes with box of experiments and hands-on learning. The programme takes them step by step through a variety of projects such as building a car, a circuit board and a motor and using those things to carry out experiments. The experiments come in organised, well-labelled bags and it practically has everything you need. They managed 3 lessons to date and then got stalled because we didn't have a glue gun! That has now been ordered and we are looking forward to getting on with it! The girls like it and enjoy putting together the projects. We are also reading through The Story Book Of Science by Jean Henri Fabre which is a lovely read-aloud book that centres on the conversations between three children and their very knowledgeable uncle who takes them on journeys of discovery through story about nature and the world in general from ants milking "cows", spiders building suspension bridges, how we make cloth from wool, flax, hemp and cotton, volcanoes and earthquakes.

 Art Appreciation:

We are using The Story of the World's Greatest Paintings by Charlie Ayres which I picked up from the bookstore. It is an easy no-fuss way to accomplish art studies at the moment. It works well as a jumping off point for learning more about the artist and his work. I also use the SmartHistory videos for a more in-depth analysis of an artwork or artist. 

Poetry and memorisation:

I am trying to get back to encouraging the kids to memorise bible verses and poems. So we have a bible verse to learn each week and I am printing out poems for them to read and memorise once a week. I am also trying to incorporate poetry reading during our tea-times. Winter is a lovely time for hot chocolate, muffins and poetry!

Music Appreciation:


Another no-fuss solution to incorporating music appreciation in our week for now - I found this book My First Classical Music Book  which comes with a CD and an introduction to instruments and an orchestra. Although it is aimed more at my four-year old - we spend 15 minutes going through a chapter a day and listening (and dancing!) to the music. It is a nice way to keep up with some music appreciation without too much effort.  

Nature Studies:

You may have read in an earlier post that we do not enjoy the climate of the tropics at all and while we were living in Singapore - nature studies always had to be deliberately planned. It is so much more fun in temperate climates - you just want to be outdoors (admittedly less so in the winter). Nature studies have just happened naturally as the girls have taken an interest in the world outside. They have really got into birdwatching after we put a feeder in their grandparent's garden - they are taking pictures, using the field guides to identify the birds and checking out their tracks in the snow. Their experience was further enhanced when I bought this DVD - Beginning Watercolor Journalling. I bought it after reading about it in this inspiring post at Pondered in my heart. It has paid off and the girls have been completely inspired  by what they've watched and started to journal and paint more regularly. These are some early efforts. 

French:

I found a lovely lady who comes twice a week to teach all three kids. She does a great job engaging them using stories and fun games. I have asked her to start the girls on more serious grammar as they have progressed quite nicely. She recommended languages online as a good website for practice.

My Rosetta Stone software is in storage so I'm not getting much use out of that at the moment although I suspect that they are going to be able to progress much quicker with it after these lessons. I've heard about Galore Park French and have been looking into using this - possibly since we may not be in our current accomodation for long and will move to another part of the UK and lose our lovely french teacher!

PE:

Being active is a total challenge in winter and not being in a place for more than a month or two makes it hard to join any organised activities. So I am literally trying to make sure we get off our bottoms for 20 minutes each day at least to exercise . It's too cold to go outside for too long so I've devised indoor games (like an active Simon Says) or exercises like circuit training. We might start off with some stretches and then on some days, I'll have them pick 5 exercises from a pile of cards - it might say something like 10 sit ups, run up and down the stairs 2 times, 20 jumping jacks etc. On On other days I will lead the exercises myself. I'd love to play more silly run around games (we used to play dodge ball with a soft squishy ball and have obstacle course races in our old home) but there just isn't enough kid-friendly space for that kind of play indoors.

So that's us at the moment, for the next few weeks at least - who knows what the next month will bring for us but I'll take what we can get.

A Study On Clouds

I love nature and I'd like to get out more, but as I explained in my last post, we just don't. Clouds (and stars actually) have long held a fascination for me. So I guess it was only a matter of time that I would find a way to incorporate it into our nature studies. 

Most recently, I started having the girls observe the clouds on a fairly regularly basis, making sketches and noting the weather. To help them, I printed out a cloud guide from here to help them identify the clouds. 

While doing this, the girls complained that it was hard to draw clouds properly and this seemed like a great opportunity to link in an art lesson or two on "How to paint the sky". And then, I thought why not turn it into a fun unit study? So I declared an "All About Clouds" day and quickly put together a unit study on clouds which would allow us to delve more deeply into all areas of the subject. 

After the usual morning's task of cloud sketching and identification was completed, we started our day reading the following books:

  

  

John Day's Book of Clouds is a beautiful photographic portfolio of clouds which is organised and explained very clearly. We "ooh-ed and ahh-ed" over many of his photos and absorbed a great deal of new information . The Man Who Named The Clouds is a lovely simple picture book which packs a lot of learning into a easy read.  It combined biography, history and weather science.

In my opinion, a study on clouds lends itself perfectly to poetry and art appreciation. I picked out a few simple little poems to read and focused particularly on the idea of Imagery.

Clouds
By Christina Rossetti

White sheep, white sheep,
On a blue hill,
When the wind stops,
You all stand still.
When the wind blows,
You walk away slow.
White sheep, white sheep,
Where do you go?

 

Rain Rain

by Jame Horner

Rain rain
falls on the street,
mud in puddles
cleaning my feet.

Thunder thunder
rumble and roar,
close the windows
and lock the door.

Clouds clouds
black and gray,
heavy with water
to drop all day.

Sun sun
is breaking through,
clouds are moving,
the rain stops too.

Rainbow rainbow
across the sky,
see-through colours
to tickle my eyes.

And then we tackled Percy Shelley's longer, more complex poem, aptly named The Cloud. We took it verse by verse and discussed the language, imagery, alliteration, assonance and personification. It is a long poem and we only looked at the first three verses. You can read the whole poem here.

The Cloud

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

After reading all that poetry, we had to try our hand at writing some of our own. So I instructed the girls that they were going to write a poem in free verse. We started off with a five minute freewrite where they could get all their thoughts down about on paper without worrying about spelling or grammar. Then they took a short break and came back to their work. They highlighted phrases and ideas that they liked and then off they went, using those phrases and ideas as a jumping off point for writing their own 

In the afternoon, we moved onto learning how to paint clouds. I think this was the highlight for us and we had a lovely time experimenting different techniques and ideas.We used these Youtube videos to start us off and then after that we looked at photos from The Book Of Clouds and tried to paint our favourite pictures. 

I belatedly found this lovely Cloud Art slideshow at Hearts and Trees, which I will definitely use for more art appreciation on how different artists paint clouds.

We finished up by reading a general book on weather and exploring some weather terms but not in any great detail. We also used some very helpful worksheets from here to complete our studies. We'll probably have to come back to do a more comprehensive study at some point but all in all, it was an enjoyable day of learning. 

Nature Studies: Is this cheating?

When I first started thinking about homeschooling, I was drawn to many aspects of the Charlotte Mason philosophy and approach and I knew that I definitely wanted to incorporate into our lives regular opportunities for art and poetry appreciation and also plenty of nature studies. 

However, when it came to nature studies and getting out and about - we just didn't. The reality being that the humidity and heat of living a few degrees north of the equator, is simply is too oppressive for us and it drives us indoors. On our last visit to the local tropical nature reserve, we ended up with huge welts of mosquito bites (despite copious amounts of insect repellent being applied) and drenched in sticky sweat. Not only that, after scaling the heights to the top of the hill, my toddler decided he had had enough and I had to carry him all the way down. It will probably be a while before we brave that again!

How I long for lovely balmy summer days, crisp cool autumns, delicious wintry weather and glorious spring days - but alas, in the tropics, that is only a dream. So, those long leisurely walks in the pleasant sun-dappled parks and forests will have to wait. The rainforest is a fascinating place to explore but how does a heat and perspiration averse family find a way to spend time enjoying more of God's beautiful creation? 

Well, first I decided that I would start small and try to incorporate nature studies in small and creative ways. Plan A was to get the girls to explore the fauna and flora in our local vicinity. I told to them to find and photograph any beasties they could within our small plot of garden and the landscaped gardens of the condominium we live in.  I equipped the girls with a camera and tasked them with the challenge of finding creatures big and small and photographing them if they could.They had fun and it was pretty successful in getting the kids out.These are some of the critters they caught on film.

Unfortunately, we found it difficult to identify the particular species of insect or animal and we got frustrated and lost heart a little. Also, as the weather got hotter and more oppressive, it became harder to persuade my girls to head out (they really don't like the heat). So, it seemed like our nature studies were doomed to be neglected.

I then hit upon an idea - nature studies don't always have to  be outside, do they? It is, after all, the study of nature and I can bring it into the home. So I planned a study on fruit, something easy and doable, an achievable goal we could build on. I would assign half an hour each week to the study of a particular fruit. 


The first week the girls looked at, sketched, and cut open a Papaya. We then went online to look at Papaya trees and I prepared a little note page on papayas which they read and stuck into their nature journals. They enjoyed it, stayed cool and happy - so I'll count it as a success.

The next week was followed by a study of a starfruit. 

It seems to be working well and I plan to carry on for awhile and spend time observing other tropical, local fruit like the Rambutan and Mangosteen.

It is not quite the getting out into the fresh air and observing nature in its natural surroundings (hence the cheating?) but I think it still counts as an opportunity for my children to observe and appreciate the natural world. What I have noticed is that the children are paying attention to their surroundings more, and they'll stop to watch a bird in the tree pecking away at the bark or a grasshopper perched on our window sill, which is lovely.

And who knows, we might still get out that door and brave the heat for another foray into nature in the not too distant future..