Firstly we went to the library and picked up as many books on the Romans as we possibly could. Josiah particularly enjoyed reading Usborne’s ‘The Story of Rome’ himself, it was just the right level.

I confess to having cheated slightly; while googling for Roman Lapbooks I found an Ancient Rome Lapbook pdf pack at the HomeschoolEstore.com, and figured I might as well save myself the hassle of planning the lapbook out for myself so I bought the pack. I must say I was fairly impressed with it, it was very comprehensive and I think both of us benefited from not having the think up the ideas for things to do in the lapbook! It helped us to break the project down into manageable study chunks, too – as we did each section (food, clothing, specific people & places, etc) we learned about them separately. We didn’t do all of it, but we used the sections that we fancied learning about, and Joe’s lapbook turned out really well.

Steve took Josiah to the RAMM museum in town, and they inspected lots of Roman things (coins, mosaic pieces, games etc.), dressed up, learnt some Latin words [wasn't impressed at the suggestion of learning more Latin though!] etc.

We had a trip to the Roman Baths in Bath, which was great.

We took a trip to a rather lovely mosaic shop in town, Opus Mosaic, and bought ourselves a few tiles to make a mosaic with. Actually the lady in the shop (its owner) was really helpful and it turned out that her teenage daughter had been home educated so we had a lovely chat about that as well! Abbie enjoyed helping with this – and it was a great opportunity to bring in some maths and ‘planning’ skills as Josiah mapped out his design on squared paper before doing the tiles. Still need to get some grout to finish it off!

We’ve touched on a fair bit of maths; not only with Roman numerals which Joe enjoyed doing, but also due to discussing the timeline and calendar we ended up talking about negative numbers a fair bit, and adding/subtracting them. Josiah looked at a few of the Roman emperors in his lapbook, and worked out their ages from their birth/death dates, some of which were fully BCE, some were CE so easy to work out, and some crossed the change between BCE and CE. Can’t quite get the hang of this BCE and CE thing, I kept slipping into BC and AD by accident. Anyway, I digress – he got on fine with the maths of it!

The project and lapbook were pretty much finished by half term, then we discovered that during half term week the museum were putting on some Romans activities so we went and did some of those, which was a great end to the project. I think Joe would say he’d enjoyed most of it, well all apart from the writing, anyway! He is such a reluctant writer, he must have actually written about 10 sentences at most.

Weblinks we used:
History For Kids Rome Links
BBC Schools Romans
Roman Empire – children’s section
The Romans in Britain

A couple of weeks before half term Josiah decided that he’d like to go back to school again. Not sure what changed his mind exactly, but I have to admit that in some ways I was relieved. So he is going back to school on Monday. I’m probably feeling more anxious than he is at the moment, and slightly disappointed all over again about not home educating any more, but at the same time I’m quite pleased, as it has been such hard work for us to have a foot in both camps. So that’s our news.

We are loving Spy Dog at the moment. I think it is the first time ever that Josiah has got hold of a book and pretty much read it from cover to cover (rather than skimming it and looking at the pictures!). Lovely to see him reading and really enjoying it.

He’s got this one and Spy Dog 2, plus Spy Dog Unleashed. I’m hoping to read them too, to see what’s so great about them, after he’s finished … later today I expect!

So, we went on a home ed group trip to Cookworthy Forest yesterday, where they have a Celtic Roundhouse and run educational stuff as well as the working forest, and had a fantastic time.

The morning activities consisted of: leaf/tree identification, an un-nature trail, pretending to be bugs with ‘sky eyes’. Then came lunch, including cooking over the fire for some people – bacon, dampers, and marshmallows.

After lunch we went back into the forest for the ‘meet a tree’ activity, and then making micro-nature trails in the deer meadow.

All in all it was a great day out, as usual tinged with slight regret for me that the girls were stuck in a classroom rather than enjoying it with us, while on a normal day I still struggle with Josiah being on his own, I really don’t know how much longer I can carry on with both approaches to education at the same time in our family, roll on half term.

So that got me thinking, and I decided to write a little bit about what Josiah’s been up to in terms of home ed recently; we’ve had reports and parents’ evenings for the girls lately so have caught up on their school progress (all fine, according to their teachers, who still seem to know different children from the ones we do !!), so this is something of the same sort of round up.

We haven’t done any written maths lately, just plenty of real life stuff, and the odd CDrom maths related game on the computer. Joe’s happy doing all sorts of mental maths as it crops up at the shops or wherever. He doesn’t know his tables off by heart, but is usually good at working them out when he needs to.
He can tell the time well and has a good understanding of the 24h clock.
He does plenty of weighing (usually while cooking) and measuring when he needs to measure things, and is accurate when he does. He will happily convert units of measurement (ie cm, m, km etc.) and is often the quickest of our three children to work that sort of problem out!
He enjoys logic/mathematical puzzles and we often sit with our ‘puzzle-a-day’ calendar over breakfast doing those.

Writing generally hasn’t evolved as something Josiah enjoys doing yet – I hope that will change but until it does I’m not going to force the issue, not at age 6, anyway! When he does write his handwriting is neat and his spelling is generally ok, for a 6yo
Joe reads for pleasure at night in bed, we regularly find him asleep amidst a pile of books. I’m not sure how much he’s reading and how much is just looking at the books as he still prefers picture books, but I don’t mind as long as he is enjoying them.
He’s also listened to the Chronicles of Narnia over and over again on the ipod, I must get some more audiobooks for him actually, he really enjoys them.
He will quite happily use a non-fiction book along with contents/index pages, he is confident about alphabetical order and can pick out relevant information from a book when he is looking for it. He is also well able to read and follow a recipe from an adult recipe book, which I think is fairly impressive.
We’ve played through a couple of adventure games on the Wii recently for which he has ploughed through guides to get through them, so I think that counts as reading comprehension too

We’ve done the odd science kit together, and as well as that Joe does lots of cooking, and plays with sciencey stuff like gears and electronics. He’s still interested in all things Space related since our project earlier in the year, and he’s also done a fair bit of learning around biology/human body stuff, through his favourite books and supported by plenty of conversation (notably Anna recounting her pshe lessons about puberty in great detail over the dinner table ). We’ve done a bit of gardening this year although most things have either drowned in the swampy waterlogged beds, or been eaten by slugs, but never mind.

We recently used Education City for another of their trials; well timed to fit in with my jury service the other week. Josiah spent a fair bit of time sitting in Steve’s office playing on it, completely unaided and unsupervised. I picked up the reports at the end of it, and having put him in for Y2 activities (he would only be at the end of Y1 at the moment), I was pleased to see that he was consistently scoring an average of 80% across all the subjects, in all the activities he’d done, thereby reassuring me that the informal year we’ve had hasn’t been too bad for him

Arty stuff happens in splurges, when we have a project on. We did the dalek thing earlier in the year, which Josiah really enjoyed, and he helped out with planning, designing and making the R2D2 costume last week. He likes drawing, occasionally, but doesn’t like getting messy, so we don’t do as much arty crafty stuff as I used to do with the girls at the same age. He does enjoy fimo modelling, and hama beads if he has some inspiration.

Violin lessons are ongoing; Josiah and I practice most days. It’s hard work – he wanted to learn and so we started, but he often wants to give up. We’ve come to an agreement that he can quit either when he’s 18 or when he gets to the end, whichever is the sooner I’m hoping that I will be able to quote Anna who famously said ‘but if I was good at it then I would enjoy it’, and in due course he will enjoy it more! Still, he is good at it, he makes a nice sound, so it is worth carrying on with the discipline, in my view.
He’s done a fair bit of music theory too – as much as he can absorb at his age, in any case, and has started piano lessons with Laura, which he enjoys. He finds it hard to play in front of/with other people, performing is not his thing particularly, although he did enjoy the one group lesson we had with violin. In a couple of weeks Laura’s pupils have a concert; he’s already said that he’s nervous about it, so it will be interesting to see if the reluctance he’s had to perform/play violin in public will be the same with the piano, or not. A very different scenario and at least the girls will be there too, but who knows how he will react.

Swimming lessons are ongoing and Josiah is progressing well there. We try to go out somewhere most days for exercise, even if it’s just round to the park with a bike. He is keen to start some sort of karate or something, so we may look into that for September, although I don’t quite know how we’d fit it in to a week.

Most regular readers will know that I have found it immensely hard to have one child at home full time rather than all of them, for a whole host of reasons. Josiah doesn’t seem to mind, though, but he does miss the girls very much when they are at school.
We’ve started going along to home ed group again and that has been good for both of us, although for various reasons I haven’t managed to get there for over a month now (and won’t until September, because of music exams this week, a towing test next week, and then it’s the holidays). Joe made a couple of little friends in the few weeks we went and we’ve been meeting up with one of them recently so that’s been really good for him (and me too).

There must be lots more I could say, but when I sit down to sum up I simply forget all the conversations we have, and the vast majority of Josiah’s learning is probably done this way. As such there isn’t any visible evidence of reasonable progress, and if I’m honest I don’t really want to start measuring him against any abitrary yardstick either. He’s growing up, enjoys having plenty of time available just to be himself, and the vast majority of the time he’s great company, makes intelligent conversation, and is relatively helpful too. And he makes mean choc chip cookies

And parcels arriving on the right day! Steve and I were worried that our present for Joe wasn’t going to get here but then it did

He’s had a lovely day, lots of presents this morning so a big thank you to everyone who got them to us in various ways (more photos on flickr). Have made time for lots of lego play between activities today

We went to Crealy and he spent a happy few hours racing around with another little home ed friend, then I treated him to lunch.

When we got home his parcel was here and he was really happy with a grown up scooter of his own, and went down the road on it to meet the girls from school.

We’re off out now to swimming and then taking Gizmo to the vet, so he’s having to come to the pool with us as well – should provide some extra changing room amusement! Steve’s dashing home to get Anna to ballet on time, and eventually we’ll all end up at home together later on.

So I ended up back at the garage with Steve by lunchtime, and Emma dropped Josiah back to me there. He’d had a fab time and greeted me with ‘I shot Spongebob Squarepants!’ Emma’s husband Adam, since coming out of the army in May, has got involved in setting up a new paintballing facility at a nearby holiday park, so she’d taken Josiah down there for the morning. Joe had apparently shot 60 pellets (I’ve never done it so don’t really have a clue what he was talking about) and wasn’t bad at it! I think the targets are big posters of characters etc., hence the Spongebob reference. He said the guns were quite heavy, but obviously not too heavy for an almost 6yo to have a lot of fun

His tooth has been wobbly for ages, and fell out today on an ice lolly!

Thinking that those were very valid points to make, we skipped over that part of the question, but then decided to email Pennywell Farm to ask if they could weigh a duck for us! Had a lovely email conversation with someone there and we ended up visiting yesterday. Joe got in for free as we’d collected activity stamps last time we went

The staff on the desk hadn’t actually heard anything about our little mission, but the lady who was doing all the children’s activities that day was more than willing to help us out.

So, around lunchtime (well, after the story time, egg collecting, goat milking, lamb feeding and goodness knows what else we did!), we found some scales (hidden under the bucket in the picture) and Josiah weighed this month-old duckling. He held it first, and made a guess of 600g, then we put it in the bucket, and lo and behold it weighed almost exactly 600g! I say almost exactly as the duck didn’t really want to sit still in the bucket to be weighed so it was a bit difficult to read the scales, but it was pretty damn close. We didn’t bother trying to hold a fully grown duck still to weigh that as well, although I suppose that would be an interesting question to ask/answer, but fairly irrelevant at this point in time!

Anyway, it was fabulous that Pennywell were so accommodating (I knew they would be, they are so lovely there), we had a great day. Joe did all the other activities and really enjoyed himself (Robyn and I literally just followed him around!), and he was pretty chuffed to have estimated the duckling’s weight well too.

Joe chose a science kit to do this morning, and it was all about forces. Gravity, friction etc. demonstrated by the standard ‘toy car down a ramp’ experiment, etc., which he really enjoyed. Then we got onto centrifugal force, spinning things around his head and in bottles, etc. At which point I had some vague recollection of there being centripetal force as well, and went to look up the difference between the two, thinking that centrifugal was an outwards circular force and centripetal being the opposite but now I’m completely confused, because this article says centrifugal force is not really a force at all!

Anyway it must be time for coffee! Hopefully by the time I get back someone might have educated me …