just another morning here

So, I just did my response to the Dfes Consultation on Home Ed guidelines. If I was respondent id 197 does that mean only 196 people before me have done it? Bit scary, that – I’m sure there are loads more people out there who have comments to add – get on and do it before the end of the month!

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.

My first day of jury service was fairly noneventful; I turned up at the court at the appointed time and did all the intro stuff – watched a video about the whole ‘being a juror’ process, and sat around listening to lots of associated blurb. Didn’t get picked for the jury in waiting, sat around reading a book for about an hour, and eventually got told to go home and phone in later to find out about the rest of the week. Don’t have to go in tomorrow either, but again have to phone in tomorrow to find out about the next day.

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!