Well, Melrose was good for Joe and me in more ways than one. We (well okay, I – but it’s rubbing off on him too!) came back all educationally motivated, which I think is what comes of spending time talking and sharing with other home educators, so it really was a worthwhile week. I guess I’d become a bit stale, and even disillusioned to some extent, as I do find it harder to home educate with just one child around. I had a couple of good chats with people about that which did re-inspire me really, so thank you all 
We decided after the Space workshop at Dynamic Earth that we should really do something on space and the solar system, it’s something the girls never showed any interest in when we were HEing them so we never did anything about it 
(shh, hope Roger‘s not reading, he would despair of me!). As a result I really think that Josiah didn’t actually have a clue about some of the things they touched on in the workshop, which is terrible really, so we’re going to put it right!
In fact not just specifically space, I have decided that I really must do more interesting stuff with him, since we started HEing again in October it’s been largely boring for both of us. So it’s on my mind to be more pro-active as the ideas don’t seem to be forthcoming from him!
The other thing that we’re changing round here is the amount of mindless screen time that has been happening – too much, basically, (yes, I know it’s all my own fault 
), so we’ve decided to clamp down on that as well.
Anyway, we started off with a Solar System jigsaw, which Joe enjoyed putting together and looking at all the information on it.
Then got slightly distracted from the space theme and made a robot instead, from
this kit which Joe got for Christmas. That was really successful – some of the fiddly bits were a bit too fiddly for 5yo fingers but he did really well. I was pleased that he seemed to be able to predict how the motor was going to work when we connected up the electrics, obviously that electronics kit has been worthwhile! I recommend the kit actually, the instructions were clear and it was all put together with double sided sticky tape so no glue or mess which obviously suits me down to the ground!
By that time it was mid morning so Joe had a fruit break and sat in front of Megamaths for half an hour (well I needed a break, ok!?).
After that we did violin practice, which took us up until lunch time.
After that we got cracking with a page of Exeter maths which was hard work, it’s just general number bond consolidation at the moment which, I must confess even for me, is becoming hugely repetitive and is relatively unnecessary, so I circled a few problems for Joe to do and let him off the rest. It does become futile when the level of the mathematics on a page is superceded by the difficulty of the writing involved in recording the answers, iyswim? Although having said *that*, the only time I ask Josiah to write anything really is in his maths/music workbooks, we’re not really doing any written work other than that at the moment so he hasn’t really got that much to complain about! Anyway.
Then came a page of music theory which was just learning about minim, crotchet and semibreve rests, nothing too strenuous there.
We were going to embark on some huge crafty papier mache planet making thing until I suggested it to Joe and he just went ‘yuk’ at the very idea of wet gluey paper – and I seem to remember the same thing happening last time we did it – the girls were into it for a while and then I ended up being the only one making a Greek urn as it was then. And as there are a relatively large number of planets that would need making (and you all know that if I started I would have to finish 
) , I decided not to even bother starting – I might see if I can pick up a smaller model set that just needs painting instead, because he’d probably manage that.
Very interesting how for us having the girls home educated at this age you could pretty much teach anything via craft etc., whereas Josiah is completely uninterested in craft at all – if you can make/build something that works or does something then he’s interested, but craft just for the sake of it really doesn’t float his boat. Making sweeping generalisations probably, but is this a girl boy thing? Anyway.
He wanted to play on the computer after that so I agreed, on the understanding that it would be something educational not just mucking around with games. So we got out a couple of Space CDroms that we had kicking around and looked at those, plenty of quizzes, games and activities, that sort of thing. And then Joe spent a while on the Nasa kids’ games page. We had a small discussion about doing a project on Space – I maintained that we’d started today whereas Joe was adamant that he doesn’t want to do one! I think he thinks that a project will mean huge amounts of drawing and writing – so as long as we can manage to avoid that he’ll be happy
Phew, then the girls got home from school! I helped Anna with various bits of homework (and that was very laborious and painful for some reason ), and they fiddled around with drawing, fimo varnishing and gamecube in various combinations until teatime. Abbie is currently wittering on about being home educated again, apparently because there are too many annoying people in her class. Don’t know what on earth I think about that!
Bit of a downer, that.