Home Schooling, Early Years: WRITING, Practicing Santa's Letter

Was worried about the whole letter joining bit , but decided that it would be a good thing to know for quicker writing at the end, so far it's coming along steadily and un-evenfully, I'd say!

Home Schooling, Early Years: Some Free-Flow Learning

I'm not particularly into teaching to learn (only) from the world around you.

Sure, I recognise the aesthetically appealing argument, yet my intuition sending me no thumbs up about it.  Perhaps it's the result of seeing our teen go total  'Minecraft is all I want, all I want is Minecraft...mmm, no programming or doing graphics is a bit boring, mum, it's not what I'm into' , for a couple of years, and then, overnight it was a bit like  'Minecraft?  What Minecraft?' There are other examples.  Perhaps school was to blame.

We are lucky, O seems to like structure.  He does have days when it's just plain to see that anything I'm trying to teach him just going over his head.  That's ok, we just cut the lesson short and move on with the day, if I managed my own 'braindead days' better, I suppose I'd try to teach him how to, but forget it.  Braindead days are what makes us human, by mere suggesting that we do have brain that's not dead rest of the time.

Anyway, days' like these only happen about 10% of a time in our Home Schooling,  at a stretch. Otherwise, it's just a routine for him: 'When are we doing 'staudiing' ?' 'Can I do numbers with sticks?' 'What book are we reading? Oh, not the same!  Can we read another one now? ' That kind of thing.  It's nice to see him laying out lego letters and calling the names out  just for fun, in his spare time.

O's dad is quite organic, on the other hand.  He gets O to help him with online shopping while reading words or at least sounding out letters.  I suspect if we did it with him every day, it would be just a way to study for him by now, but as an occasional activity, O takes great pride in reading this and that of the 'grown up' stuff. 

He used to be able to get a game download for the weekend treat, just by reading 'Sonic' ( Just like Jo-Jo gets a small sweet every time he asks for potty) but,  now , those days are gone.  He needs to work much harder than that! 

This brings me to the hilarious 'Behaviour Chart' dear dad put in place today, surprisingly swiftly, in a matter of minutes, here's the organised man for you!  It goes by points and Oliver's sarcasm, for example,  counts a 'Bad Behaviour' on a par with answering back or saying that he's too tired to tidy his lego, so , basically doesn't  earn him any good 'points' to add to the scale. I guess we'll be adding up those points at some of our 'Numbers' lessons! Interested to see the graph , too. 

Home Schooling, Early Years: NUMBERS

Doing some numbers

Home Schooling, Early Years: NUMBERS, Deduction

A couple of weeks ago we started our deductions, which turned out much easier than anticipated.  He just picks out the bigger number, which, when it's  '-', is always at the front, he knows, and takes the second number  in sticks , out of it. 

The counting STICKS and CARDS rule in our HE house, more so than books, at this point, lol. 

On a whole, I think,  O is much more ready to do his reading and writing, even though, ironically , 'Numbers' is his favourite subject still! 

Home Schooling, Early Years: READING, Friday Reading is a Piece of Cake!

Reading at the end of the week.  by now O would have read this book 3-4 times.

 

Home Schooling , Early Years: READING, Beginning the Book on Monday

We tend to go through one phonics book a week, of whatever stage Oliver is in. At the moment we are half way through 2nd stage, the green level of Songbirds.

The blogger doesn't seem to want to let me download a longer vid, but this is pretty much how it goes. By the end of the week O is always dying to start a new book, though he probably realises that starting a new book is difficult, much more so than continuing with the old one!  But he always wants a new one, nevertheless!

Home Schooling, Early Years: READING: Phonics , Recognising More Words.

Another new book, from the beginning of the week.  I must admit, we really get on with the phonics.  O has started recognising words like 'and' , 'the' and 'I am' so out they go, in come 'said' ,  and the concepts of two consonants together as in 'mi-lk' and 'chi-ps' as well as , of course a very useful to recognise 'ing'. Trying, also,  to crack the harder , multi-sailable words like 'Doctor', too. Ollie seems to forget 'Doc' by the time he got to 'tor' and vice versa, lol.

Home Schooling, Early Years: Writing the Letter to Santa , Joining Letters Compulsory

We started to prepare to write the present request to Santa. Oliver was very keen to start on this and tried very hard.  He's not really ready to join letters or write long words yet, in my opinion, but it's a shame not to capitalise on such festive opportunity, especially seeing that he's very interested is very proud of his work on finishing.

I'm trying to talk him through the commonalities that there are in joining letters, as, I think , in a long run it will help him to write quicker and clearer and will, also stop the need to unlearn later. It's amazing how quickly a child can fall into useless wrong patterns with his writing, for no apparent reason!

This is, actually, the first vaguely 'classic' things we've done in our HE.

There are times O just tells me 'I'm not doing studying' ( which is not an option as it's part of our routine, but I do tend to leave it for a bit and come back to it, if he's determined).  However, as often he actually asks me if he can do 'Studying'.  It's so cute, and very dear. The fact that children, at this young an age are already very keen learners, does resonate here.

Home Schooling, Early Years: Writing , Taking Stock of Where we are With it ( if I ever get this video to work!)

Home Schooling, Early Years: the Sticky Issue of Socialising.

Productive socialisation while Home Schooling can be tricky, as it can be at school, I's say, now I'd seen how it went over the years for our now 14 year old.  In both places making close friends is a bit of a game of chances. At school the choice is, potentially,  wider, ( though not as broad as it's perceived imho) and of course the danger of your child stopping to be themselves overnight,  is zero, too, on a plus side.

There are absolute plenty of organised activities for Home Schooled kids, at the moment we have time to participate in one of them only, weekly HE Gymnastics.  We started with schooled kids but switched, as it was less crowded and less rushed at the HE alternative.

Over the last few moths we also tried few HE social groups.  Generally, Oliver falls back on the safety of playing with his brother, but finally we found one that runs twice a week with many kids Oliver's age, which both him and his brother enjoy.  So, generally we go for a day there ( with Math , Drama etc activities in the beginning,  the days  runs between 10am - 3pm)

We have another two regular activities we are trying to, and generally do keep to, in a week.  

The first one is a day out with some kind of an educational value.  Our main one is  Discovery centre in Bracknell.  We have a membership to it and both boys  absolutely adore it, so much that they never want to leave.  Most of the time, they, seem to spontaneously fall into some kind of building etc play with some kids who happen to be there for some of the time they are there, which is nice,  ( or occasionally other HE kids who we know, also come along). We also have 'a yearly' to go to Legoland , which was fab up to recently.   And if anyone thinks it's not educational , they haven't explored the geographical and engineering potential of Miniland alone, and FairyTale Brook got Oliver into books, which was not all that bothered about prior to.


Our other regular activity is a regular long playdate.  We have at least one of those a week and Oliver normally meets his friends, most of whom are either friends of the family or ones he met in pre-school playgroups  + there the other home schooled kids, of course.

So this is our socialising.  We are  hoping to squeeze in another activity, something sporty, perhaps swimming or martial arts for Oliver, to give him a bit of a variety over local playground visits and the large trampoline in the garden for sports.   Other than that, allowing for an odd one off HE hook up at some kids farm, etc, we are comfortably 'booked up', I'd say. Not many pics to show.  Taking pics of boys playing with other kids is a bit awkward, same as at school, lol.

Home-Schooling, Early Years: WRITING: Grouping Similar Letters for Writing at any One Time Seems to Work!

It seemed, we had no system for our writing exercises.  I kind of just picked out random letters which seemed a good idea.  So I decided to try 'bunching up' similar letters, e.g. h & n and m, or b & l.  I was a bit worried that O would get confused, but in fact I think it helped him, and he's taking well to it. We'd only just started doing it, so far so good, but if we run into problems with this one , I'll 'unrecommend' it in my further posts.

The 'smileys' or the 'grumpys', the little 'faces inside the letters, is a treat of free flow 'doodling' our son loves at the end of his writing exercise.  It generally leaves him in fits of giggles and we try to chose pretty letters' to make faces. 

Home Schooling, Early Years: READING, Going up to the Next Level!

We are going up to the next level of Songbirds, which is really exciting.  Wasn't keen to move on just yet, but Oliver was starting to guess words, and not the handy ones like 'and' and 'my' ( see last post ) so it was kind of, time to.

Songbrids phonics are working really well for us so far. Brilliant books. I always make sure Oliver understands what is the book all about, read it out to him and repeat the sentence back,  ask Qs, etc, plus he finds them quite funny, which is a +.  Very happy customer!

Home Schooling, Early Years: READING, Learning to Recognise the Short Words, that are Very Common.

We are now moving on from 'glueing' letter combos together e.g. 'B-a' , makes smooth 'BA' sound 'M-o' sound 'MO' etc. The new 'warm up O and I are going to be doing before he would move onto reading itself, will be learning to recognise short words like 'AND' or 'HE / SHE' that seem to crop up a lot.  Some of them are a bit tricky to a complete beginner, so it seems easier to get him to recognise few common ones as well as the fact that not all words are straightforward phonetically. (Lets face it, nothing is phonetically straightforward in English or French reading , when compared to Italian or Russian, for example.  Unlike the grammar. I guess it's just the luck of the draw!)

Home Schooling, Early Years: NUMBERS, Adding 1 'In Your Head' Using the Numbers' Poster

We are still doing additions only.  The idea is to build up on one principle before moving on to the next, to avoid confusion.  Numbers is O's favourite 'subject' at the moment: finally similarities with big sis!

However, I've been trying to think of the ways to teach him mental additions. He can do 1+1 and 2+1 and then he gets stuck most of the time.   I've noticed that he doesn't know things like 'what's a bigger no, 5 or 6?' I suppose why would he. (Crazy how many things we take for granted).   Although I love cards, the simplicity and versatility of them, it seemed easy to have something in one piece to avoid laying it out every time.  So we got a poster.  In fact we kind of binge shopped and got few of these posters in Bracknell Discovery centre, I'm sure we'll make some use out of them all!

With this lovely poster, we are now trying to explore the idea that 'each next number is bigger than the one before' , bigger by 1 , to be precise, and so instead of counting out 6 counting sticks to add 1 , he can just go to the next number up in his head.  Hopefully it will work.  Will update! 

Home-Schooling, Early Years: Is Baking = Schooling?

O loves baking, loves to see it through too, the whole project.  This surprises  me,  as Jazzlyn would always start and then quickly lose interest in both baking and cooking.  By now, she seems to have permanently lost it in fact,  but maybe O won't?  That would be super cute. 

Home-Schooling, Early Years: READING, video

Trying to get   a little video of O reading here,  not having much luck with  it at the moment, though.

Homeschooling Early Years, WRITING: The 'L' Hell

He gets it, he forgets it and so over and over we go with this 'l'.  Horrible letter, or maybe it's just the holiday effect. 

Wanted to do this cute pictogram of Oliver's holiday activities but all the running behind with my filing, it's time for new 'work' posts.  Except, maybe we can sneak in some O's baking in the next post.  But yeah, 'l' difficulties regardless, we love HE.  It seems to work well for us, nice little routine, even baby respectfully keeps quiet, while we study.  For the most part. 

Home Schooling, WRITING: Ups and downs of 'g'

O's writing started  off surprisingly quick and easy.  We decided to alternate the wipe offs and 'real' writing from scratch with ball pen and paper.  The first few goes went incredibly well, he seem to do nice neat small letters, letter 'a' and 'd' to be precise, with little difficulty and only starting dot for a guide.

Then, I decided to move on to 'g' as I thought it was similar to 'a' and... he just couldn't crack it, for days and days, no joy, he was worried about his writing, I was worried about his writing,  trying to understand what I did wrong and if I pushed him too  hard ( he does 1 A4 a day , about 10 lines, at the moment) 

Then, by the end of the week, his 'g's just got nicer. Strange what things make you rejoice beyond belief when you are parent  and a home schooler parent at that.  Oliver loved it, it was such a celebration for him to get it right.  I think going through the difficulty and then seeing with his own eyes that he could overcome that difficulty was a very nice experience for him.  Oliver is very goal orientated and now he is working  on writing a letter to Father Xmas to get his highly desired lego set he'd seen in Legoland.

So, ( running a little behind on our posts), we are nearly reached his first ever 'holiday' and seems like we about to pack away all our studying resources on a good note!

Smooth Beginnig 'd' & 'a's similar enough , right? 

Starting on 'g' with quite a difficulty, much like 'y' 

...And getting there within about a week that seemed like a month!  But a very very neat 'g' ! 

Home-Schooling: NUMBERS, Additions.

Little by little we are now starting to work with numbers, and it seems, there's nothing a simple set of DIY cards can't start off. 

So far, O has very smoothly taken into matching sticks and numbers.  The drill here is this. O choses numbers and '-', '+' "=' on the instruction from me and lays them out.  Unless it's something like 1+1 or 1+2, which he can do 'inside his head', he then matches the right no of sticks to the number, counts them together and choses the number to replace the totalling sticks, to put at the end. ( We'd covered the 'take away'  concept briefly, but decided to let additions settle first).

Yes, sometimes he forgets to count out the right number of sticks,  confuses '6' with '9', or lets his mind wonder off completely here and there, but all is smooth and predictable with our numbers game so far.  He's getting to know the sequence of events here, no alarms and no surprises. 

I understand that it might be because we just starting on it, but I'm glad, too.  It's nice having something to go at a nice pace.  With other stuff we are going through some dramatic notions already.  Reading and phonics, for example.  Oliver found it really tricky to start with, then we had a nice period where he was getting it all, sounding the sounds and 'glueing' them together,  and all was becoming easy until the next step just today.  

With writing, too.  He had a brilliant start where all seemed just too easy and then, a complete set back when he seemed to 'unlearn' everything to suddenly catch up again, unexpectedly, today. More about this in the next 2 posts. 

Home - Schooling DAYS OUT: Discovery Centre & Kew Gardens, to name just a few...

Now, our homeschooling week is over,  this weekend we were chilling and doing very little.  The plan to go London,  to our 'local' Marylebone, just to shop at the Farmer's Market and have a coffee, got scrapped due to the rain.  It always surprises me how relaxed the boys are, not particularly bothered about going out, just hanging out home on the weekend, playing with phones ( weekends only in our house) and making mess of a gazillion pieces of Thomas the tank of every configuration,  we have sitting around the house. I think they like to have a downtime during the weekend as much as we do.

I mean,  we did have quite a busy week ( on top of whatever we do for studying , then shopping , running errands etc).

 MONDAY, Playground & Gymnastics.

TUESDAY, attempt to go Legoland, which was closed and so ending up at lovely Discovery Centre second week on a trot.  Boys had no complaints.  I know I keep evangelising about the Discovery centre, but it's a goldmine for growing minds out and about. Anything and everything for any age.  The behind the scene teen used to love it, too, so not just for boys, either.  In the pic below, our dear Oliver is completing puzzle made out of human insides.  Matter-of-factly, he does it.

WEDNESDAY , we meeting O's little friend N  Normally it's Friday, but not this week. N's mum, who's foreign like myself,  brings a couple of toy guns to play with, and Oliver has the time of his life playing those with N., taking them apart etc,  he knows dad wouldn't let him, so it makes it even more fun, I guess, never mind love of guns in children seems as natural as love of bright lipstick in teens, both soon fade, get replaced by something else.

THURSDAY.  We are meeting up with a lovely HE kids / parents in Kew gardens.  It's always VERY awkward to even attempt to take pictures of kids playing together, let alone take those pics and post them on a blog. So I don't.  Kind of a shame, but here we are.

FRIDAY.  We in all day, ( which includes baking cookies )  and then spend ages on the playground.  We only get there around 5.30-6pm but, surprisingly,  there are other kids not yet on their way home and boys really make best of it before we head off for a Friday pub meal of chicken nuggets and chips.

So here goes.  Busy week. Like any other week.  No wonder they are not in a major rush to get out over the weekend. Though I'm repeating myself here, but would like to reiterate my precious thought: kids love downtime as much as we do. Here's to a happy weekend just gone , tomorrow we start again.  Big local meet up at Hobble-town ( I think it's called ), I think most of local home-schoolers, even those who don't go HE groups, or at least not those we go to, will be coming. Must remember the rain coats!

Home-schooling young years: WRITING with Pen instead of felt-tip Pen

Because we haven't quite established a decent filing system for our home-schooling endeavours, as of yet, this is the boring bit of the whole thing, we often end up losing our bits and bobs.  For example we'd already lost a set of self-made letter cards.  While on the subject, the cards, which I cheaply make very much to my own specification in no time whatsoever, are quickly becoming our best tool to learning all kinds of things which do not learn by themselves. We love cards.

Anyway. On top of losing cards,  one day last week we couldn't find our main 'whipe-clean' writing pad.  It was annoying but there was no time to spend going around the house in circles, hoping that it will just turn up because I SO wished it would.   So instead, I asked Oliver to write  with 'grown up' pen straight on paper, telling him that , at least it was not going to get rubbed off quickly.  And he did! It took him a little bit to get hang of the ball pen medium, but he did.

I was very surprised with the result and very pleased, indeed, that we were thrown into this brave, all considered, 'grown up'  writing  straight away. Some letters, like 'V' he struggled with quite a bit.  Other, such as 'd' , 'a' and 'O' seemed really really easy for him. All I did was just to point the beginning dots. And he really enjoyed writing most letters, too! 

3rd day in,  O really struggled with 'y' and 'g' , just couldn't remember where to go from the dot,  and I didn't want him to lose his writing confidence, so I had to write them in red felt-tip pen and he just went over them ( can't find the pad right now, no joke,  will post as soon as it re-appeared).  So, yeah, very pleased. Well done, little man,  our little super-writer.  

READING: 'Glueing' the Letters Together

So, we learnt the first helping of our sounds, what now?  As I mentioned in my post below, we'd  started on the 'Songbirds' Phonics books, stage one.  All the ones with 'Top' 'Tom' 'Cat' 'Mop' and so on.

Immediately, we had a dilemma.  Oliver was quite happy to say out the phonics, soon enough happy not to say the letter sounds, as well.  This was as a bit of a result, as he really struggled to NOT use those, when we were learning phonic sounds without actually applying them.  Clearly he didn't understand why we needed phonics when we already had letters, but now, we are 'reading', he is quite happy to apply the sounds, not the letters, because he sees why we need sounds, not letters. Nicely done, Oliver.

But back to the DILEMMA. Do I let him just to continue sounding out the sounds, one by one? And hope for the best?  Easy, but how to we convert them into words?  Ok, he will, probably, get there with simpler words, though it doesn't fold in naturally, no sign so far,  but what about the longer ones?  I decided to go with the strategy to of segmenting syllables as in 'M-a 'Ma'' , 'B-a' 'Ba'' and so on and ask O to sound them out smoothly , as he hears them when listening...

The transition from sounding out the individual letter sounds to smooth combo sounds is quite tricky, and a bit frustrating  for both  of us, if I was to be honest, but I think we are getting there now! I had to re-write the cards, as the first lot was quite sloppy and I didn't want for there to be any more distractions than necessary! 

The above strategy  left us with some word segments which were a, kind of, 'dual'. For example 'S-o' So' and 'G-g' 'Go'. On their own , similarly to 'I' and 'a' they would read differently then as a part of the word.  Unlike the initial issue with 'glueing the sounds' O does really well with reading the 'on their own' words and sounds and not confusing them with the 'middle of the words' ones ( despite the reading book comments suggesting that he might struggle: must be off the range somewhat)! So perhaps I'll keep all the confusing combos and will go through them as 'super special ones' with Oliver, separately.  He's bound to pay more attention to them just because the are 'super', I bet! 

LEGOLAND Education

Although today was a completely unfathomable weather for the beginning of October here in UK, pretty much the kind of weather you'd wear the clothes our boys are wearing in this picture below, this is actually a post dated entry. That day in Legoland, was, coincidentally, the same day most of Oliver's little friends from pre-school went to their first day at school.

And so , we went to Legoland instead.  

We weren't trying to prove a point of any sort, but we figured out  we might get a great warm day and half - empty theme park, for once.  And we did. We went about our business looking at miniature Scotland, France and London in Miniland, visited fields of yellow ducks,  Jo-Jo fell in love with a lego figure and both got a lasting memory of Red Riding Hood story while riding around in Fairy Tale Brook. I think it was the first time the story came alive for both boys, O in particular.  He recognised and has been showing a very distinctive interest in Little Red Riding Hood since then.  She's probably all alive to him now, despite Legoland mercilessly cutting out the pappy bit at the end , where the woodcutters let the RH out. But O seemed fine about it. We had that chat about talking to strangers and wandering off all by yourself. 

What a fantastic day, indeed.  I got Oliver to count stripes on Jo-Jo shorts and teach him ( Jo-Jo)  some colours, so not much accountable 'education'  but it was a great day that Oliver still mentions, the bridges and the trains and the buildings in Mini Land, the submarine, the 3 little pigs' performance,  the whole load of other things they still seem to remember ( as in 'We should use bricks, they are very good for houses' Oliver tells me these days in Discovery Centre's Building site). 

It was a nice first day of our Home School and it's amazing how much kids learn from everywhere and anywhere,  if you start paying attention to how they connect and reference things, so very effortlessly and continuously.

READING: Songbirds

...So our Classical Education reading teacher didn't work any miracles, so we decided to heavily substitute it with Songbird Phonics. They are great little books.  10 years ago I taught Jazzlyn to read using these before starting school.  It worked a treat, she learned quickly enough.  However, she was the only reading kid in her class and she was just getting bored. Even though she enjoyed the new skill.

Anyway. Ollie seems to like phonics, too.  He doesn't run to  read along, unfortunately I just don't think it's on the cards, but once he gets into it, he seems to like it, like to do well. When he's in a mood anyway. 

Here, on the picture, he pretends to read all by himself after our official 'lesson'. With the lesson , we tend to go through the sound/ letter cards, just enough of them to cover the first few books of phonics, and then we work our way through the book , bit by bit, trying to figure out what works for O. 

 Because the letters came first for him, Oliver was really confusing them with sounds , saying letter before the sound, which isn't exactly the idea when you're trying to read. Now we finally starting to lose letters, and I won't be mentioning them with the rest of the alphabet for a while. With Joey, too, I think we do sounds first, then letters.  

READING: The Beginning

I had high hopes for this teaching to read manual, which follows  Classical Education route, because we kind of hoping to follow this way of learning,  losely.

However, sadly, it doesn't seem to work for us.  Now, our Oliver is quite keen on repeating things generally, perhaps even too keen at times. However, the little rhymes in the book, which are to do with vowels,  consonants and other things which Oliver can't relate to as of yet, has no imagery in his head for, just doesn't make for easy repetition here, let alone remembering.

It didn't seem much point in pushing the agenda for the sake of it, so , at least for now, we'd just left it and stuck with the cards. The cards work well with one exception ( more about it in next post )

 Our next step will be to venture into Songbirds Phonics , so we are covering about 1/3 of all the alphabet to go with the sequence of the phonics. 

'Wormy' Sausages.

Today I was going to write a bit about Acrobatics, Oliver started going to, and which he suddenly  reported to really enjoy, after a bit of a shaky start.  However,  Jo-Jo was running around like headless chicken,  so I never got a chance to take few discreet pics.

So, instead, I'm going to say a few words about the benefits of 'wormy' sausages, as per pic below. I first spotted this idea on Pinterest and wanted to try it ever since.  So, on the day, when my children collectively or individually said 'no' to everything I could possibly think of , the 'wormy' sausages' time has finally arrived.

Oliver felt a bit apprehensive at the idea of eating 'worms', but on seeing this pasta, decided to overlook this whole talk of worms, like it never happened. It seems sensible that he should count out 5 'worms' in the making before inserting it into the each piece of sausage, and off we went.

O needed some help with counting but by the end, got quite at home with it.  Well, not 100% but much better.  What surprised me that he did not, for a second, get bored! And so in they went. Oliver asked Jazzlyn, if she wanted some 'worms in sausages', and although aged 13, she is mostly very very cool, she accepted this interesting dinner and even asked for more! Now, was it her saying that 'Pinterest things didn't work'?

So here we come.  Dinner done.  Cooking lesson?  Kind of , at least.  Chemistry?  This got me thinking. Is boiling spaghetti chemical process or not?  I mean, can they be returned to the previous state, the 'as before' chemical composition?  If not , than , yes, it's chemical reaction, But then, I'd seen enough pasta dried hard to the plates the next day, looking brand new hard, if misshapen , so, probably no, no chemical experiments here, after all, just some mathy cooking.  

Great time had by all.  We didn't count the peas. 

WRITING: 'Ladybird' Wipe-Cleans, Good Value for Money.

And here goes, the new writing book.  Though it looks less fancy, it made more sense to me.  For starters it has loads of letters per page, so more flow, really. Just letters, hardly any drawings on main letter pages , so I assumed O will get a bit bored, but no such thing, I think he probably found other stuff a bit distracting. So far so good.  The pen's not great, will try the old one next time.

I noticed O took to wiping out some of the letters if he didn't like them , and tried to do them again.  I assumed he was being a perfectionist, but no, he explained that he wanted to make sure that he will 'still get all 5 rides, ice cream and candy floss' on the Carters' steam fair this weekend!

Note to self: If someone is coming over, like nan, not even playdate or anything like this , finish all study, even if just a bit, beforehand or your child will have trouble concentrating.  Silly me.

Another thing. Someone in the pub we popped into for a drink asked him if he knew what letter 'it was' in the paper, so he said Capital 'S' , the lady said something along the lines 'Oh nice, what school are you going to?' to which O looked a bit confused', as did we , as it was the first time for us , the newly homeschooling parents.  We not home-schooling evangelists of any sort, we just choosing to homeschool, that's about it.  We said to our son to tell people that he's going to school next year, thinking that it will either sink in or be easier to explain, when he's not quite such a completely newly made little boy.  But then he looked really worried and said he didn't want to go to school , few times over. Since then , once , he commented , when I told him that we going to 'go and do some reading now', he said quietly , as if to himself,  'we going homeschool'. Why on earth did we think that the whole logistic  of it was just going right over his head?

WRITING: Usborne Wipe-Cleans , not Convinced About the Bonus Phonics

I've decided to record our Home-schooling venture in a blog.  It came about a week or two after we actually started, so the all I'll be posting will be slightly in retrospective, but hey , at least it will be on record...

First thing we did was to go and shop for some wipe-clean writing books , the wonderful tool young years' educators got themselves these days.  (Never any of these with our now 13 year old, they would have been a find, much as would the whole Home Education idea, coming to think of it!)

I'm sure I'll find some essential flaws in these wipe cleans with time, maybe when dear Oliver is swapping from them to normal paper writing, but for now, what's not to like?  Economical, neat and tidy, not to mention all the fun pictures and shape-letter ideas.

There are endless wipe cleans on the market.  I got a bit overwhelmed there in Waterstones, I must admit.  The first wipe cleans out of two we bought so far are  ' Usborne' Phonics Book 1' Oliver loves it.

I managed to convince my little home schooled to hold his pen by 'pinching' close to the bottom of it mainly with 3 fingers , and rest both , the side of his palm and his elbow on the table. It helped him to get SMOOTHER LETTERS with immediate effect. Though it didn't seem all that natural to him initially, he soon realised that it's just easer .  Not many letters to write per page, had to wipe and do the chosen letters' rows over and over again, which kind of works against the flow a bit.  Didn't use the phonics facility either.  We do phonics in our reading time, and, besides,  it seemed distracting.

With this homeschooling while also having a job which I love, if something has to give , it will be the school records, so, reluctantly,  I will now round up this post.  In the next one, we will be using another wipe clean , different in format and , slightly in content,  by 'Ladybird'