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.