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.