Our week of Learning - 8th March

English: He practised the letters 'i' & 'j' in handwriting. We had Book Day at our homeschooling group where each kid presented a display on their favourite book. We had some very creative entries - it was great to see. There are photos if anyone wants to see.

We've started reading books from the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge Booklist.

We also started on grammar with nouns & verbs.


Maths: One of the reasons I wanted to homeschool was so that Billy could work at his own pace, rather than the pace of the class. I wanted the flexibility of doing different subjects at different levels, depending on his needs, and not making him go over & over stuff he already knew..... So why was I making him go unit by unit through a Maths book that he was clearly past?! I think it's from my years of being schooled - I have an obsession to 'fill in all the blanks'!

I finally came to my senses! When I looked through the rest of his Yr 1 Maths book (another 15 or so units), there was NOTHING that he didn't already know quite well. I randomly picked a few things out that were more advanced and asked him to tell me the answer - no problems at all. So I gave him a grading test for NSW Yr 1 & 2 that I found online. He got 9 / 12. Of the 3 he got wrong, 1 was because he wasn't concentrating (he added rather than subtracted - I got him to look at it again after I'd marked it and he got it right). The other 2 were Base 10 representations of numbers which isn't in the Yr 1 book so we haven't covered it... Hmm, my mind was made up and we moved onto the Yr 2 book.

However, looking through the Yr 2 book there is still a lot of repetition of things he already knows. I'd decided to just pick and choose as we go along, when serendipitously I came across Suji's Funschooling.net blog which really resonated with me. We seem to have very similar boys! From there I found a link to a curriculum at MEP which looks far better for us. It will be more challenging for him. Every week seems to introduce new material and there is less repetition. I'll intersperse it with other materials if he needs more practice on an area. I've downloaded the year 2 books, and will see how it goes. I'm quite excited about it!

Science & Technology: Push / pull unit: We did experiments comparing the weight of objects in air vs water, and how you can make something float by changing it's shape (using modelling clay).

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): Out came the clay! We made some people & pots for our stone age diorama, then went looking around the yard to find rocks & sticks to make some tools. We've been using a book called "Step into the Stone Age" as reference.


Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class. Playing with clay.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Circus class.

Life skills (cooking, gardening): He did some sewing - he's working on making himself a pincushion.

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I've decided we'll take a mid-term break next week and just unschool apart from the normal drama & circus classes. We've been going for 8 weeks since we started mid-January, we have 3 social activities planned somehow and I just feel like a break!