The kids were both VERY excited about trying the What Next? box, so dived in right after breakfast. Lots of giggling ensued as the first task picked was "Draw or write about what you will look like when you are 100" and lots of hilarious pictures followed!
It really started the morning on a high note, and I was even able to leave the kids giggling together and get on with various chores for a good hour.
When they tired of it, DS decided he would get out his Moon Dough and do some construction building, while DD decided to take another suggestion from the What Next? box. She got "Find 10 things beginning with A around the house, and make a story out of them." She wrote a funny story, in 3 parts, about Adam the Apple Head!
I had in mind I wanted to try something else with the kids, that I'd read about in a newspaper article - a Home Educating family where the Mum reads aloud to the kids in the lounge. She chooses the subject, they are allowed to play (quiet play like Lego or marbles) or draw while she reads and then they discuss what she has read. When we first started our HE journey I was very pro-writing and pro-Table Work, and over time I have become less concerned about this. My DD, for example, is a monumental fidget and it is very easy to think she is not listening or concentrating on anything. However, we sat down this morning, and I read the following Usbourne book on The Stone Age - (we LOVE Usbourne books!)
I read the whole thing, cover to cover, with barely any interruption - although we talked about some of the pictures as we went along. DD barely looked up, and sat with her back to me the whole time. But after I'd finished reading she handed me this -
- that she'd just done as she was listening! I'm going to take that as a WIN :-) Just goes to show children have different learning styles. And while, in a traditional classroom setting, she may seem oppositional and disinterested, she is actually listening and taking it all in, she just has a different method to the status quo. It's taken me a long while to see this myself, but I will definitely be using this method again as we have so many wonderful reference/ non fiction books to work our way through.
We had a friend over for lunch - this unsettled the kids hugely, as ,although she is a much loved friend, it was an Unexpected Thing. Lots of challenging behaviour over lunch and I had to send them both down from the table to calm down, and eventually to separate areas of the house. This worked, after much repeated reinforcement of my expectations, and when they had played a while individually, we all got back together at the table and DS picked another item from the What Next? box. This time, he got "Draw a picture of your future house", so we all did that :-)
We spent the rest of the day playing board games with our friend and having an afternoon tea party :-) She left just before dinner time and after their dinner, we sat and read some more Greek Myths together - Icarus, The Golden Fleece & Medusa. There were only 2 more stories left in the book, so DD took the book upstairs and read them to her brother in bed :-) Precious xx
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