1st proper day of homeschooling

Hi all

Tuesday 10th April.

This was our first official day of homeschooling. I wrote a plan out for the day which consisted of English, Maths, ICT/PHSE, Languages and PE for both girls.

Jacqueline (10) wrote the first part of her diary from our holiday last. She wrote a page and said she did not want to want to do any more and did not want to put in any pictures.

She told me that Monday of last week was the most boring day for her, which greatly surprised me. She spent about 40 minutes on that.

She has got all her books organised into subjects. This really is starting out as school at home. Next we did some Maths.

I have got a really good site, which is part of Exeter University, which has Maths activities and lesson plans for every year group.

Again we did about 45 minutes on units, tens, hundreds and thousands. I could tell when she had done enough as she was starting to get bored and fidgety.

I can quite understand what the problem has been at school. I could never figure out why the teachers said she seemed to start out with good understanding and got all the first part of the lesson right and then started to get it all wrong.

Now I understand what is happening. She has a razor sharp brain and has grasped the concepts. She only needs to do a few examples before she has GOT it and needs to move onto something else.

In the afternoon I got Jacqueline to write a list of the things she KNOWS something about and the things she LOVES to do. This came under PHSE (personal, health and social education) but it is also a great start for ideas for her website business.

She has settled on her first business. She wants to sell her photography pictures and teach kids how to become fantastic photographers. She has already done an outline of what she wants her website to look like.

I need to teach her to use Dreamweaver to build her site and also to get to grips with the coding behind the payment processor, so we can offer a choice of pictures and sizes.

We also managed to walk the dog (PE), go food shopping and change Jacqueline’s library books.

Stephanie (13) got off to a great start as well. From the Maths site, we downloaded a module on Factors and Perfect Numbers.

This is all Chinese to me at the moment but I have a feeling I am going to be getting up to speed on Maths very quickly.

She created herself an Excel spreadsheet to solve the problems (ICT and Initiative)

She happily spent a couple of hours on this – and discovered the answers provided had some flaws in them- and finished it off this evening. Her dad, the mathematician, checked it and give it his seal of approval.

I wrote out the shopping list in English and Stephanie then found pictures for all the items and found all the words, with the appropriate genders, in French and German.

She wants to learn both languages and Spanish. Jacqueline just wants to do Spanish.

We had done a similar exercise a few weeks ago, when Stephanie was off school and I was delighted that she had remembered quite a few of the words in both languages, particularly the fruit! That was very encouraging.

All in all we had a very good day. I have learnt a lot about my girls today. They are very different personalities with very different working styles.

Stephanie will happily work at something for hours, whilst Jacqueline needs everything to be done in quick, short bursts.

Stephanie did not get around to writing her English diary, however she read mine and pointed out all the grammar and spelling mistakes. I need to correct all that before I post it to my blog.

Who is teaching who in this house?

With love and abundant blessings
Amanda Goldston