Musings

Q & A Day

/ Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Today’s blog post is brought to you by the punctuation mark – ?

What this translates to is me answering questions that I’ve been asked by some online friends.  (Thanks for helping out with NaBloPoMo material guys.)

What does a “typical” day look like?

Well, I’m sure that everyone – no matter what they do with their kids – will say that there is no such thing as typical.  But we do have routines.  Currently they look something like this.

Three days a week (Monday, Wednesday & Friday) both Oh Waily kids head off to the gym daycare for two hours of other-kiddie and adult interaction*.  This starts at 9:15 and finishes at 11am.  Most days this pretty much tuckers them out, so they have some food when they get home and one of them usually takes a nap.  If Miss Oh is particularly tired I sometimes sacrifice a regular bedtime that night for daytime sanity – hers and mine – by ‘encouraging’ her to have a rest by having snuggles in her bed together.

On Tuesdays, just after lunch this term, we drive to the not-so-local swimming pool and Miss Oh has lessons with a small class (4 other kids) of home educators.  Master Oh plays on the other side of the littlies swimming pool – sometimes on his own and sometimes with other HE kids.  This takes up the entire afternoon.

Those are the anchor activities currently for us.  Everything else is fluid around these.

As for subjects and teaching style, this is pretty fluid at the moment too.  We’re basically just feeling around to find the right way to go about all of this grand learning we hope to do.  A little while ago we would do more formal, sit down learning in the Classical Education style.  This was okay, but a bit stifling for a physically active 5 year old.  So we are trying out a more laid-back approach, with much shorter bursts of information and learning.  But the information and coverage of CE is still going to be trotted out when it will work for us.

I am currently trying out the Khan Academy website for keeping Miss Oh’s hand in with the more formal written side of maths.  I have found that if we go back to simple conversational methods of teaching addition that she loses confidence when she sees written equations.  Right now we are working on the first and simplest maths practice options there – Representing numbers, Number Line 1, 1-digit addition and 1-digit subtraction.  My current goal is to grow her confidence and have her feel able to tackle new ideas.  Oh, and I’m waiting for my Singapore Maths books so I can get some inspiration for other things we can do (without the computer).  I have been asking her to do these four activities (there are 8 exercises per activity) each morning.  It would take her 15 minutes or so, although she is finding the subtraction a difficult concept at the moment and that has made it a little longer.

The other biggie is working on reading.  She has had access to Reading Eggs for a while now, and we have always had letter identification and sound related games (I Spy) previously.  I have always encouraged her to do the lessons there whenever she has wanted to – and since it is computer related, she is usually happy to spend 30 minutes or more pottering away.  It is obvious though that while it has helped stimulate her interest, we also need to revise and revisit the basics to help her settle to reading.  She, I think, does remarkably well with her reading but just (again) requires confidence in her ability.  So along with regular (daily or every other day, it varies) access to Reading Eggs, we also have been doing reading together and sound revision using my little white board and some magnetic letters most days lately.  (Thanks Pete’s Emporium for the very cheap, but usable minuscules.)
And it goes without saying that we read stories each night together as this is one of our routines.

Just a note here about the reading.  As I am not “buying in” a curriculum to teach reading** and do not have access to the graded books found in schools, I have found that identifying the appropriate level of reading book from the library to be a bit of a trial.  They may say “Stage 1” or “Beginner” or some such other terms, but they vary wildly in readability.  So I have worked out my own very simple system.  I now have a small hardback notebook in which I write down the title of the book, the publisher’s name, and where on their sliding scale (P, PP, or PPP for example) the particular book sits.  Then I get Miss Oh to read it to me.  If she needs help with too many words, that grade of book goes on the “future” list.  If it’s just right or a bit of a stretch, then it goes on the “look for more of this level” list.   I know.  It’s not rocket science, but it has made my library visits considerably easier and less fraught with concern that I’m going to get something that puts her right off trying.

As for other subjects, well they just turn up based on our newest planning device – the monthly theme.  I try to make sure that a number of different aspects are touched on when we do our themes.  Last month was Gardening, and since Miss Oh loves to be outside in the garden, clipping and digging and weeding with me, it will be a continuous theme.  We count seeds, talk about what plants need to grow.    Discuss the weather and what makes up the clouds and why it rains.   Daily conversations often provide the most amazing opportunities to impart information and seems to be the most welcome way to learn currently.
I also have a gardening related science lesson on our living room window ledge at the moment.  It will be an upcoming post, when the shoots finally grow big enough to photograph.

I guess if you wanted to pin down or name our style of learning it would be part unit studies (the monthly theme idea plays in to that), part unschooling (or natural learning – that which comes from daily life and conversation) and part structured (like at school – exercises to do).  We’re a bit of a mongrel really.

Eclectic learning will do me for a name.  And our days reflect that.  Some days I have planned activities ready to go, other days we head to the beach or get out into the garden.  Other days I let them go wild with their imaginations and they get to play^ or build things for most of the day.

I’m not sure if that answered the question, but I hope you get a better feel for how we spend our days.  Eclectically.

If you have any questions about what or how we do things, feel free to leave a comment.  There will be more Q & A days this November so, if you’re interested in this bit of our journey, stay tuned.

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* Theoretically I am exercising during that time, but this past three weeks – not so much.
** As though you really need to !
^  I’ve just got an interesting looking book from the library – Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul by Stuart Brown.  I’m looking forward to reading all about the benefits of play.

Not So Organised Chaos

/ Ms Oh Waily / 3 Comments

My Organized ChaosThat would be a fair description of life in the Oh Waily household on many a day.  So what better than getting some excellent pointers, and reminders, of what family life can look like.

That’s what Jo from A Bit Of This and A Bit Of That is offering to do for you.  You may recognise Jo from the Neighbourhood Walk series.  (Another of her brilliant ideas.)
I’ve been a follower of her blog for a long time now, having come to it through my interest in things Montessori.  So when the opportunity to tap into her vast store of ideas came along, I took it with both hands.

She has created an online e-course to help you sort your kids, and your home, out.  I’ve been doing it now for a few weeks, and it has been great.  I needed the prod and the guidance to actively put into practice concepts and ideas that I know will enhance our family life.  I’m loving the community support and help with generating ideas that will work in our home.  Best of all, everyone is a normal person so any before and after shots of changes are realistic, not a Better Homes and Garden feature that you know you’ll never maintain.

If you think you could do with some help getting things sorted, I’d highly recommend clicking across and taking a look at what Jo can offer you.  I’m sure you will get as much out of it as I have and I haven’t even finished up everything yet.

I will be putting together a short series of posts on some of the changes we’ve made around our home as a result of doing My Organized Chaos.  It won’t be everything we’ve done, naturally.  Can’t give away all of Jo’s secrets, after all.  But it may help you decide if you want to join a course.  I hope you do.

Just a note, I’ve chosen to join Jo’s affiliate scheme.  If you click through on the links in this post, or my sidebar, and sign up for a course I will earn a fee.  However, I’d like to be clear that I wouldn’t be recommending it if I didn’t think it was good value.  After all, I wouldn’t want you to be mad with me for getting you to spend your money needlessly.  🙂

TV Free

/ Ms Oh Waily / 2 Comments

Thought bubbleAfter nearly a week away from home visiting family, and the obligatory use of television baby-sitting as an aid to adult conversation, I decided this morning to try something a little radical.

No TV.

All day.

Do you know what?  My world did not fall apart.  My children did not go feral.  I did not feel like I needed to resort to it in order to do things.  Instead we had a really, truly, focused day today.  Focused on doing fun things, together.

Now, lest this sound like I have the television on 24/7, this could not be further from the truth.  Normally the kids get to watch some TV in the morning and then once again in the late afternoon.  But I have found it to be an attention stripper and a brain-sucker.  I would really like to keep us a TV Free zone, but the adult male in the household may find that a bit hard to deal with.  We will see how it goes when he returns from his trip away.

In the meantime, I am going to try it again tomorrow.  Just to see.  You know.  In case today was a fluke.  Keep your fingers crossed for fine weather and well rested children, and we may survive another TV Free day together.

Are you TV Free, or do you have watching rules?

Rhythms

/ Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Thought bubbleDay three of our more formal style of learning has gone well.  After everyone had eaten and dressed for the day we arranged ourselves in our makeshift schoolroom, also known as the living room, in order to hear the next story in our Classical literature journey.

I am deliberately approaching this in a gentle, easing in kind of way.  The last thing I want to do is go in heavy handed and make learning a chore instead of a joy.  So our “school” days pretty much consist of a reading from the Ancient literature, doing a bunch of drawings about the story, completing a small sheet of handwriting to help tidy up her letter formation, a snack and then whatever they want to do after that.

Not too strenuous I think.

Today Miss Oh also asked if we could play her number games, Zingo 1-2-3 and the large number cards, so we added that in too.  I really like the Zingo option as it teaches recognition of both quantity, written number and symbol in a fun format.  We even ventured into the addition side of the cards and Miss Oh did fine.
The fact that the small plastic numbers can be used to set up other mathematical operations is an added bonus.

So today’s lesson for me?

A gradual introduction of a gentle daily school rhythm is working for us already.
That shouldn’t be a surprise really, but I had visions of a more unschooling/free range style.  I’m quite intrigued to see where setting a rhythm up will take us.

Do you have any rhythms with your children that you would swear by?

Phan Ku

/ Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

As I mentioned yesterday, we have started working through some creation stories, Bursting From The Hen’s Egg and Spider Ananse Finds Something.

The first of these is about Phan Ku and comes from China.  We went over this a couple of times yesterday, and Miss Oh struggled to concentrate on the story enough to be able to relate back the events in her own words.  So after leaving it overnight we had another, relaxed, morning of revisiting this story.  I chose to work more on getting her to draw Phan Ku, which she did.

Here are the three sheets she produced about this story.  The first is the sheet provided, and includes a section where you can write things your child tells you they remember or like about the work.  Or, if they are writing on their own, where they can write about the story.
Above that you can see a square to allow for illustration, which Miss Oh enjoyed doing.  She described all the aspects as she drew them – Phan Ku’s horns, tusks, his chisel and his breath (that’s the funny little dotted line on the left and around the bottom of his chisel).  The image in the middle is one she did yesterday of Phan Ku.  And the one on the right is the Egg with Phan Ku inside the small squiggles that are the egg cracking and the squiggly lines around the egg is the “bursting out” that is happening.

Phan Ku

So I think tomorrow we will move on to Spider Ananse and do the same for that story.  We will be following our own schedule for working through the suggested curriculum, but that’s just fine by me.  After all, that is one of the main points of choosing to homeschool – working at the kids’ pace.

Some things I’ve learned today:

– we will try to work at the table until her concentration level is good enough to work wherever.
– we will work specifically on her handwriting from now on rather than just letting her write as and when she wants.  But only in short bursts.
– Master Oh can work quite happily with the Montessori apps on the iPad while Miss Oh is listening or drawing.  An hour should be possible.
– I am very impatient at the moment and that was coming out in my approach to “teaching” this lesson.   I learned my own lesson yesterday.

So tomorrow we will move ourselves into the creation stories of Africa.  I can’t wait to see what sort of spider Ananse will turn out to be when he’s drawn.  And I will relax about what to expect Miss Oh to be capable of doing from now on.

Remind me – whose learning journey is this again?

Detours and Rerouting

/ Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

The stay at home section of the Oh Waily family have fallen into some rather undesirable habits of late.  The dreaded television has become rather more than an occasional treat and enjoyment, to the detriment of concentration and the ability to self-entertain.  Worse still, the very excellent habit we had of reading LOTS of books had shrunk to Lilliputian proportions.

I won’t regale you with the hows and whys of us arriving at this situation.  They are mostly mundane and directly related to extra-family stresses.  What they did do, however, was start a slippery slope of auto-pilot parenting.
Find the simplest solution in order to accomplish non-kiddie related tasks?
What better than the television as babysitter?
Tired at the end of a stress-filled day? How quickly can we get to stress-relieving hobbies and habits?
Read less bedtime stories.

Seriously.  What a numpty.  Two of the biggest promises I made to myself when I became a Mum were – no babysitting by television and instill a love of reading.

So the auto-pilot changes have been recognised for what they are and what they have been doing.  No more.  Television has been relegated to the short time between waking and breakfast, plus the afternoon addition of Art Attack. Any time in between is for play, reading (oh yes, it is back), arts & crafts, field trips or other regular events – like our Tuesday afternoon swimming lessons.  And the assumption* that the couple of hours of daycare made up for any stupid amounts of television in the afternoon has been kicked to the kerb, permanently.  Now we have lots of imaginative play, and I mean LOTS.

I am also trying to introduce a regular, once a day, Reading Hour – separate from the bedtime stories.  I have been finding this one a little harder to implement.  Tearing them away from their games, having to run family or work errands, and generally having to squeeze it around the existing activities has proved a little less simple than I first thought.  But I am determined to have it become a permanent fixture in our daily rhythm.  I just need to work out when is best, and where it works best in any given day.

I feel slightly embarrassed to have fallen into such a simple trap.  Auto-pilot, thoughtless, parenting.  Not the way forward when you are planning to home educate your little people.  Then again, I’m not superhuman.  It’s time to face that fact, and realise that to keep on track means to take care of myself, make choices that help reduce external stresses and take a regular look at what we are doing around the Oh Waily household.  We do much that is good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also have areas that could do with changing.

How about you?  Do you have any areas of auto-pilot parenting that you want to challenge and conquer?

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* like I didn’t know that it was a load of the proverbial !

The Importance of Play – An afterthought

/ Ms Oh Waily / 2 Comments

After I wrote yesterday’s post I had a quiet time and an opportunity to think about what I had read, and then written here at The Patch.

It came as a surprise to me, but when I thought about my younger school days, say up to the age of 12, the dominant memories are of times of play.  I had never really given it any thought until yesterday.

At primary school my memories are of playing What’s the Time Mr Wolf? when I would have been 5 or 6 and still in the junior section of the school.  Playing on the jungle gym and hanging upside down with friends as I grew or with one of my best friends playing tippeny runs and soccer with the boys out on the playing fields.  At Intermediate my memories involve playing bull rush behind our classroom, before it was banned in schools.  We also went through a period of trying to build human pyramids during our lunch breaks.

The only other strong memories relate to aspects of school that involved personal responsibility or achievement.  Taking my pocket money to school each week as a 7 or 8 year old and filling out the deposit slips as part of the Post Office Savings scheme that ran in schools here when I was a nipper; being bell monitor and using my own watch to keep track of the end of lunch breaks; being part of an advanced reading group and being able to sit under the trees outside to do this class.  At Intermediate it was taking my turn as lunch monitor, collecting everyone’s order and money in the morning and then getting their lunches from the canteen at lunch.

At no point do I have any real, strong memories of the “learning” parts of school.
At least from the years before High School.  Yet clearly I learned to read and write, do basic maths and such like.

If I think about my life out of school through the same time frame, then it was all about playing.   The games my best friend and I played out the back of our houses in the local church’s big back parking lot.  War games, cowboys and indians, The Dukes of Hazard, (okay so that not only dates me, but sounds kind of sad all these years later) and more of the same and similar.  Fantasies and collaborative expressions of creativity of all sorts.

This playfulness seems to stop dead when I begin to think of my years at high school.  I don’t know if this is a function of the change of attitude and more academic focus around this age, or if it is purely the result of a natural developmental progression.  More reading will be required on this, I think.

How about you?  What are your dominant memories of childhood?
Play. Learning.  Or something completely different.