February – Home Ed Plans

I thought I’d share my plans for February – the January ones seemed to be well received and it helps me to spend a little time organising my thoughts.

I’m expecting us to continue to be in the same lockdown that we have been in all January which means that seeing friends will be via zoom still. I do plan to pack quite a bit into the month though!

Longer Projects

Our ‘big’ project this month will be Vikings. Right at the end of January, we had a session with Yorvik that a friend organised. I’m using that as the springboard into a bigger study. The older two have studied the Vikings at the history group they were doing before Covid struck and I hope this will be a good refresher for them.

I wasn’t going to plan in any other longer studies planned as we have a lot of shorter bits planned (which fit into an overall bigger theme of work). I also want to concentrate on Maths this month, however, H is desperate to do a dinosaur project so I’m going to set the older two off on their own independent study. Em I might get her to do something about the different birds we are seeing on our canal walks and Daniel I think will do a football-themed project as it will link to his ‘sports enthusiast’ cubs badge. I’m not sure how and when we will do these projects, but we’ll squeeze them in somewhere.

The older two are close to finishing their current maths books so I plan to get through those (or close to completion) then spend some time consolidating their learning. H has also shown some interest in starting a more formal maths programme, so we will probably give his stuff a go. I’m not hugely fussed through right now for H as he is doing so well with his reading. If it works out then great, if not then we will wait until the summer to pick it up.

Themed Studies

One of the things we are doing for the first few months of 2021 is an artist study and a composer study. We started the artist study in January with Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol. In February we will be looking at Roy Lichenstein and Rene Magritte.

We also started looking at composers in January, picking up a session with The Cardiff Violin Teacher. We really enjoyed this and I am going to purchase some of her older classes to do. We have sessions booked in on Beethoven and Satie so I look forward to those too.

Finally, we are also going to be looking at a poet a month. In January we looked at the work of Robert Burns and in February it’s a more contemporary poet – James Carter.

One-Off Sessions

I have a few one-off sessions planned in too; we have the geography fair right at the start of the month and other sessions including:

• Storytelling week celebration
• Chinese New Year
• Festival of the Dancing Masks
• Polar Bear Day

I am sure we will pick up a few other bits and pieces too across the month!

We also will keep up with our walking, and I plan to frame a canals project in at some point; that may well be a March/April time project. I might also try and squeeze in another short bird study at some stage too during February, but realistically I think this won’t happen as we have a lot pencilled in!