Gosh, I can scarecly believe I am about to enter into my fifth year(!) of home education. I feel like, despite the (many) challenges of the last 18 months, we have found a rhythm that works well for all of us. I am also excited for the children to get back to some activities and for us to settle into (another) new routine in due course.
I’ve been busy planning some areas of study with the children, and I thought I’d share these below. They’re not in any particular order, more that I will tackle them as and when we get to them.
In-Depth Projects
We really enjoyed the deep dive projects we did this last academic year and I plan to do more of those. They’re quite intense but the children get a lot from them. We are going to have large projects learning about:
- The Ancient Egyptians
- Australia
- The Mayans
- Living Planet
- North & South America
- The Human Body
We may well add some other bits in there too but I think those six subject areas will work well for us this year. Some of these projects will be longer and more in depth than others, but they will all be reaonably detailed.
Shorter Projects
We like to do some shorter and quicker projects, generally when we are filling in the gaps between bigger projects or when we want a change of foucs. The children identified some things they would like to learn about so I have these as project ideas to fall back on:
- Butterflies & moths
- Bees
- Spiders
- Space
- Great fire of London
Year Long Studies
And finally, I have two subjects I want us to look at across the year. We will continue learning about different artists. This is something the children have really enjoyed and it has been great to see them build up a portfolio of work that demonstrates all that they have learnt. I’ll be running these fortnightly from September time. We are also going to be learning about the different religions of the world.
Both the artist and religions of the world is going to be run with friends and I’m busy planning out the religions of the world right now and am looking forward to doing this with the children.
Ad-hoc days
And, as ever, there will be plenty of ad-hoc events in there! I already have an MP booked in to come and meet and speak to some local HE children to co-incide with Parliament Week in early November, and I hope that there will be regular project fairs again as well as events and activities to mark different things across the year.
We will of course keep on with English and Maths work and I plan to do some stuff on extended writing with the older two to really encourage their use of written language and I hope to really crack handwriting with D this year. I’m also keen to see where H’s interests develop as he improves his reading and, hopefully, moves onto independent reading.
Thats a fine bit of forward planning
Wow. You’re very organised x