August has been a strange month. The weather has been hot one week then so cold I’ve been tempted to put the heating on the next! There has been a definite strangeness to August and it’s all felt a bit peculiar.
We are in Greater Manchester so as July ended we got the news that we were to go into a local lockdown. Essentially this meant that we weren’t allowed to visit people at home. This felt heavy to me. The day it was announced my parents had had the children for the day and it had meant I’d been able to get on with some jobs. Later this week, on Wednesday, my part of Greater Manchester is released from the local lockdown thankfully.
Core Subjects
Our general approach has continued and the rate we have got through maths this year has been astonishing – it feels like it’s finally clicked for D now. I plan to work through this book then take some time to really consolidate the areas he has been working on before moving on again. We aren’t in a rush and I would much rather embed his current understanding before moving forward, just because we have got to the end of a book. The same for Em too. She’s doing really well and I want to ensure she’s confident in all areas before we move ahead too quickly. Both of them are ‘ahead’ of where they would be expected to be in school and I am happy with their progress so we can let progress rest for a little time.
English we have been working through some comprehension work and I’ve been challenging them with some vocabulary sheets. They have a word to use in a sentence and to find some synonyms. I think this is a great activity for building up their language skills and it’s funny to see the sentences they come up with. The older two have been doing a lot of reading over the last few months and the information they retain is always surprising. We have been sharing a few read aloud chapter books with the older two which I am really enjoying and H is ever more interested in words. He is a while off reading himself yet, but we have started to work through some phonics based stuff. This is more to assist with his speech rather than his reading, I want him to be able to understand the importance of all the sounds in the words when he is speaking as this is where we have some issues right now.
And finally, we have started the online science videos that I mentioned earlier in the summer in this post here. We are taking this slowly and are part way through a simple experiment right now. I think the science curriculum lacks a bit of depth in some places and it would be super easy to whizz through the videos and associated exercises, but that doesn’t do much good. Instead, we have been talking a lot about plants. We are linking it to the nature curriculum we are starting again and have been busy identifying trees and seeing their seeds at different stages. All three children are getting good at being able to identify trees from the shapes of their leaves and this is something I am really keen to work on with them over the course of the academic year.
Project Work
Project work has been a bit lacking this month, and that probably more a reflection of us taking a bit of downtime. Full days since March is an awful lot of time to fill and truthfully, it’s exhausting. I need the break as much as the children do so we have left projects this month. The only thing we did was to finalise the speaking and listening projects by baking some cakes and biscuits before presenting to their friends.
The older two have enjoyed learning a few bits and pieces with their Micro:Bits and we have been playing in the garden and playing board games. We have read, a lot and the boys have been enjoying the Draw with Rob tutorials. But, full projects have taken a back seat recently.
Regular Groups
Daniel joined a new cubs group this month and has enjoyed the challenges that that has brought. We also, as mentioned above, had our regular speaking and listening group which is always good fun. The older two have continued their Spanish classes via zoom and I think they’ll continue online until the October half term. I am hopeful that swimming might start again in September, I am just awaiting the information about that.
We also attended a robot and a sock puppet zoom meeting. The children really enjoyed making these and it was fun watching their creatitity!
Days Out
We have had a lot of days out this month. Mostly walks to collect blackberries or to have a good stomp in the muddy puddles! We have covered a fair few miles and I’m looking forward to the autumn and doing this a lot more. It’s my favourite time of year and I can’t wait for the next few weeks when the conkers start to drop and we can really enjoy the changing seasons.
We started the month with a short break in North Wales which the children loved. Lots of walks along the beach and a dip in the sea too! We had a lovely time and we might try to get a few days away again before the end of the year.
So, all in all, a quiet month in many ways, but it has been needed. I’m looking forward to the coming weeks of September and later this week we will mark our ‘not back to school’ day with cake and hot chocolates at a local cafe. I can scarcely believe I’m entering my fourth year of home education!
Quality work again.