January – Home Ed Plans

Whilst musing on Instagram about planning for the new year, it seemed that people might be interested in reading about my plans for the children’s education this month, so here it is!

I don’t meticulously plan each and every day of the week, but having a loose plan for the month helps me to have the relevant things prepared and ready for the children to use, as well as helping to ensure that the older two get suitable challenge and H gets to be involved at his level as well. It can be easy to only focus on the older or younger children if I don’t plan a little in advance for things.

I intend to share my rough outline of plans for the month ahead, but with the caveat that this is very rough and ready and isn’t something I will be rigidly ruled by. I often switch and change things about/ Sometimes a theme can take the children’s attention to somewhere I hadn’t anticiapted, or we can get a book that really inspires them to learn more so we change plans.

I use my plan as a guide to help me think about things that are coming up and to make sure the children are suitably prepared for any sessions we are participating in.

Longer Projects

Longer project wise I have three planned this month. These are likely to straddle both January and February and the detail that we go into will be determined by the children’s interest.

We have our Speaking and Listening group at the end of January with a theme of ‘Elements’. I plan to get them to choose their projects week commencing 4th January so I can help them frame what the project might look like.

 

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Geography-wise we are going to be looking at Kathmandu and Nepal; this is for our online geography fair planned for early February. We are going to use our Letters from Afar as the basis of this project and this is likely to be the most in-depth project we do in January.

The final longer project I am going to do with them is around the artist Yayoi Kusama. I have two artists themed zoom sessions booked in and the first is about Yayoi Kusama. I want to spend a couple of days exploring her work with the children so it is likely we will do the session with friends then go on to look at her work in more depth as well as complete a short lapbook study. I’ll share more on that when we do it.

One-Off Sessions

I have a couple of ad-hoc sessions planned in including Penguin Day, Burns Night and some music-themed sessions with The Cardiff Violin Teacher which a few of the children’s friends have enjoyed doing. The first of the Cardiff Violin sessions is about Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and I hope that we can do a mini project on that to look at how that music compares to The Nutcracker Suite (which we studied in December) as well as using our December Post from the Past to learn about the Ballerina Anna Pavlova.

I’ve also signed us up for the RSPB Garden Bird Watch so we will do that and do some other bits alongside it.

PawPrint Badges

Finally, we are using the PawPrint badges to help frame some of our work. I have found pandemic home education a challenge at times and the PawPrint Badges have helped me to bring some focus to our work. We are still working on the Winter Badge as well as the STEM badge. We are going to be making bath bombs as part of the STEM Badge this month with friends via zoom, as well as making soap using a kit by brother bought me last year for my birthday.

The speaking and listening group will count towards the STEM badge too and I am sure we will pick up some other activities as the month progresses.

I’ve been busy gathering the resources we will be using this month and leaving them accessible for the children to read through.