Day 3

7th October 2021

Trouble In Paradise

Me and my big mouth yesterday saying ‘this home school stuff is easy’.

Today was hard.

We had a hard day. It was salvaged and it picked up, but it was peppered with hard. Urgh.

It all started out fine. We settled down for English and then they played a game of chess, while I got ready for a Teams meeting with work. (I’m a little embarrassed to say Lincoln has beaten me at chess more than once). 😳 Here’s a cool video for kids if they want to learn chess. (http://thehomeschoolyear.com/Chess)

The trouble actually started yesterday when we received an invite to go camping (which would have been tonight), but in the end Liam had a Zoom meeting he forgot about and so we couldn’t go.

Brain Cells Exploding

We explained we would be able to go next week, but this only mildly helped the situation.

Luckily, we had already done English right after breakfast & they were due for a break.

Pepe was ready for his morning walk and so Liam took them out for some off leash, dog park time.

They LOVE the dog park. They get to cuddle lots and lots of dogs. They love it when the dogs lick their face (ew!) and they always, always cheer up after a visit to the dog park.

So that was good timing.

Tree Therapy

There’s something about climbing trees isn’t there?

Is it that you need to use your whole body & therefore move on from your emotional state?

The fact that it’s a bit dangerous and kind of a thrill? Or that you’re just high up & away from everything?

After some tree time and dog cuddles, they noticed there was no water for the dogs. There was a bucket, but no tap.

The two of them walked up the hill & across the field, in the full sun, to the tap. It’s a long walk, & it was a heavy bucket.

On the way back, a man saw them struggling with the bucket and came over with a large stick and showed them how to leverage the load with the stick. (So timely, after our pulley investigations yesterday!)

Does that make this a STEAM activity? 🤔

They finally made it back to the thirsty doggies.

Things Had Just Picked Up

They arrived home and to my delight our maths curriculum had arrived in the mail! Yippee, I thought!! I had so carefully selected the curriculum and was excited for it to arrive.

“Lets do Maths!!” I shouted with glee. 😁

That didn’t go down well, at all. 🤦‍♀️

They had just walked in the door. They were hot. It was bad timing. Things started to ramp up. We broke a house rule and let them have TV in the day. We gave everyone a 20min, TV time out.

This did perk them up a bit.

I was really proud of Liam for getting everyone over the line with our new Maths curriculum. Neither of them were keen to leave the TV for maths but they did, and they really did learn! They were both so proud of themselves.

We decided on Singapore Maths (http://thehomeschoolyear.com/Singapore%20Maths) for our home schooling. We’ve heard nothing but good things about it and I just went for it. Check it out here. (http://thehomeschoolyear.com/Singapore%20Maths)

Incentives

Ok, we did need to add a little incentive to get over the line with Maths today. The neighbourhood kids scooter in the street at 4pm each day, and we said they could go.

It was their first time. Motivation was high.

Dad through a curve ball after maths and said they needed to help with the shopping list, and to my surprise, he had Lincoln calling out from the pantry what we needed & Mila checking things off from his Excel Spreadsheet.

Yes, I just said that.

Liam LOVES a spreadsheet! (I was working from home & so wasn’t paying too much attention, but I’m pretty sure they both learned how to use Excel today 😂)

Scooter Time

We did it. Today wasn’t easy.

The camping thing really threw a mood over the whole day. There was lots of fun too, but it did keep rearing its ugly head and we had to pivot accordingly. Home school is good like that. If it’s not working you can come back to it.

Or….incentivise!