A Typical Home Ed Day in Photos Carnival

Merry, over on Home Educating the Puddle Chicks, is hosting a "Typical Home Ed Day in Photos", Carnival.

This is our day:

Purchasing this blackboard is money well spent!  Rye has shown a renewed interest in letters recently and this morning, even before my first cup of coffee, he was asking to "learn my letters".   

Progressing to me asking him to draw a self portrait and then write "Rye" underneath....

To drawing my mindie.  This is she, with arms and legs, I was so excited, I don't recall seeing Rye draw arms and legs on his faces up to now.  Indeed, I was beginning to think he'd regressed as I've only seen him scribble for ages!

Then he needed to add hair, and do more face drawings. 

And this one, he asked me how to draw hands, so I showed him a very stylised hand (on the left) and he sort of had a go on the right - 'cept he had run out of space.  Still, noticing these details to add is great and shows how his observational skills are developing.

Oh, and he had to draw a spider of course!    Rye draws spiders a lot, not sure why, I think he just likes the "shape". 

And then he decided to do a puzzle and chose, rather appropriately, the Alphabet Train.  Again, very impressed, he hasn't completed this puzzle for such a long time, and there are some letters he is still a little hazy on - nonetheless he did brilliantly, and completed the train with me only saying which letter came next! 

All that brain power usage makes for hungry tums.  So we made pancakes; Rye measuring all the ingredients out, and then stirring the batter:

 Yum, pancakes with summer fruit syrup and Rye asked for some homemade yoghurt too.

Naturally, one must then indulge in a bit of lounge rally racing, with much banging into chair legs and getting stuck under the sofa.  Yet also a great lesson in cause and effect!

Touch of imaginative, horror play going on here - the finger puppets were being crushed by the theatre..hmmm, not quite sure where that came from, lol.

Making me soup.

Learning about gravity.

"Muuuum, it keeps hitting the floor!"  Huff.
"That's because there is an unseen force, Rye, called "Gravity" that pulls things down, that's how we can walk on the ground - otherwise we'd float."
"Ooooh mum, I'm jumping, gravity is pulling me down".    Falls to floor.

A bit of magic painting - cor quite a bit of science going on here today.

Chill out with Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs, DVD.
I sneaked off upstairs for a quick wizz on the laptop, and ended up looking at Reading Eggs and signing up for a 2 week trial.  Rye, appeared at my elbow with a very excited look on his face, and proceeded to suprise me with his aptitude on the laptop and control of the mouse.  Not only has he been learning the sounds of "S" and "M" he's been learning listening skills too, and doing really well, he had to listen for "S" sound of two objects and then choose the object.  He did remarkably well. 

Teatime - Grilled lamb steaks, mash potatoes and mixed veg with gravy.  (I had planned to do a roast dinner, alas time got away with us).  "What's this?"  Rye asked, chewing on a piece of meat.
"Lamb, you know, the sheep we saw, lambs are their young, and that's what you're eating."
"Oooh, Lamb mummies make lamb for us to eat." 
"Err, yeah, but we kill the lambs so we can eat them.
"Yuck!"  Shoving a large piece of lamb in his mouth!

Reading his Oxford Reading Tree books.  We read two of these and Rye did really well - really noticing what is happening in the pictures, and being able to complete the sentences, and say the word I was pointing to etc.

We sang the tidy up song:
Now's the time to tidy up,
Lets be busy pixies,
Busy pixies hard at work
Tidying everything away.

Rye tidied up super quick, because I'd promised him he could have another ten minutes on the Reading Egg site, if he tidied up quickly, had his bath, cleaned his teeth and got into his pjs.



I confess though, today was a little unusual, trialing the Reading Eggs has meant Rye has really focused on letters and reading.  But, I am a Waldorf, automonous (sort of), child led home educator and today, this is where he went.