This week.

Since re-embracing autonomous home education and my role, this week has been full of activities and I'm once again seeing the learning that is happening all the time.

Tuesday after GAP (it's an adventure playground the local HE group hires, lovely place, with art room, soft play room, sports hall, and adventure playground outside) I promised Rye and the other kids of Rose Howey we'd paint.  So I cut out, admittedly, some dubious looking egg shapes, and the kids painted, glittered and stuck to their hearts' content.

Sorry the photo is a bit blurry, this is just a few of the eggs the kids decorated, hanging proudly in our communal living room / Events Room.

And in the spirit of providing Rye with lots of interesting activities, I've started a Science Club at RH.  All the HE kids from RH joined in and we had another family join us too. We were looking at Forces and Motions.   I was a bit nervous how it would work out, initially it looked like some of the boys were going to be more interested in just playing, however, the magnetic silly putty drew them all in.  Easy to make, its liquid starch, pva glue, iron powder all mixed together, to create a kind of flubber.  Then one can uses rare earth magnets to make the putty move.  Rye spent ages experimenting, as did the other kids.  I'd also made some normal putty for the younger children, as rare earth magnets can be very dangerous if swallowed.

The children demonstrated excellent experiments showing different types of forces and we watched a video that explained Newton's 3 laws of motion.  Rye declared it as being "super fun" and is asking to do more!

Later after science club a few of the RH kids watched Dragon Races  on the projector.

We've also played junior scrabble, Rye has read some of Marvel's "These are the Avengers" Level 1 reading book to me.  Now I'm not pushing him to just done one page more, he's a lot more keen to read.   And I've been ensuring I find time to read to Rye too, resulting in almost completing the 3rd Harry Potter book.  I've relaxed my stance on screen time, so there's been a lot of Minecraft, videos and playing other games.  Interestingly, when Rye showed me his stash of goodies in Minecraft, he was reading the labels to me "Cooked Chicken", "Pressure Plate" and so forth, I had to smile, right there organic reading.

Rye's father texted me the other night, so anxiety levels were once again raised, especially as after not a peep since Christmas,  the first thing he wanted to know is how Rye's reading is coming along, and wrote Rye seemed very behind, and when was his 8yr old assessments etc.  I assume he means the assessments that school kids take.  

I did point out that comparing Rye's learning to a school kid's is not comparable, and that is quite common for HE kids not to read until 8-9yrs old.  There's a faint wisp of amusement too; as bibliophile and degree educated person, it is rather inconceivable that I would raise an illiterate child. Never mind that Rye can read, and as the experiences increase where the ability to read well is useful, his fluency will increase. 

Ah, life as a single parent and home educator.  sigh