Catch up.

I will get back into regularly blogging again, at the mo tho, I'll be doing catchup posts.

So, what have we been up to?

Well,

We visited friends in Folkestone, and had a wonderful time. We really didn't want to come back as we both miss Folkestone a lot. So we made the most of our visit. We visited the Fountain several times and we also went various parks including Brockhill.

The day after getting back home to Liverpool, we went with the Home Ed group to New Brighton for an end of term picnic. Its the first time we've been there, Rye really enjoyed been at the beach again, and he loved watching the remote controlled boats on the little boating lake.

While visiting my friend in Folkestone, we discussed Home education, and my frustrations around keeping Rye engaged and enjoying learning, without it dissolving into tears (his), and annoyed frustration (me, understand, that's me being polite!). What we were doing just wasn't working, we were constantly bashing heads, and getting really upset with each other.

I realised that a lot of the difficulties we were facing was because of my perceived feelings of being pressured by his dad,because Rye's reading is very basic, and his handwriting is awful. I also strongly suspect that Rye is dyslexic, he presents with a lot of the indications.

We really needed the fun back in home education, and for Rye to be more in charge of his learning.

Cue project-based learning. It is perfect, Rye is really enjoying the learning process, and we are ticking all the boxes of things that I would like him to be practising; crafting, painting, handwriting, reading, comprehension, and working on fine motor skills. We are also doing spelling lists, I confess I never had any intention of doing this but Rye is very good at working out what a sentence reads from the pictures, but without the pictures he cannot read the words on their own. I believe it's because he's not really seeing the words and the letters combined to create the individual words. By doing spelling lists it encourages Rye to see the whole of the word, and it does seem to be helping.

And the project, space of course.

We started by painting a background for his project, which I have stock up on the wall in the corridor outside his bedroom. We are currently learning about the sun.

Background for The Space Project.

 

This is the background pinned to the wall and photographed at night with only purple fairy lights for illumination.

This is what he's done today.

A brilliant morning with so much going on; learning how to make a makeshift compass, so he could draw a large circle for his sun diagram. Cutting the circle out and thus improving fine motor skills, we then talked about the different layers of the sun. So he painted the sun as a diagram showing the core, the radiative zone, the convective zone,and the photosphere. His handwriting is still very shaky so I wrote the labels out for him and he went over them in pen, again practising fine motor skills. We are going to spend the entire week, at least, on the sun, doing experiments, more crafting, looking at history (Copernicus, Galileo, folklore, myths and legends) and whatever else sparks our interest :-)

Oooh, the chronology of this post has gone a bit haywire; we went camping too - a few days after Rye painted the background to his project,

Peace News Camp was wonderful, 5 days in the countryside in Shrewsbury; excellent set up of workshops and activities for the kids, and excellent workshops on, mainly, how to oppose renewal of Trident; there was also singing peace protest songs, which was great fun, life drawing (part of using creativity for peace) and evening entertainment, including a talent night, which Rye took part in, very proud of him.

So there we have it, all caught up on family and home ed life.

 

 

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