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. 

What next?

Typical eh.  Have the laptop two minutes and I get a malware virus from hell.  Vista Security Services 2011, unregistered version - which rewrites the registry and held me to randsom by blocking everything online except the page to "register" the programme - aka steal my card details. 

A mate did point out that while microsoft can be sods, they wouldn't do that, so probably a virus.   Would you believe it, after my anti-everything (lol) software removed the virus, the laptop was still screwed.... managed to find a backdoor to getting online; and bugger me - the virus infected the machine again.

The man that can, has just removed it and sorted the registery out for me... this time for free, normally he charges £59!  Ouch! 

On the upside, lack of laptop has meant extra crochet time and oh yes, I am tantalisingly close to a "Ta-daah" moment.

Oooh, and hasn't it been glorious today.  Lovely and warm, we spent a relaxed morning playing with playdough, and then after lunch we popped to the bank and to pick up the laptop and then onto the park.  Had only planned on staying half hour or so, it was so nice we stayed a couple of hours and came back just in time to have tea before pickup. 

And tomorrow, the beach for a sand castle comp :-)

I have laptop!

Oh my gawd, it's almost orgasmic!  lol.

I will update properly later, and share photos - at the moment I'm still in the process of adding back bookmarks, adding software for printers etc.  But oh my, this is so wonderful.  And I get to spend the time doing all this without guilt because Rye is at his dads!  Woohooo.

Balance.

Desperately needed. Since the Badman Review came out I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading through emails, posting links, emailing mps, answering the consultation, surveys and what not. Somewhat ironically, it means I've been neglecting Rye a little and just letting him get on with playing while I tap away at the keyboard.

So from tomorrow I am going to limit myself to evenings on the laptop, which will be hard for me, I do so like to have a quick check of emails etc first thing but it does means that sometimes I end up being online far longer than I planned.

So once I ascend up to bed I shall take the laptop with me and leave it in my bedroom. One of the benefits of wireless range working in my bedroom, I don't have to have the laptop downstairs and out of sight out of mind.

Bearing in mind that Rye has spent most of the day entertaining himself, I made myself stop reading the vast amount of emails the Yahoo Action Against Badman Review group is generating and popped ot the shops for a few bits before closing and then we had a snack and popped over to Queenies. Rye loved it. I kicked a ball around with him, played with lego, drawing, we had fun showing him how to slurp up spaghetti etc. He loved it and oh it was nice to put aside the worry for a few hours and just enjoy being with my son.

And to get a little perspective too, the review is damn worrying, but it will require primary legislation to be changed, and the statutory stuff can't be done until after the consultation, so there is a bit of breathing space and for the moment nothing has changed, getting into a frenzy too early risks burnout.

I'm in love.

With my new laptop (shhhh, I justified putting it on my account because it;s my birthday today...)! I fried the other one about a week ago when I tried to attach external speakers and accidently touched the usb port with the speaker jack, and this one is just shiny and loveliness and oh, oh, the wireless is finally working and I'm actually sat in the garden typing this blog entry.

Lack of laptop for the past week means I have completed a lovely crochet bag, my season swap gift (although I'm not entirely sure about it - might have to get someone's opinion on it) and I'm in the process of crocheting a jute rug for the kitchen, plus lots of time spent in the garden with the little one having fun and games.

I had an epithany regardng laundry and realised I could attach a line to the fence and a tree so finally making inroads into the laundry heaps.

Ok, much as I'm loving sitting here watching Rye playing with the football while I type (ahhh the joys of touch typing) I am really hungry, so I suspect the little man will be too. I'll post some photos later of the bag etc. Oh, and one delightful moment last night; my son decided to sit on his marble run and pee on it.... boys!