A week of home ed

Last week was varied and began with a long walk to the top of Firle Beacon in the South Downs.

Charlie loved the the view at the top of the hill.

Not a lot of work was done last Monday morning, as we had a birthday in the family: my oldest son - who doesn't want to appear in this blog - was 15. Unusually for him, he was up early and all set to receive our presents.

He was particularly touched by Charlie's card and present: Charlie had made a kitten toy out of a sock filled with gemstones, tied with a long piece of thread. It was a success with his brother and with the kittens.

The week was filled with appointments for Tom, which meant our home ed needed to be flexible. We practised Times Tables in the car whilst we were waiting for Tom to come out of a doctor's appointment. When Tom had appointments at home, Charlie read or worked on the computer (he's still using ConquerMaths and MyMaths every day). We also did a lot of our home ed in the evenings, instead of earlier in the day.

We have continued with our Titanic project. This week, Charlie has been writing imaginary postcards from passengers. He dyed the postcard templates with a teabag, which made the cards look old. We read about several passengers on the ship and Charlie was particularly taken with Benjamin Guggenheim and chose him as his subject.

 

Charlie enjoyed writing one of the postcards with a homemade ink pen

We have also spent quite a lot of time on our Titanic lapbook from Currclick. A simple question - how much did the Titanic weigh? - turned out to be quite complicated. The lapbook states that the Titanic weighed 46,239 tons, but Charlie remembered that one of the early adverts recorded the Titanic as weighing 45,000 tons. We ended up comparing lots of historical evidence in our search for a correct answer: the transcript of the register, various adverts, the list of first-class passengers, various websites. Eventually,we accepted 46,328 tons as the closest to a definitive answer that we could find.

In Maths, Charlie is concentrating on his Times Tables. I have just bought him a set of 'Multiplication Write and Wipe' cards from Kumon for him to practise with.

In between our lessons, Charlie has found plenty to occupy himself. He found an old Usborne cookery book and decided to make one of the recipes, which was then presented to me to eat.

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With admirable ingenuity, Charlie had dug around at the back of the kitchen cupboard to find cooking chocolate and, with my assistance, he had melted the chocolate to add to the banana smoothie. 

 

It was delicious.

Charlie also discovered the results of a science experiment from a couple of weeks ago. It may look unsightly, but this is actually crystals, and caused much excitement in our household this week.

 

I don't think Grandma will be getting her ramekin dish back anytime soon, though.

On Friday, we went to the local library and Charlie chose some new books.

That afternoon, he spent a long time drawing a sketch of Titanic, guided by a YouTube video by Shoo Rayner. 

He was very pleased with the result.

Of course, our daily home ed antics are watched closely by our kittens, who provide an entertaining backdrop - and sometimes welcome interruption - to our activities.