A tiny ray of hope!

Those of you who have been following my blog (and my facebook ramblings!) will know that having a 15-month old around while I am trying to present to Addie has been quite a challenge! Bear wants to be involved in everything, touch everything, do everything that Addie is doing. She can be really in to doing something (rarely on her own, but there are moments of individual work), and he will just come in like a tornado and leave devastation in his wake... !

Some times, Daddy will take Bear to work with him, so we can really get in to some work, but he can't do that every day, and the struggles I have been having have really made me question whether or not I can do this home education thing...

However, today there was a tiny ray of hope.

I sat down with Addie to present Open Ended Distance Matching with the Knobbed Cylinders, which she absolutely loved, and along comes Bear... And he absolutely loved it too! Neither of them did the activity 100% as it is written in the album, but there was so much sensorial learning going on! Actually, Bear really surprised me once again with these. Although it is really a work for a 3-year old, he is really good at matching the cylinders to their holes (except the one where it is only the height of the cylinders that changes). He puts them back with no hesitation and very little error. And actually, it was not a disruption this time, it was great to see them working together. OK, so Bear did not get the cylinder that was requested, he went and got another one (and placed it, first time in the correct hole regardless of which cylinder it was), but Addie was really good at selecting the correct cylinders too, and we went through all of the cylinders, doing both the Open-Ended and Closed-Ended presentations because they loved this game! I was pleasantly surprised and the tiniest ray of hope started to come through... I managed to capture some of this on camera, but I have realised as I added the photos that I actually don't have any of the main work they did, just that difficult 4th block and also the last block we did when we started to lose interest...!

Bear is really good at realising when he has made a mistake - he recognised that the cylinder he did put in was in the wrong hole, and corrected himself - something I have only noticed from looking at these pictures as I write this post!

Addie did some more work on her lifecycles today... Here she is getting her Insect Lore Life Cycle Stages Frog to kiss 'his picture' on the Tadpole to Frog (Lifecycles) book (I wasn't going to correct her that the frog is a lady frog!)... 

And then Bear and I did some more work together - Rolling a Work Mat and putting it away! So cute! (and after that we got it out again and looked at the Children Around the World pictures together!)

Today was a good day. Tomorrow will be different. Actually we are going to watch the solar eclipse, hopefully at the beach! Onwards and upwards with a tiny ray of hope...

Weekends are for learning too!

So today, Addie and Bear went with Jay and Auntie S went to a Wildlife Park... It's the weekend, and you can't possibly learn at the weekend... can you? ;-)

Playing in the sand, more time outdoors, wolves, wallabies, badgers, owls, deer, bison, otters, warthogs and lots more...

And then when they came home, Addie did some hoovering and sorting out the laundry, and both Addie and Bear helped Daddy scrub the floors in the classroom - they loved it, great hand strengthening squeezing out the sponge, and a great practical life exercise... but, of course, no learning ;-)

HT1: January & February Round-Up

As we come to the end of our first home ed term (HT1), I thought I would write a very short summary of what we have done, and then let some pictures say the rest.

This term has been a settling in one for us. It has actually been quite a struggle to get into the swing of things, having a just-turned-one-year-old Bear has been quite a challenge, and now he understands things a little more, but is cheeky and does things you can tell he knows are cheeky still. However, I am loving seeing his little character come out, and he loves doing activities with us. Sometimes, actually often, far too much and he tends to be like a bit of a little wrecking ball or whirlwind and tries to take over Addie's work, but he is getting there... He is definitely walking and climbing everywhere now. He has worked out that if you put a chair that he can get on to next to a table, you can use that to climb on the table and then turn the TV on, or try to climb up the bookcases (!)... He is also developing his hand muscles quite a bit now, and you can see how he is getting a little more refined with them, and he can feed himself with a spoon now too.

 

We are using the Keys of the World (AMI Montessori) albums, which you can currently buy here. I absolutely LOVE these albums. I cannot express how much I love them. They are so comprehensive, yet simple, and achievable for home educating.

Having said that, making a change from doing things as and when we need to, to having any time every day to do 'school' (we call it school because Addie used to go to nursery that we called school, and due to her anxiety issues, we told her that school would now be at home) a very BIG challenge!

It is hard being in our living space, with all the distractions of every day life, and trying to focus on having a work cycle. We don't really have one I suppose, at the moment, and our whole day is a mix of learning, presenting, reading, doing other stuff. In that way, we are quite autonomous in how our days go at the moment. I am hoping that this will progress to a more defined work period in the future, and over the next term, HT2 (or March & April), which starts on Monday.

One thing is the preparation it takes to get things ready. It really isn't that much compared to what a lot of Montessori homeschooling blogs seem to indicate, particularly when using the Keys albums. I mean, I have put off one presentation because I have to sew a tiny little thing onto some dusters, but just have not got round to it! Too many things getting in the way!

Now, though, Daddy has his office much closer to home, so he can be here more, and at the office more (because he does not have to travel 90 mins each way now), and I am hoping that this will lead to better home organisation, and better home ed organisation and better family time organisation too! It is a step in the right direction at least!

What have we been learning?

Jessica, the author of the Keys albums, has given a sequence, broken down into 6 month intervals (starting at age 2.5), of how presentations can be given. It definitely is not a definitive guide, and following the child is always a must. We have definitely had to adapt it for Addie because she covered some Interval 2 & 3 stuff at her nursery (haphazardly, by the way, with no prerequisites being taught), and not a lot of the Interval 1 stuff. For her age, the suggested order indicates she should be going into Interval 2 work, and I can see that she is definitely ready for a lot of it. But, we have also been trying to make sure we have covered Interval 1 too.

Getting her to do anything though has been a bit of a struggle. And I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that she is not in a community of learners, so she has no one to really observe or learn from, or spontaneously be inspired to do any work. I often have to prompt her. The other is that she really has not been presented much, and so when she has time to practice or revisit things she has been shown, she doesn't really have a lot to fall back on. So, HT2 will have quite a lot of new presentations and a lot of things she can choose from our shelves to work with.

What has she done in HT1?

Well, quite a bit of practical life, quite a bit of drawing, some Knobbed Cylinder work, started the Pink Tower, and through our daily reading, has started to recognise beginning sounds of words, and also where different continents are. These last two are really calling to her at the moment, so we are focussing a lot on those, while trying to keep interest in the tactile sensorial work.

We have also been trying to get out and about in nature, learning about animals, the sky, plants, etc in preparation for learning coming up in HT2 & 3, which will be finishing off Interval 2 work, moving into a more relaxed (and more outdoors) HT4 over the summer months.

One thing, though, is that Addie is loving school. She is always asking to do some, so I need to be ready to respond to that, and treat all the times she is awake as learning moments, and not just think we do school in the mornings only. You definitely cannot, even if you tried, stop a child from learning or wanting to learn!

Here are some pics...