Last year was a strange one and not a very easy one. So,the kids and I took a complete two weeks break over Christmas, we felt like we really needed it and I left all my admin, planning, printing until the weekend before we were due to start again. And then on the 31 December the boiler broke – no heating or hot water and I realized very quickly that I do not work well when there is no heating or hot water. The kids and I retreated to hide under a mountain of blankets and all that planning, printing and organising got forgotten about.
Luckily yesterday (Sunday) they managed to fix the boiler and then slowly, we started to re-emerge. But today (Monday) was supposed to be our first day back and well, nothing and I do mean NOTHING was ready. Plus I now have a huge pile of washing. So what to do. Well after 8.5 years of doing this thing called home educating there is one thing that I know – home education does not occur in isolation, we home educate as a family in our home so if something happens that affects the family or the home it affects the home education. It may be that one of us is sick or it may be that our boiler breaks, whatever it is it affects the routine and plans. But we can adapt and really it is NOT the end of the world if the activities that I had planned to do today only happen in 2 days time or even next week.
So what did we do on our FIRST day back? I did printing, filing, emailing and just tried to sort the house out a bit.
The kids – they logged onto The Night Zookeeper website and continued with their writing on there (we really love this site).
My daughter picked up her English Literature book that we started before Christmas break and continued reading and writing her summarises on that- she is working through Pride and Prejudice. She also continued watching Emma. She watched the Emma mini-series and is now watching the movie and is going to then write a comparison between the two (Totally her idea to do this).
My son watched another episode of Dragons, Riders of Berk and then wrote a description of what happened in the episode.
Oh, and we baked chocolate chip cookies.
So yes, we did not start the Maths or Science that I had wanted too but the kids still did learning activities.
Why am I writing this? We are all going to have things happen that mean our home education plans don’t go as planned but just because our kids don’t do the activities that are written down on some schedule does NOT mean they have done NO learning for the day, it is okay to adapt, in fact adapting our plans on a regular basis is the only way I manage to start partially sane.
ofamily learning together 