ofamily learning together

Midnight at Moonstone a lovely read

Posted on April 29, 2019 by ofamily

My daughter was recently given a copy of Midnight at Moonstone and it turned out to be such a lovely, gentle yet fun story for tweens that we wanted to write a review about it. Nothing scary, sinister or spooky (which does not go down well with my daughter) but instead it is a fun story about a 12-year-old girl who discovers the period mannequins at her grandfather’s museum actually have a night life of their own.

Kit (the 12-year-old) feels like she does not fit in with her family – he dad is a famous Scientist and her older siblings are bright and very succesful yet Kit just failed the entrance exam to a fancy school and her father is pushing her to study harder. While her dad is travelling she runs away to her grandfather’s costume museum but even there her grandfather is not initially warm and welcoming.

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However Kit soon discovers that the museums mannequins come to life in the evenings and that her mother (who passed away when she was very young) used to be friends with the mannequins and helped to mend them and look after them. So she hatches a plan to save the museum. (There are also a few other twists but I don’t want to give everything away).

I really loved this message of the story – a young girl whose strengths were not the same as her family – she was artistic and they were scientific yet her strengths in the end are what saves the museum. I also liked the fact that one of the mannequins (Fenella) has selective mutism, yet it was the mannequin that was the most caring and helpful and eventually become very close friends with Kit. Another powerful message that the author managed to beautifully weave into the story.

My daughter loved the whole idea that the mannequins would come to life and that each one was so unique with a their own distinct personalities. She loved that there was this magical element to the story but there was no darkness to the magic. She also enjoyed the fact that Kit saved the day and as a result her family stopped pushing her to be more like them.

We both think the story is well written and makes a lovely heart warming book with just a touch of magic and a slight mention of History (the fact the mannequins were dressed in period costumes). So for my daughter a complete win.

We were given this copy of Midnight at Moonstone by Oxford University Press. You can also get it from Amazon here – Midnight at Moonstone

I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged children's book, Fictional Fun, home ed, home education, homeschooling, OUP, Tweens | 2 Comments

A Week

Posted on April 27, 2019 by ofamily

I often get asked what a week of home education looks like for us and it is really hard to say because the weeks are often so different. However I can understand that someone who is thinking about home education would like to hear what people get up to so I thought I would try to give an idea of what could be included in a week. But please I want to STRESS this is a general idea, it changes a lot and as I always say what works for us will not work for every other home educating family.

Monday – Nothing scheduled so it varies between – stay at home and work on projects, do some work in the morning and go out in the afternoon or a whole day outing somewhere with friends.

Tuesday – The kids have a swimming lesson and then after that we stay and swim which takes up most of our morning. In the Afternoon we normally do a bit of Maths, Reading and possibly whatever project/ activity the kids are currently working on.

Wednesday – We have a sports class in the morning and dance class in the late afternoon. In between is Maths, often a comprehension or English activity, Reading and whatever the kids are working on.

Thursday – often tends to be our stay at home day as we get home late on Wednesdays and the kids end up going to bed late. Maths, English, we will often do longer activities if we know we are going to be home for the whole day – like an art session that might require more than 1 stage to it. Reading, if the weather is good out in the garden (in the warmer months the kids help us grow some fruit and veg). Projects anything really.

Friday – If we feel like we have had a quiet week we will often go somewhere on Friday – could be into London, could be to a National Trust site (often with other home ed friends) or go back for another swimming session. If we are going out we often first try to finish up any left over work from the week. Alternatively if we have had a busy week with outings on Monday and Thursday then we often stay home and get some work done. Currently the kids like listening to audio books and doing a bit of art on a Friday afternoon.

Weekends – yes I am including weekends because the kids learn a lot over the weekends as their dad is around and he is always chatting about articles he may have read or video clips he saw. We like going out to National Trust sites over the weekend but we also like spending time working in our garden and just chilling at home so weekends vary a lot. The kids do tend to read a lot over weekends and often work on their own projects – currently my son is creating an animal book which involves drawing animals and creating personalities for them. My daughter normally has a history related project she is working on – timelines, family trees, writing stories about fictional people who lived in a certain time period.

Projects can vary from between Science, History, Geography, Animal based topics or even activities based on books we have been reading or documentaries we have watched.

Reading – We read a lot. I like to always have a family reading book that we read together and I still listen to the kids reading. My daughter actually asks to read some of her History books to me so I can help her with names and pronunciations of more historical terms. Also both kids always have multiple books that they read to themselves which is a mix of fiction and non-fiction. No matter what happens in our week we always read.

My kids and husband have a tradition of reading science books in the evenings together before they go to sleep – kind of like a non-fiction story time that evolved from when they were younger because fictional stories often resulted in nightmares and non-fiction fact based books were a safe alternative.

Maths – I also always like to make sure we have done some Maths each day but it is not always traditional Maths worksheets (although we do work through Maths workbooks). Maths also includes – working with money, working with quantities in baking or measuring items, discussing a maths problem and how we could solve it, we use Maths in maps my daughter likes Maths dominoes or Maths loop cards – it really can take lots of different forms.

Although we do have some scheduled weekly activities a lot of the outings are determined week by week and can be workshops, trips into London, trips to our local parks, meeting friends somewhere, oh and we have a wooded area with a stream near our house which we often visit – that side varies a LOT.

Like I said above this is a high-level general look at a week and it does change with different seasons but for those who keep asking I hope it answers some questions.

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Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged home ed, home ed life, home education, home education mom, homeschooling, routine | 1 Comment

Wolves

Posted on April 25, 2019 by ofamily

We recently watched a few Wolf documentaries and the kids really enjoyed them. There is one, a BBC documentary called The Snow Wolf – which traces a Mum Wolf after she loses her mate and she then moves through the Alps looking for a new territory for her young pups. My kids were routing for this mum wolf and her pups and learnt a lot by watching her. And I must admit it was such a nice change from our normal Big Cats / Snakes / Sharks animal themes that the kids are normally obsessed with that I could not resist extending it a bit.

We read up more about Wolves using this book The Story of the Wolf: Band 17/Diamond (Collins Big Cat).

The book is a lovely resource for a Wolf Topic. It covers the Canid Family, the different species of Wolf and how the wolf is built to survive in difficult terrain (my son found it fascinating that the wolf has 4 toes in his hind feet and 5 toes on his fore feet).

It also includes sections on the wolf pack, their pups, wolf communication, hunting, diet, how they evolved, wolf sanctuaries, people who are working to help wolves and rewilding projects – including the Yellowstone Park Project.

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The fact sections are good and informative but I must admit the sections about how the wolves evolved and rewilding is what really interested the kids. They liked the section were it spoke about wolves starting to get closer to human settlements, possible becoming hunting companions and then pets. This is something they have picked up from a number of the historical fiction books that they have been reading so it was nice to see it included here and to read about the cave where there is evidence of a young boy travelling with a wolf (Wow).

Also the rewilding. We have watched the clip about the wolves in Yellowstone park and we have chatted about it and the possibility of them introducing wolves into Scotland so again we liked that they covered the rewilding in this little book and gave us some extra information about the Yellowstone project.

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We decided it would be good to create our own Wolf Books filled with the facts that we have been learning so I printed out some Wolf Masks from the Activity Village website and we used those as our book covers. Then we traced around the masks and cut out lined paper in the same shape for the inside pages. I decided that it would be better to attach the pages together with some string so that the kids could add extra pages at a later date if they wanted to.

The booklet looks super cute.

The idea was the kids could fill their booklet with any facts that they had learnt and in any way that they wanted. (I am always interested to see how the tackle the same projects in their own way).

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The wolf booklets were so easy to make – really just printing, tracing and cutting and both kids ended up writing quite a few pages – which is always something that I am keen to encourage so I think we might try this idea again. I already had a look on the Activity Village website and they have a number of different animal masks which we could use for future animal booklets.

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Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged activity village, animals, Big Cat readers, children's book, home ed, home education, homeschooling, wolves | 3 Comments

How to Draw Book Review

Posted on April 22, 2019 by ofamily

We have been working on our drawing skills lately and one of the resources that I have really enjoyed using with the kids is this book by DK – How to Draw

The book starts with a general introduction into different art materials – pencils, pens, crayons and pastels as well as the different type of lines. Then the first real drawing activity was drawing trees – we have done a number of different tree drawing activities before but my daughter still found this one helpful and I must admit after she followed the examples her trees where more detailed and realistic.

Then there are some really useful concept pages – what I mean by this is it breaks down some basic drawing concepts into understandable chunks which the kids can easily follow and try to incorporate into their drawings. They were – Arranging Your picture (composition), Colours, Close and Far away (so perspective), How to draw a landscape, Shading and How to draw a 3D mug. As someone who draws I was really impressed with these pages as they broke down drawing concepts which I think I take for granted and made them easy to understand, follow and then implement

Then the book goes onto drawing animals. I loved these pages because it showed examples of how you break an animal’s body down into shapes and then use those shapes to get a realistic animal body. And after trying two of the worked examples my daughter commented that she felt more confident in breaking an animal’s body down (for drawing purposes).

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After the animal drawing pages the book went onto using grids (something we have done a lot already and I highly recommend), drawing an underwater scene and how to draw a face – another really useful page. And then How to draw a person. Both the face drawing page and the person drawing page are exercises which we are definitely going to do soon as they are good drawing exercises for the kids.

Then there are pages on drawing a still-life, drawing silhouettes, how to draw a dragon (this one is going to be popular with mine) and then a number of different pages on how to adapt your drawing and use them in fun ways like cartoons or patterns.

The instruction part of the book is 79 pages and that is then followed by a number of blank pages for the kids to draw on.

The book is aimed at kids aged 7-9 but I actually think that is a bit misleading as you could use it for a much wider range of kids. For me this book is more about kids who need some drawing tools so they can become more confident with their drawings and then hopefully enjoy it more.

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I personally think this is a great drawing book and I have been very impressed with the pages that we have used and I am planning on going back and working through the other activities with the kids

I approached DK and asked if we could review this book because I like the look of the activities that were included.

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas | Tagged book reviews, children's art, children's book, drawing, home ed, home education, homeschooling | 1 Comment

What about Secondary School ?

Posted on April 21, 2019 by ofamily

Aren’t you glad your little attempt at home educating is over now that your daughter will be starting secondary school in September ? What, why are you not placing your daughter in Secondary school ? So you’ve found tutors for all the Secondary school subjects ?

It turns out there were a number of assumptions that once our home educating kids reached Secondary school age we would stop with our “little adventure of educating them at home” and “come to our senses” and place them in secondary school. And then when the realization dawned that we had not put out daughter’s name down for secondary schools a new assumption arose – that we would now be taking a hands-off approach and instead start using tutors.

Since January of this year I have had numerous versions of this conversation. And my answer has always been the same – we are STILL going to be home educating our daughter in September (when she would in theory be starting secondary school), NO we are NOT using tutors, YES we are aware of the subject content, NO we are NOT forcing our daughter to stay at home she has NO desire to go to school, Yes we talk about this with her, she knows about the different options out there, she happens to think she is very lucky to be home educated.

I get that there is a “step-up” when it comes to school years and what is required of the students. But the truth is for us that step-up has been happening very naturally since the end of last year. My daughter has some very distinctive areas of interest – History and Animal Science and she has naturally started working on longer more complex projects within these areas and has been actually been using secondary resources for these subjects for a while already.

And in the past few weeks what would be classified as English Literature took a giant step up and I spent hours searching for materials for her, all of which was designed for Secondary level students. And then surprisingly in Maths – Geometry has emerged as something which she LOVES and again she has been asking for more and more Geometry material and I have had to once again started using Secondary resources.

I am NOT stressing about extending her hours of learning because the truth is our approach is working and as she grows older she is naturally extending the amount of time that she work on academic projects – although she hates being told that History and Biology are subjects because she thinks they are fascinating topics that she enjoys learning about and are NOT the boring subjects that her school friends moan on about.

So no, I am not worried about that academic “step-up” or that she is not doing enough.

Our approach to home education has evolved over the years and I am sure it will continue to evolve and develop as the kids get older. And that is fine we adapt and change as needed. For now our plan is continue on our semi-structured approach with a few more “workbooks”. (And Yes for those concerned I am already doing a lot of research into Secondary resources)

My husband and I are not qualified teachers but we are university graduates and believe that we are capable of guiding her learning and explaining concepts to her. We know we are going to be spending long hours reading up, refreshing our knowledge on certain areas and even learning some new content. We actually enjoy that side of it. And I personally think one of the most powerful phrases you can say is “I actually don’t know the answer to that question let’s go and find out together.” I have used that a LOT already because my kids want the detail – detail that is often not covered in the national curriculum but that does not stop us, I will search and find the answers for the kids.

We know the Secondary Years are going to have new challenges for us but my husband and I are both happy to dive in and learn when needed. Our priority has always been providing the best learning environment for our kids, one where they can thrive and that is not going to change just because she would be starting Secondary education in September.