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Week In The Life …
By Janet W
We kind of fell into home education quite by accident. We are parenting for the second time around after our tiny premature grandson arrived and it became obvious very quickly that we would be raising him. As the stay-at-home parent the education decision was mine, but I’m fully supported by my husband. Our boy Charlie is almost nine and, until Covid hit, had travelled the world and Australia extensively with us.
Because of Charlie’s challenging start to life, we made the decision to delay intentional teaching until he was around seven. We’ve bounced around a bit with learning styles beginning with play-based immersion then onto Reading Eggs and the Sunshine Collective. We are now using EUKA (formerly Complete Education Australia) and Charlie is thoroughly enjoying it. We still mix it up a bit as he isn’t comfortable with a lot of art techniques…he struggles with sensory issues. We also add unit studies to our week. We aim to complete two unit studies a term and last term we enjoyed both Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt. Future unit studies will include the summer Olympic Games and Japan, oceans and seasides, space and possibly the human body.
Like most home-ed families, our weeks never really look the same except for a few things that are regulars. So here is an average week in our home.
MONDAY
Monday is one of only two days that we tend to dedicate solely to school. We began our day with one hour of outside play as Charlie is participating in the “Premier’s be active challenge “. Charlie chose to ride his bike for an hour as the day’s activity. Finishing that, it was time for a quick snack then our new spelling words followed by putting the words into sentences.
The term reader is a book called “Tornado” so we read the chapter and moved onto the weekly activities. Charlie had to make a tornado, from a hoop and crepe paper, to hang from his ceiling. As the weeks progress he will add things of interest from the book to it. For maths, Charlie is beginning to understand multiplication, so we played a couple of games to reinforce what he knows.
Today is also the anniversary of the National Apology Day, so after we had watched a video of then PM Kevin Rudd making his apology in Parliament, we watched Indigenous singer Archie Roach sing…. “Took the children away”…..and read the book by the same title. After lunch, we moved onto our Ancient Egypt unit study. We began by finding where Egypt is on the world map, we located key features like the Nile River. I made a timeline of Egyptian history for Charlie to place in order before doing a couple of pages in the Egyptian activity book. By now Pa was home from work, so Charlie finished out his day by playing in the pool.
TUESDAY
Tuesdays are always fairly chilled as we have a nature-based Occupational Therapy session every week. By the time we drive there, have the session and get home the afternoon is completely gone. So our mornings are usually some unit study work or game playing.
Every Tuesday at 3.30pm, Charlie participates in the EUKA zoom cooking club. He thoroughly enjoys this and is getting very confident in the kitchen. We always end up with a delicious afternoon tea or accompaniment to dinner.
WEDNESDAY
Charlie’s choice of activity for the ‘ Premier’s be active Challenge’ was to ride his bike for an hour. That really woke him up and he was raring to go. We began our day with the EUKA curriculum and handwriting practice, spelling and the book “Tornado” activity which was making a fan out of playing cards and including the 3 of ❤️ in it. For maths, we played the multiplication game ‘4 in a row’, followed by a Kumon maths work book. Morning tea was the delicious savoury rice cakes that Charlie had made the day before in his zoom cooking club.
As a bit of fun, I have introduced a “Wreck this journal“ and when I find Charlie is zoning out, I bring this out to lighten the mood significantly. It’s taken him a while to accept that the whole point is to wreck the book, but now he thoroughly enjoys it. After lunch, we studied the life cycle of butterflies, painted a watercolour butterfly, tried a static electricity butterfly experiment and made the life cycle of eggs, caterpillar, cocoon and butterfly out of recycled materials. Wednesday always ends with the EUKA Minecraft Zoom club with weekly challenges.
THURSDAY
Speech therapy always takes priority on Thursday mornings and we try to fit a library visit in after our session. The afternoons are free time before Cubs in the evening.
FRIDAY
Today was VERY exciting. We were up bright and early to watch the Perseverance Rover finally land on Mars! That led to a day full of Mars and space activities. Charlie designed his own Mars Rover. He completed a Mars cloze and reading comprehension, built and launched a Marscopter and finished with making fizzing Mars rocks. Then it was time to pack for a Medieval themed Joey and Cub Scout camp up on the Murray River…123km from our home in Adelaide. Charlie’s grandfather went too because every child needed an adult as it was so close to the river.
SATURDAY and SUNDAY
Charlie and Pa had a wonderful time on camp, kayaking, swimming, playing medieval games and eating lots of yummy food. He came home an exhausted, sun kissed, very happy boy. And that finished our week.
OUR WEEK
We love the freedom and flexibility that home education allows us. We can have full productive days or quieter, calm days…..Charlie frequently stays in his pj’s or Oodie. I love that he can totally immerse himself into his passion of history and not be strangled within a mainstream classroom at the pace of children who don’t share his love. We both love that he can choose whatever books he wants to read without having levels ticked off in the process.
For us home education is the perfect choice.
Otherways 168 May 2021