Ringing in our 2014 Journey

It's nearly 2014! This year has been an amazing one for our family. Our decision to home educate Chipman has made a huge difference to our home life, Beebie is turning into a young lady and the other half and I have been able to squeeze in some date nights that actually involved leaving the house! To celebrate the end of a great 2013 and usher in the new year we are having a celebration with close family at home.


I have it all planned out and will post photos once it has all happened but here's some ideas if you are doing something similar! The evening will start with food, what would a celebration be without a bit of grub?! I am skipping out on the cooking and we are ordering take away. Chinese is the children's favourite so we will be ordering the usual favourites and a couple of new things for them to try too.


Then of course we need to have games. After the success of my sister-inlaw's Christmas favourite of pass the parcel on Christmas day the gauntlet has been laid! After whiling away some time on pinterest searching I have whittled it down to 2 choices. The first is a farmyard sounds game which I'm hoping will produce some laughter. You can find out more about it and my next game suggestion on my pinterest board. Then it's time for a game in the dark, glowstick hoopla. A large glow stick will be tacked to a piece of card in the centre of the room and each player will take it in turns to throw a glowstick bracelet over the larger stick. I am blessed with appalling hand eye co-ordination so don't think I will be winning this one! Again if you want some more details you can find them here. Our last game will involve after eight mint chocolates! The cold chocolate (the key is for it to be cold to work best) is placed on each person's forehead, then without using their hands they must get the chocolate into their mouth. This is a great fun game to watch (the facial expressions required are very amusing), but also to play.

We will also be making some of these photobooth props thanks Home school share blog for the idea! We will have the props on the dining room table along with the digital camera (both our children are trusted to use it now but if you have younger ones you may want to put it higher) The results of our photo booth will be posted on here! Another idea I will be stealing from home school share blog is to do a review interview sheet about themselves. Each member of the family will be given one to fill out and we can share our answers over dinner.

I would love to know any of your family traditions or new things you are doing to mark the start of 2014. Whatever you are doing to see in the new year I hope it's fun and marks the start of a great year for you and yours!

DISCLAIMER: Although this post is not strictly on the theme of home educating it was written as a procrastination tool for home ed prep for January!

The trials of home educating

I knew when we started on our journey into home education there would be bad days, but the optimist in me thought they would be few and far between and I never imagined we would experience 5 in a row! Last week Chipman was on his 2nd week of a trial of no ADHD medication and I was in a really grumpy mood that I just couldn't shift. It was not a match made in heaven! Without his medication Chipman needed constant reminders to focus on his work and I have felt like a real nag, if I said once 'sit down' 'pick up your pen and write' or 'stop being an aeroplane' I said it a thousand times.

Being an aeroplane, train or gremlin have been ways for Chipman to express his frustrations but have unfortunately added to mine. On Tuesday we were working on simplifying ratios, not being in a particularly patient mood myself and numbers looking like a foreign language to me we stumbled on a problem solving the 6th question. I suggested to Chipman that we move onto the next question and talk to mathematically minded Dad when he got home about this particular question. He was having none of this as he said they had to be done in order. So whist I trawled the Internet, phoned various people and stressed out trying to find the answer Chipman spun around me being an aeroplane, noises and all. And just in case I was in any doubt as to what he was doing, the aeroplane engine noises and arms out to the side circling after all may not have been a big enough clue, he was periodically shouting he was in fact an aeroplane. Despite my pleas, which started out calm and turned into shouty quite quickly, Chipman's aeroplane was not going to land any time soon. In tears I decided that we had had enough maths for one day and called it quits, Chipman landed and got on with some geography.

The maths frustrations continued, the aeroplane made appearances, although Chipman's method of transport sometimes changed to a train as the week went on. And with the train as you may have guessed came noises, arms circling at his sides and the announcement that he was a train until Thursday. We had been stuck in the house for 4 solid days and think we were both starting to go a little stir crazy. So when the suggestion from a friend to go out for lunch came up we jumped at it. Having some time away from the house certainly helped, Friday was much calmer, although Chipman still needed to get around the house somehow so the aeroplane and train returned, I felt more able to deal with it just from a couple of hours away from the house.

I have learnt my lessons from last week, and there are quite a few. We need new strategies to help Chipman deal with his ADHD now that it is not being controlled by drugs and to get a fair assessment of how he is coping without them, we need time away from the house at least once a week and finally I am not blessed at being good with numbers so Dad is now the maths teacher. It was a trying week but reflecting back I can see my mistakes and I am hopefully going to learn from them.

Pen phobia and dice to help

Hands up if you have your child is a reluctant writer (I'm putting my hand up at this point). Hands up if you have difficulty inspring them just to start writing because inspiration is not there (again my hand is up). Hands up if the thought of creative writing with your child makes you want to hide under the covers and cancel school for the day just to avoid it (I think you can probably guess my hand is up again). In our house we have found a great solution for our 12 year old son Chipman.

It's called Storycubes. The box of Storycubes consists of 9 dice with a different picture on each side. You can get them online although we bought ours from our local bookshop. It's like writing is fun all of a sudden, throwing dice and taking it in turns to make up tales is more interesting than just being given a subject to write about or being told to write a story. Once the dice are thrown it's up to the thrower to decide what order they go and how the story will end.

 

When we first started using Storycubes we didn't write anything down. We would throw the dice and tell our stories, once Chipman was comfortable with this we started taking photo's of the cubes and I would scribe the story and then stick the photo onto the page as a reminder.

The next stage was for him to copy out what I had scribed. We took a while to get to the pen stage, letting Chipman get used to the story telling and imagination processe first. This week I will be adding challenges by looking at story structure. This week we will be looking at endings, Chipman will be challenged to try out a different ending for each story he makes up. We are using TES resources (free to sign up, everyone loves free!) for the structure ideas but you could make up your own. 

Once we have worked on structure, we will be working on length. Chipman's stories are typically a paragraph long with the bare minimum detail require to get his point across. The plan is to start increasing slowly so that they are more descriptive and encourage him to use longer conversations and build more atmosphere.

Once we have that mastered all of the above the idea will be for him to plan his story out using this planning grid, placing the cubes and making notes in each relevant section before he writes the story out on his own. He wants to make a book of his Storycubes stories, complete with his own drawings, for his cousin as a  Christmas gift, so I am hoping we are at this stage by then! I am so excited to see that Chipman not only picks up a pen because I have told him he needs to, but is actually enjoying it and setting his own goals. As we are only half way through my master plan I cannot tell you how well it will all work but I am hoping it will all go smoothly and I won't be hiding under the covers!

We have gone from having a pen phobic writer that came out in a cold sweat or grumpy mood at the mere mention of writing a story, to one who wants to write his own book of short stories! Storycubes really have been an invaluable resource for us and I hope that my ramblings and Storycubes can be useful to your family too!

(This post is a personal opinion of Storycubes that I purchased for our family. I am not sponsored or endorsed by the Storycubes brand.)