Sleepwalking our way through the day

The reward chart is working! 6 year old P is now going into to school and coming home without any problem's, although I am writing this before the morning school run so anything could happen today! The next hurdle with P is sleep, or lack of it for everyone because she just doesn't want to go to bed. We think it's for attention so tonight we start a "ignore the bad behaviour" operation, I will let you know how it goes!

As for A he is getting stuck into his school work. We have finished our samaurai and general information on Japan and are now moving onto the exciting world of earthquakes and volcanoes. We had great fun making baking powder and coloured vinegar volcanoes. We put baking powder in an old yogurt pot and in a seperate cup we mixed vinegar and some food colouring to give it a more dramatic effect! When we mixed the two we had a volcano and a very happy 12 year old who if we had more baking powder would have made them all day!

I am still struggling with the maths side of things, I just don't like it! However A loves it so I have been trying to make it more interesting by playing games and activities. Yesterday we played prime number snap, needless to say A knew his prime numbers by heart and was a lot quicker than me and won! A has also enjoyed learning about the digestive and excretory systems - boys and anything to do with poo and wee seems to be a winner!

This week our aim is to get more sleep and have more fun! As well as feeling sleep deprived I am also feeling incredibly blessed that God is taking us on this journey. Let's see what the rest of the week brings!

Our first step....

Today was day one of home school. It has been amazing, seeing Chipman enjoy learning was such a privilege. After all his anxieties, our prayers were answered when Chipman settled down to his work with enthusiasm. As well as all that Chipman learnt, I have also learnt some valuable lessons today. The main one is that my well organised weekly plan is already out the window! It turns out that as much as he loves maths his limit is 25 minutes of concentrated work, and as much as he hates English he will do more than 10 minutes. Tomorrow is now going to look a lot different to how I originally planned but then I was told that flexibility is the key, I can now safely say from experience it certainly is!

As well as our creative writing, multiples and factors and looking at cells we also started the project on Japan. Chipman chose the subject and we will be using the topic for lots of lessons. Today was history and art. History was focusing on samurai warriors and I wanted to share with you an amazing fact filled book. Fierce fighters - Samurai by Charlotte Guillian, it is easy to read and jammed packed with information, with great pictures to engage with. From this one book Chipman managed to make a page full of notes. His fact file will start to take shape tomorrow and he can't wait!

As well as having Japan as our topic for History we are also using it for art too. My flexibility was also needed for this lesson today, my plan was to do origami. The 'simple' origami book we took out from the library was not as simple as it advertised! So to avoid frustration I used this site to do some manga drawing www.drawingnow.com/how-to-draw-manga I found it whilst browsing manga to use on another day but I'm glad I had it up my sleeve to fall back up on! A is not particularly confident at drawing but loves doing it, the step by step instructions produced this piece of work today. He was so proud of it that he asked me to put it in my blog, so here it is!

Today was everything I had prayed it would be. I am incredibly grateful for God's blessing on today and am looking forward to what's in store tomorrow!