I have loved documenting our home education journey on here this year. It has helped me grow in discipline and helped my perspective through the day. I have noticed myself grabbing learning opportunities for the girls and having a desire to connect with them more over the course of the day. There are downsides to this blog as well, like most things, one of those being, I am usually typing on here by the end of a very tiring day and am not giving it my best. Not all pictures, concepts, activities make it on here and I am totally fine with that!
Reading-
We read books about different types of people, lots of Alfie books, A science book on the human body, a few on bees and their hives, lots of living books and her favourite in this season, the story of little Babaji. On days we are not able to include reading into her home ed slot, we simply move it to the ones we read at bedtime. Some nights she gets to choose the books, other, we choose them.
Ahna also practiced her phonics through letter games and is familiar with most letter sounds now. She has not been introduced to the lower case letters so far so we’ll be looking at doing that next month followed by blending sounds.
Science/Nature-
We have had a wonderfully full 2 weeks of science, nature and learning about Gods creation.
Ahna is learning about the direction of the sun when it rises and when it sets. We talk about how it rises at her window every morning and sets at her cousins bedroom window every night. We go up to the terrace during the mornings and evenings and talk about the changing direction of the shadows and how the sunlight impacts where the shadow will fall. We had been learning about butterflies and moths and this week we saw a dead moth in our terrace garden so we brought it home, observed it a little and drew our versions of what we saw on our living room windows. We also went for a couple of nature walks and I am learning that it is much easier to get the children(especially Hope) to be quiet enough to observe when there is something to eat. We took cookies along and sat and observed a tree. We saw the creatures that lived in it and how the tree gave a home to so many birds, insects and squirrels. Hope has made some friends in neighborhood dragon flies and millipedes and she has met some of our pet earthworms. She loves them all. Sometimes, enough to want to eat them. We mainly aim for 1 main unit study with nature/science each week.
This fortnight, we did the differences and similarities between roses and hibiscus before we used them to make tea. Ahna was able to point out the differences in colour, size and the manner in which the flowers rested on her hand. We then counted the petals in each flower and also noticed the roses have many more than the hibiscus although the size of the petals were different.
Another unit study we did was on sorting and matching leaves from the terrace. She used her sensory skills of touch, sight and smell to distinguish between the leaves and sort them in order. If you have ever smelled a bitter gourd leaf, or touched a cucumber leaf, you know what I mean.
Life skill/Math
Baking and cooking and popsciles and herbal teas have been an almost every second day thing here. Ahna has started enjoying making popsicles and it takes me about 15 minutes to organise and help her ‘help’ me make it. She and Hope both enjoy eating them too and its a good dose of fruit in the middle of the day along with buying me 15-20 minutes of chore time while they make a contained mess. Ahna got to bake her entire first dish(rose petals) this fortnight. She has always wanted to do everything during baking and this time she could.
Next week, we look forward to more study with flowers!