Good intentions thwarted!

Well, after all my good intentions of a daily jounal, I managed to come down with swine flu at the weekend and have spent the last 6 days in bed! Meanwhile my 2 year old has been busy educating himself!

The house is a mess as just about every toy in the house is out and subsequently discarded in favour of the next one! Just who are the tidy away fairies that normally oversee the putting away of such things???

The toys of self choice have been the wooden tool set (role play and working on his fine motor skills EYFS KUW & PD!) ; the megasketcher (communication and literacy); toy castle and animal and soldier figures (imaginative play, knowledge and understanding of the world) tombliboos ride on car physical development) and colouring a picture of a number 1 then cutting it into pieces which were then scattered everywhere (numeracy, physical development and creative development).

Truly a testimony to self directed learning!

Today I am feeling slightly less piggy and slightly more human and so managed to involve myself in some activities with the little man. We chose a lovley magazine kindly sent to alumni from the OU which had some lovley pictures of animals and people so we chose which pictures to cut out and "carefully" cut them out - that was about the sum of his attention span so the pictures have been saved for use another day.

We have also had a bit of a look at the cbeebies website - his currrent favourites are way balloo and show me show me. There is a very good game where you have to click to find the hiding way balloo character (Ict skills and problem solving!)

The biggest boy in our household is in the middle of week three at college - and so far is finding it boring - he is doing a BTech ND in Media (games development). They have been playing on photoshop (what??? he has been doing that since he was virtually in nappies!- have they not seen those ads in the tv with the 8 yr old?), playing on a mac (which he found a bit more interesting as he hasnt got much experience here), and from what I can gather from not much that has stimulated his interest! I hope things get better.

DS#3 is in week three of secondary school - and so far is really enjoying it - he has made friends with lots of children from across all year groups in school, especially the older ones, so my worry that he wouldnt know a soul and would struggle to feel accepted were totally unfounded! He is enjoying the work, although his dyslexia is making tasks like wordsearches for his "library" homework more of a challenge than I suspect it is for other children. His maths teacher gives them a quick 10 minute task after every lesson - this style suits him much better! So overall, things are looking good.

DS#2 is still plodding along at school, just that now he is in year 9! The highlight for him today of course is that he has his electric guitar lesson with Mr Walker. Things like this make the week more bearable for him! There is a meeting tonight about the year group doing some of their GCSE's a year early - I am gutted I cant go (damn piggy lurgy!) but Im hopeful that the information will filter through.

Oh and the other learning experience today was do not forget that you gave your 2 year old an ice cream cone earlier in the day only to discover a big melted mess with knitted sausages and plastic utensils inserted into it in the toy kitchen several hours later!

What we did today - day one of blogging!

Today the little people and I have baked flap jack. After a shaky start it proved to be edible! It did require a further 10 minutes in the oven as it kept falling apart on first inspection - we were just a bit too impatient me thinks! Still, it went down a treat when 2 of our little friends came over to play.

This afternoon we did a bit of sleeping followed by some cutting and sticking. The problem was that someone* (*read probably the teenagers of the household) has removed the glue sticks and scissors from the designated drawer in the craft cupboard - so we had to improvise with very blunt pinking shears and lots (in fact copious amounts) of pva glue. It was a challenge to their fine motor skills to say the least - did I mention how blunt they were?

Giving it a whirl!

Decided to start a blog to keep a journal of our home education journey with our youngest. I thought it would be a nice record to look back on in future................providing I can keep up with it of course ;)