Like many homeschoolers, there is no “typical” day in our household. Our week is loosely structured around external activities like sports classes and our weekly homeschool group, and there are certain subjects that I aim to cover in a week, but other than that, I like the flexibility of a routine rather than a fixed schedule.
Having said that, here’s an example of a typical, non-typical day!
530am I get up. I’m not normally this early! But it’s such a beautiful morning already I decide I’ll enjoy some quiet time to myself.
645am I go back to bed and meditate/play Words with Friends until 730. I love how my iPhone lets me have a permanent scrabble game going with my mum who lives in Wales!
830am We’re having poetry tea with friends later, so I bake some gluten free/sugar free cookies with the children. J has been so much calmer since we reduced his dietary sugar, gluten and dairy five months ago (on the advice of a complementary health professional) . Since most bought products are either sugar or gluten free, I find myself baking a lot. I’m not an experienced cook, so the recipe substitutions I make can be a bit random, as can the end products. Luckily the children are very forgiving.
850am As we put the eggs away, J asks if we can make pancakes. I promise him that if he gets on with his maths and English without any fuss, there’ll be time to make some before we set out for our friends’ house.
855am Incentivized by pancakes, J physically drags me into my office, where C and J do most of their individual schoolwork. He does copywork from “Fox In Socks” and we practice phonics and spelling using The Wand. For today’s maths we look at negative numbers in Primary Grade Challenge Math.
915am J makes pancake batter. He and C got very good at making pancakes shortly after we changed his diet – gluten and sugar free English pancakes, made with goats’ milk, work really well!
10am We arrive at our friends’ house. C and J run off to play with the other children (aged 12, 10 and 9) while I catch up with my friend. Later we sit at a beautiful table and eat cookies, drink tea from fine cups and saucers, and take turns reading poems aloud. These are the friends who introduced us to the Brave Writer lifestyle, and I love sharing Poetry Tea with them; it’s such a pleasure hearing the poem each person has chosen.
I read “A Summer Morning” by Rachel Field, because even though it’s only May, temperatures have been in the 80’s today. After the weather we’ve had in England recently, it definitely feels like summer!
1130am On the way home we stop off at the park to enjoy the sunshine.
12pm We make another stop, this time at the garden centre, to pick up some compost: it’s finally safe to put the tomato and pepper plants outside!
1230pm Lunch. J learned how to make cheese and ham tortilla flatbreads at our homeschool centre yesterday; he decides to make them again today. It requires a brick, apparently. C obligingly finds one in her den at the end of the garden. J teaches C how to make his new dish. I do the bit at the hob, involving flattening the tortilla between the griddle pan, a saucepan and a tea towel-wrapped house brick!
1pm C waters her vegetable patch while I plant out the tomatoes. J bounces on the trampoline then retreats from the heat inside.
145pm C and I go to my office for her English and maths. We continue our discussion of literal versus metaphorical meaning using The Arrow and our novel, The Phantom Tollbooth. We discuss what clichés are and pick out a few from a list I had printed out; then we start an exercise from The Arrow, creating a story taking metaphoric meanings literally. It’s about a king standing on the tip of an iceberg. C enjoys this so much that when I suggest finishing, she begs to do a bit more! Always a good sign 🙂 We finish by reading aloud a chapter of The Phantom Tollbooth.
We use Primary Grade Math Challenge for maths and C answers the level 2 questions on negative numbers.
245 pm Science: we continue our space travel project. The children make edible space shuttles following directions in this NASA Educators’ Guide.
We watch a You Tube video of the shuttle taking off and look at a printables of the parts of the space shuttle and the sequence of take-off, orbit, and landing. C and J then assemble their own shuttles using bread, carrot, celery and hummus. I video them “narrating” their own take-off to landing sequences on my iPhone. C leads the narration but J contributes a piece of information he remembered from our recent visit to the Kennedy Space Centre – something I hadn’t even realised he’d taken in at the time – I love it when that happens!
J follows his space shuttle snack with a plum from the fruit bowl, and then asks me to point out to him the plum tree in our garden. We look at the hard, grape-sized plums on the tree and I tell J how I ate the sweetest, juiciest plum from it on the day we moved into our house on 31 July 2007. He said he is going to keep an eye on the plums’ progress. Sometimes I wish I made more time for formal nature study in our homeschool; then I realise that thanks to the huge amount of free time they have to spend outdoors, C and J are actually quite in tune with nature and the seasons.
4pm History: I decide to squeeze in a bit of The Story of the World before swimming classes. J groans (he never likes the idea of history) but he soon joins C pleading for more when I stop after half a chapter on the Celts. Half a chapter is all the Celts get in The Story of the World, but as they are our bit of ancient history, we’re spending a bit longer on them than our curriculum suggests. I read from our living book on Boudicca while C spontaneiously makes a Boudicca “doll” from a feather the cats brought it.
5pm C and J go to their swimming classes while I squeeze in half an hour in the gym. When the children were at school, exercising often felt like a chore. Now I cherish my gym time! We eat dinner at the sports centre cafe, and C and J have some time jumping around in the soft play area.
7pm We go straight from the sports centre to take C to Cub Scouts (where she is one of only two girls). Normally this signals the end of my day’s “work”, but Big J’s commuter train is delayed tonight so J and I go back out to collect C from cubs at 830.
930pm I’m relaxing with an alcohol free beer and watching The Vampire Diaries.
A good day!
