Gabriel was continuing on with his English block we started last term, and this week we were looking at sentence structures, whilst continuing with reading "Beowulf" and Padraic Colum's King Arthur stories.
We looked at a pictorial proof in geometry this week.
My version.
Gabriel's version.
Gabriel has progressed onto modellling for his craft project, and is currently modelling zebras, before he will eventually move onto planning his project.
Arden and I continued working through the alphabet this week, looking at the letters L and Z. Next week we'll do a mix of activities, before moving onto the vowels.
Here's our modelling.
And our painting for the week.
This is my lamp painting.
Arden's lamp painting.
Willow is onto working on her computing block. Damien is taking her through the basics of hardware, and she's teaching herself touch typing using Ktype and tux type. (Damien works in IT and we have linux as our operating system at home.)
I bought a few new books recently: "The Little Prince" and also "Between Form and Freedom" and also "The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care." We've all been enjoying "The Little Prince", and it's been our lunch time read for the week. Arden is particularly enjoying it. I wasn't sure how much I'd like "Between Form and Freedom" as I'd come to realise quite some time ago that homeschooled teenagers are different from schooled ones, waldorf or not. Generally this book is a schooled child's book and not a home educated child's book. There are bits I'm finding really annoying, but there are a few good bits in there too. The last book I haven't had much of a chance to look at properly yet, but I cut out all pasteurised dairy, after reading that this can cause some babies discomfort when breastfeeding, and Irving is certainly cheerier now. I wasn't having a lot of pasteurised dairy (milk and cream at home are raw) but now I'm pretty much sticking to raw.
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2025
The teen situation is definitely different when home educated, and I really would focus on the educated word there, and not home schooled. I've now met quite a range of people doing both now, and the home schooled ones end up with more of the schooled kids issues. Feeling controlled, lacking autonomy and intrinsic motivation over their lives is something I have come across a bunch of times. These things are particularly an issue from what I have seen if they are over scheduled. Obviously if their schedule allows for flexibility to do other things and to explore in their own time, as well as doing structure, then this won't be an issue.
There are quite a number of people that move to home schooling here in the teen years. Interestingly in Adelaide, the more experienced home educators, use to almost discourage it, because the way the educating happened there was more of a natural learning approach and that can be difficult to transition into, when all one has ever known is school. I do like that a lot of people step out, even in high school here, with the support of a programme, because I think learning outside the mainstream schooling system is still an enormous step in the right direction, and TBH it is what we started with, although from the Steiner system, and in the early years.
Socially it can be difficult hanging out with the kids that have had a hard time at school, because they can bring the chaos of their school issues with them. I've also learnt, over the years, that there are some great schooled teens to mix with, and generally these are the ones that have high parental/multi-generational involvement in their lives. Hold on to Your Kids is a great read on this topic, and whatever education model one uses, it is an excellent read on how to maintain good family connections with one's children.
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