Schooling so far

24/4/2015 – Written by Julie Rayner

Ok so the boys don’t jump for joy at doing school, even though we only school them from 9am until mid-day, but I think they appreciate how good they have it even if they hide it well.

Most days the morning goes ok, we start with doing Mathsbuddy for 45mins thats nice and quiet, I normally in this time get on with some of my work.

In their class they probably have around 20 children. The Correspondence school site sets up Threads online for them to post Local, International or just funny news, they have set threads on each subject they are learning, and they can post what they have been up to, I think this is great as it gets them thinking about whats going on in the world, and gets them writing and responding to others, it is encouraged to read everyones posts and reply to a few and get to know your class.

There are always a few projects going on at once, as well as projects they have been given many power point presentations to work on that they have to present to the rest of the class in a thread.

We have covered Magna Carta, all aspects of Shipwrecks, Anzac and World War 1, Explorers and Adventurers, Survivors, looked into comparisons and contrasts. At the end of the year (2015) they had to pick a charity of their choice and do a audio and visual presentation as to why the school should pick their charity to fund raise for next year.

The boys have made biscuits, made poppies, designed sports shoes, made a survival outfit from plastic bags, made outfits from lego boxes, designed book covers and done some pretty awesome drawings

Survival Fairy? 🙂

Survival Crazy Baker 🙂

I feel personally that although we only do 3 hours a day my boys are learning a lot more than they did in school, especially Lucas who is so easily distracted now only has Jacob to distract him.

They do reading tests, writing tests and maths tests at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year and so far they are doing extremely well, Jacob works well above his age in everything, Lucas above his age in reading and writing and now where he should be for Maths, where as at School he was not understanding a lot of Maths.

There are certainly challenges with Schooling mainly online, we sometimes use something called PDF Escape which allows to boys to type onto a work sheet, but it’s not the easiest to use and with a touch of OCD in the family it’s hard watching your words not all line up, you can’t backspace to get rid of work, it’s not the nicest looking, so that is still going to take a bit of getting used to…

All in all I love it, we get the whole afternoon to ourselves as a family, so far so good. 🙂