Miquon rules

Or at least seems to in our house. Got home from work to find maths type books - singapore and miquon liberally scattered over the floor, a magazine from nanna f as well, where she had written out a crossword, and filled in lots of puzzles.

I think SB going through a very dynamic autonomous era at the present, and really diving into learning spontaneously. Oddly, it makes me feel even more disorganised that I haven’t got things at my fingertips for her. Writing and maths are the flavour to savour, though a lot of read aloud history and stories going on. The usborne farm series are proving to be a bit of a hit, with SB just quoting the first page. Certainly a lot of processing is happening.

Through ebay got lots of books coming through in a steady stream, so looked at the usborne through the ages homes and houses, and also barefoot animal stories from around the world [4 of] which we do a fair bit of talking around – geography, beliefs etc. Am trying to have a rest a bit on beliefs, as noticed when swimming that SB said of the life guard to herself ‘she has a cross, she must be a christian’ and felt that this was seeming a bit labelling, and don’t want her to think she has to attatch a label to herself. Sticking to gods and goddesses as plurality therefore, and mostly ancient. Science also a bit of a back burner – Chris has loads of Krampf experiments tucked away, and I really need to get a resource box organised so that we can experiment like mad [sb likes!]

After tea she was again desperate to do some miquon with the cuisinaire rods [which for a year I wondered why I bought them, and now I know!] and was not keen to go to bed until she’d finished a page… and another one!

I used to read the autonomous ‘trust to the process’ type posts, and panic and have deep suspicions, but I see it in action, and it is working. However, I am a queen of listmakers, and somewhere high on the anal retentiveness scale [a former boss recurrently threatened to list me for an anal stretch], so I think Chris and I need to come to agreement on recording the broad brushes of home ed, and perhaps develop my ideas for a broad brush story arc for things such as history, with points for incorporating geography along the way.

Basically trying to predict tangents to go down, and facillitating the resources rather than ‘today we are looking at france’ type arrangements! lso with the piano in another room, we are forgetting about it [like the tv] so I want some kind of game that we draw cards for activities [games, music, crafts, experiments as well as a few readers/workbooks] and then do them [cheating allowed so actually get one she wants to do!] at those lulls, so that it again sparks off using some of the hidden away resources.

Also Chris needs to BLOG! After all, this is his blog [and the flikr is his account too, that I seem to have overtaken. born to organise, thas me!]. cos when she is 5, i want to start some way of recording what we do as we do it with comments on the other things you notice – like increased attention span, and processing info thoughts etc. Like Jan, so that if ever we become known to PTB [and this area strong on that, so anticipate it will be near instantaneous] we can at least be confident in our body of evidence – even if we decline to show it.

Other ponderings, I think i’ve swapped my desires from an eglu to a swallow now where is that fairy godmother???