we have been drifting a bit in organised home ed since dec, and TBH we are not anywhere near as organised or formal as the ticklists might have you believe. They are a bit aspirational, there is no negative consequence or anything for failure to ‘achieve’ . However, having done well and achieved the aspirational does have a positive – something from ‘the book box’ which is a selection of book people books, some ‘stocking fillers’ also in BB’s case, and lots of well dones.
for BB, this is just to guide really, we hope to do something reading and something mathsy most days and ‘something else’ and mostly she gets on with whatever she fancies and is pretty autonomous. SHe likes the idea of a ticksheet and doing 4 things a day, and she liked the idea of having different boxes to choose from, so we will see…
SB is part her choice, and part the fact that she needs to gear up as she wants to go to university, so will therefore need to get some qualifications along the way. this means contemplating getting us organised enough that some gcse’s will happen. Unfortnuately for SB, she has 2 expert procrastinators for parents. Only the pressures and organisation of school and then uni got us where we are, and left to our own devices we would prob both be dreamers and wished we had done x-ers. so hoping that the ticksheet will get SB going into reg doing something and help her to where she wants to be. Ideally she should do 7 things a day [eek! i imagine some spillage to weekend] and ideally 5 of these should be from the bolded group, and she can choose 2 out to the unbolded – tho TBH, think this is going to be v aspiational rather than actual 
. i think we still have some fiddling to do to get it to work for her. [SB made me add days of week to top, and don't think that works! - having said that to her, she says she is going to bob around - so why it needed days i don't know! (maybe because BB's had?)] so it is a ‘work in progress’ . Anyway, we worked on it together, and she thinks it is reasonable and is quite happy with it. we try to ensure she actually likes the resources we use, and actually is happy looking and learning those things [hence no latin 
as tho i would like to do it, she isn't keen at the mo]
welcome comments as always 
and thinking i should say that sb usually goes for a 20-25 things as an average – so definitely aspirational… – and that others do lots of their home ed at museums, in groups, and in many other inspirational ways, but due to our split age group and rural locale and general not v good at going a distance, we tend to do socialising and arts and crafts or sports in groups. [many strokes for different folks and all that]
3 1/2 hours plus extras sounds like a lot. They don’t do maths every day at school
When Gwenny was at that stage, she used to manage about 4 things a day, but she would never have dealt with an aspirational timetable, would have just seen it as failure when it wasn’t achieved!
BB’s looks like fun though
Our days might look a little like that if I charted them I guess, but we don’t do formal anything of a Friday – Never have
~ it’s a ‘school’ free day! Essentially we always kept it free for outing etc, but in reality it’s been a shopping and toddler-group day for the last few years, and before that… It is a nice day to think about going for a walk, doing some baking, sewing, gaming & playing together, catching-up (in my case), extra editing (Jake), or nothing at all sometimes!!
I think when I was at Secondary we did two double periods of maths a week ~ so about 4 hrs all told, and the same for English (2hrs Lit, 2 hrs Lang). Science was 2hrs per discipline. Then languages had an hour each! All other subjects also just got one hour, or even, in some cases, a split period (so just 1/2 hr!).
I think having something to aspire to is useful ~ esp’ if there are no consequences outside of personal disappointment, which might then be used as a motivator (maybe, for some people ~ I know that doesn’t work for all…). It’s a tough balance to strike, I find, between providing and cajoling just enough to help the children achieve their goals, but also allowing them the freedom to choose/take responsibility for their own path of learning, or not…
Keep us posted…
thanks both of you, have tried a variety of ways of presenting and we both [sb and i]know that if i put less, she does less, she also wants a lot of choice! in reality if we do math 3 times a week, doing well. will remove the weds one [as we are mostly busy/out - the things on weds line up with wodensmeet
] and fiddling with it more when we see how it goes. i guess i was thinking that i did 2 music pracs a day and then school on top… will feed back . i don’t want to work her into the ground, or make it all school at home. orign my plan for sb’s was to have colour coded boxes and then choose a certain number from each box in a week and i think worked a bit better in my head. but hoping to perhaps see what happens and tailor it to what we actually do.
it is an interesting exercise in balancing tigermummy aspirations on the one hand with wanting-my-kid-to-have-a-fun-life-mummy aspirations and then through the filter of what SB wants to do
BB’s far easier to do TBH, and she and I both like it.
With Claudia for the last few years we did maths, English, history or science & one other thing every day* which was about 3-4 hours worth. I haven’t done any enrichment type stuff with her for ages though – we were just aiming for efficient!
She undoubtedly did more maths at home than at school – she has 3 hours a week but we had do an entire school week’s worth of work in a hour at home (one of the things I like least about school). Science pretty much the same – we did far less practical stuff that you but school doesn’t do much more & the waste soooooo much time [depressing myself now!]
(*unless we were going out
)
i have often thought that what you did with C is prob closest at what we aim to do with SB, but that we don’t achieve it as often! since C is doing brilliantly at school, hoping that means that SB would at least be OK! guessing what i am looking at is 3-4 hours on average over the week, but if lots of going out, likely to be less.
you do a much broader range than we did. After we’d done the core stuff C was pretty much on her own – she did a bit of French & some geography, art, cooking, craft etc, or took herself off swimming – because I had to devote time after lunch to the younger children; I really wasn’t involved in any of that stuff. And we’ve never done any of the music of course.
It looks great to me, SB will do brilliantly
have to admit that sb does most of this on her own, but gets help when stuck and we peer everyso often to make sure she understands and is getting the point of what she is being asked.
My plan with Jasper is similar to BB’s. A selection from – writing/OT/worksheet, phonics/reading/reading eggs, maths/SM/manipulatives, read aloud, SALT activity, ABA target, some sort of life skill/going out/group/exercise etc. I try to keep it reasonably balanced but we inevitably spend more time on whatever interests him most.
I probably spend more time with him than I did with Claudia at the same age because he requires much more help to initiate stuff.
thanks layla, we also have life skills unofficially for BB as it is something we try and work on quite a lot. and clearly if BB decides to spend loads of one day on reading eggs etc we aren’t likely to move or shift her just for an arbitrary list. it is more for her to look at and utilise too to see what she can do]
With Jasper the ‘read aloud’ covers pretty much all else … science/history/nature/geog etc together with a liberal smattering of multimedia stuff.
I am far less ready to say fine we’ll just let him follow his interests than I was with Claudia at the same age (though that is still the bulk of the day) simply because his interests re so well defined & he is so resisted to trying anything new. I have to push a bit but still have many days where we will do 10 reading eggs lessons or 20 pages of SM then he won’t want to do either for weeks.
And I am very glad than Nellie is having such a great time at nursery because that covers everything – academics + craft, cookery, outdoor trips, music, dance class & yoga etc – I am happy not to have to worry about what she’s doing right now!
if you can make any sense of that through the typos well done! (had help from Rufus interruptions :p )
please anyone else comment too… it is really quite hard to try and do balanced, interested and worry about too much or too litte, so having otherviewpoints really helpful, and already adjusted SB’s [tho it is the orig still here on the blog]
Looks good to me.
thankyou