Our Waldorf Homeschool Journey

Hi Everyone! We’ve reached the end of a very long day. The kids are in bed, not sleeping….StJohn is singing, Juliette is reading. That’s all fine, quite normal. All is quiet and calm. Unlike this morning! I’ll tell you about that later!

Firstly to give you some background. Yesterday, I taught Jules about the skeleton, it’s function and basic names for each part,ie. skull etc. To do this I drew a simple diagram of a skeleton, which I’ll be adding to the Homeschool Resources page of the site later this week (as I struggled to find a suitable skeleton!). Then I labelled Juliette’s body with all the relevant names, skull, shoulder girdle, ribs etc. in the right places. Which got a lot of laughs from her. She in turn had to stick labels onto StJohn. And finally she had to fill in the correct words for each body part on the diagram. They really loved this excercise and ran around for the rest of the day, with their labels still on. I got a couple of odd looks from other Moms at the park yesterday afternoon! Anyway back to today.

Homeschool started well. We continued with the Biology lesson. Todays’ lesson was “what we need to survive”. Air, light, water, food. With this came “The Bean Experiment”. We took 3 beans. Each one was put into it’s own cotton wool bed. One will be watered and keep without light. One will be in the light and not watered. The last and “lucky” bean (as far as I’m concerned) will have light and water. Now we have to monitor their growth and see which one does best. (Please cross everything that the Lucky Bean actually starts growing!) I’ll keep you posted. With any luck the cats won’t eat the beans….

Then we had Maths worksheets to get through. Juliette struggled with maths initially, as she had a fear of any numbers greater than 10! This was brought with her from her previous school. So it’s taken months to get her to view numbers as fun, and to find comfort in the predictability of Mathematics. It’s finally happening this year. Today she was doing addition, with hundreds, tens and units, eg. 345+27=. She did so well, and really enjoyed it. We called it a day at this point…..

The kids were getting irritable, for some reason today, and then shortly after our Maths worksheet turned into Monsters. Fighting and shouting! I swear they could have grown extra heads and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Jules was moaning at StJohn, apparently he spoke to her “rudely”? StJohn was shouting at me, because I wouldn’t fetch a cat for him, to hold and love to death, under my desk? Hey I wasn’t going to try and rationalise this mish-mash of emotion!

I finally sorted them out, and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to get far if I started Language studies. I’ve found that this is one of the Joys of Homeschooling for me. It’s flexibility is a huge advantage. If they’re having a bad day, you can skip school, Cut Your Losses! Do something else, and tomorrow you can make up the workload shortfall. There is no need to force them to learn. It has been my experience that this achieves little, and you’ll have to repeat the lesson again!

Anyway they had a friend to play this afternoon. (The sweet child arrived with a flower she’d found for me!) They had a grand old time together. For all you “socialisation maniacs” out there, believe it or not, we moved to a new city, where we knew no-one, 2 months ago, and they’ve made 3 friends at the park. All these friends visit regularly! They’ve formed a tight knit group, who share and play together fantastically.

Finally the day is at an end, I’m now exhausted, I’m going to have a long hot bath, and then in to bed with my husband and a funny DVD on the Notebook. We don’t and won’t have aTV in the house! More on this another day!

I wish you all a good nights rest, and a day filled with fun and laughter tomorrow.

With Love, S.

Filed under: Homeschool on June 12th, 2007