The Brick House

Monday

Despite appalling insomnia and only three hours sleep I dragged us out to HIP in the morning. Much more sensible than an attempt at keeping everyone entertained all day at home. So we spent a couple of hours there, then went to the bakery for lunch then the op shop, but decided against going to the supermarket. By the time we got home it was after 4 so I didn’t feel bad about subsiding into a heap and letting them watch Playschool until Mr Bat got home (and cooked dinner).

Tuesday

Park Day at the train park in Hobart. I managed to get a lot more sleep (nearly 12 hours) the night before but for some reason I felt worse than I did yesterday. Meh. Didn’t manage to get us out of the house til after 11, so we only had a couple of hours at the park before everyone went home. Since we were in Hobart anyway, I took advantage to go to the Vinnies on Argyle St before we went home. This time I discovered the back room with all the furniture and homewares, but managed to get home without trying to load an Art Deco dressing table into the back of the car (just wait until I have a 1930s farmhouse to fill up with refinished furniture *bounce bounce*). After we got home, they spent some time playing in the garden before coming in when they got too cold.

Wednesday

K has declared today to be a work day. As soon as she got up, and well before I had had sufficient coffee to feel complacent about assisting her, she was going through our newly arranged cupboard and pulling out all the maths manipulatives. They also played with the magnetic pattern tile game (called, obscurely, Marbletick) we found yesterday. Fortunately K waited until I’d finished coffee before deciding she wanted to do some writing.

First off, she wanted to draw a sloth, so I found her some pictures on the internet, and we wrote about it. I’m trying to encourage her to write in lower case rather than all upper case at the moment, so I suggested copy writing. She started with scrap paper, then I found a scrapbook which I will try to keep track of and use for drawing and copy writing. When I was looking for the scrapbook, I also found an alphabetised notebook, which I picked up ages ago to make a wordbank. We’ve already started a wordbank of words she uses to find YouTube videos, but that was just in an ordinary notebook without an attempt at alphabetical order, so won’t be helpful for very long. So far, in her scrapbook she’s drawn a picture of My Family, and is working on My Farm, with all the animals she wants us to get. H asked me to draw lots of different animals, then pulled the old abacus beads and metal posts (repurposed as a patterning and threading game) out of the cupboard and became engrossed in threading – at least until K got pissed off because he wasn’t sharing, and stole all the extra rods *sigh* She started playing when he stopped.

Today was actually intended to be a laundry and getting the house under control day, so of course it started raining overnight. I was gradually getting a bit of laundry done and hung on the drying racks, but since the kids were wanting intensive attention most of the morning, it wasn’t much. That, combined with the fact that we have to bring most of our current loans back to the library tomorrow so we can borrow all our holds, meant that around midday I suggested K could watch her Naked Science DVD, The Angry Skies (she loves this series and we’ve borrowed a few of them). H then had to have Playschool on the other computer, although I’ve been successfully putting him off all morning. At least now it gives me time to do more laundry, and heat up some frozen pumpkin soup and toast Turkish bread rolls for lunch. Despite my whinging about all that early-morning thinkivating I was forced to engage in, I’m quite pleased with our morning: it’s been much more productive and connected than many of our recent at-home days. A win for better organised supplies and facilitating K’s desire for more structured learning, I’d say.

When K’s show was over, and H had lost interest in watching his, they moved naturally on to playing together. I sorted the huge pile of clean laundry outside their room and K helped me put it all away. I printed out some African colouring sheets for K but she had gotten distracted by a book of graph paper I had cunningly made accessible and started drawing and making patterns. H found a basket which he was playing in as a boat, so I gave it a mast with the broom, and a sail from an old scarf. Then K wanted to play with it, and do stuff H did not want to do, and there was A Nargument *sigh* When she got over her huff she sat down to do a wipe-off number tracing book. As I write this they are both in the bedroom, and I can hear happy sounds of Duplo and K singing “Miss Polly Had A Dolly”, which is a lot better than yelling.

After the smalls started getting restless, they asked for the Kitchen Science book, but ince I wasn’t feeling quite up to that level of activity, I suggested reading library books. So we read all the ones we could find, including starting on one of the Africa books which we’ve had for ages. Then when I got sick of reading, H asked for playdough, so I made the cooked playdough recipe off the back of the Cream of Tartar packet, for the very first time in 13 years of parenting. It’s much better than my usual recipe, but I’m not sure if I’m going to make it again, because stirring it absolutely killed my wrists. But since it lasts a lot longer, hopefully I can convince these ratbags to look after it and not leave it out to dry up like they usually do… They have the rolling pin and cutters out and are making biscuits, and singing “The Leopard Has Lots of Spots”. Aww.

After that, K wanted to watch Walking With Cavemen, so H had to have more Playschool, but he is mostly bored with that and kept coming back and forth to me, mostly to play with Duplo. There’s also something weird happening with the media players, so after a while we mostly gave up. K finished watching her things, then rummaged around in the cupboard and came out with a box of addition flashcards, which have been in there for ages but have never been opened. She started out grouping the counting bears to do the sums, but she was just having revelation after revelation about how it all worked and by the end of it was adding the abstract numbers without even using her fingers (under 10 – she got stuck when I tried to explain place value so I stopped). She worked out for herself that you can get the same answer from different sums – at one point she worked out the answer to 7+3 and then said, “See, I knew it was 5+5!” Just watching her brain catch fire and her total absorption and excitement when things clicked was possibly the most awesome 45 minutes or so I’ve spent in seven years of home educating. And just watching what happened when we tried to explain place value again later on when she was no longer in the learning zone – the alertness drained out of her face and you could just see her switching over into self-consciousness and anxiousness about not getting it – reinforced my philosophy never to “teach” my kids anything.

Anyway, I don’t know how parents do formal school-at-home, I’m exhausted after all the edumacation going on today. But in between my children braining all over the place, I did manage to get enough laundry done that Mr Bat doesn’t have to go to work in the nudd tomorrow, which is A Good Thing. And now to bed…