Homeschooling Oma’s musings

 We have two orange trees that have been providing us with wonderful, sweet, juicy oranges for a number of years now and this week we finally got around to picking this years crop. The children had a lot of fun picking the oranges and investigating the garden.  It had recently rained so there were plenty of slugs and snails around for them to interact with.  Our two trees provided us with three very large bags of oranges, which are just as delicious as past years.  In previous years we have eaten a lot of them, given some away and juiced the remainder, but this year we decided to use some of them to make marmalade as a homeschool activity. After cutting and leaving our oranges to soak overnight, everyone sat down and watched Paddington 2 for inspiration.  Today we completed making our marmalade and it went fairly well for a first attempt, although next time we will slice the oranges finer.  A distraction at a crucial time resulted in a small amount of burni...

 We have had a fairly quiet week as a virus has been making its way through the family.  One of the great benefits of homeschooling is that you can adjust learning to cater for situations that arise, if they need a rest day then we have one.  Informal self guided learning still occurs, they just get the time they need to fully recuperate which is wonderful for everyone.  Something new that we have started this week is the Touch-type, Read and Spell program (see here ) for Grace and Sam.  Grace has muscle/joint issues that mean she finds it very painful to write for long periods of time, while Sam’s autism and adhd impact on his writing.  Both love technology and so we have decided to teach them to touch type to assist them and because we know this is an important skill for people to have these days. So far both are enjoying the Modules!  They are smiling and happy as they type and are keen to keep going even when they make mistakes.  Sam learns be...

The grandchildren have begun this years MS Readathon and on day two have already read a total of sixty two books and raised forty five dollars.  They have ambitions to read two hundred books and raise five hundred dollars this year!  They all love books and spend hours each week either reading aloud or quietly to themselves.  Gracie and Sam are both seriously into graphic novels at the moment, in particular the Dog Man and Cat Kid Comic Club books by Dav Pilkey.  While Rosalie and Lorelei are currently learning to read and love the My Little Pony books, Cat by Mike Dumbleton, Thelma the Unicorn by Aaron Blabey and anything with puppies and bunnies.