This Homeschooling Life #6

Another new month and the sixth edition of ‘This Homeschool Life’. I have to admit to being a little glad January is over. It’s probably my least favourite month of the year. We all struggled to get back into any kind of ‘routine’ after the lovely Christmas break. This month so far has been wet, cold and very windy which hasn’t inspired us to feel like doing much at all.

For me, I felt like I hit a bit of a homeschool burnout this month. Feeling a little overwhelmed with life in general, and the constant-ness of everything. Add in a severe lack of sleep, bickering children and a week long migraine and it’s a recipe for disaster! I decided the best course of action was to just let go of the worry. Go with the flow and remember WHY we chose to home ed. Not to have them sitting down doing ‘school at home’ but to let them follow their own interests. Home ed is an entirely different route, and looks so different to school. Sometimes my brain still returns to the ‘school conditioning’ that it was so used to growing up and forgets that it’s ok to be different!

So… I got the girls to have a think about what they wanted to learn over the next couple of months or so. They came up with some great ideas and we came up with a couple of ideas for each one… for example, Baya is horse mad and decided to she wanted to study them. So we thought she could do some horse inspired art – maybe a 3D model or some Dala Horse esq paintings.. as well as making a mini fact file about horses. Creating mind maps is a great way to get the kids inspired and thinking about what is important to them. I’ve found over the years that topics that they have chosen are met with so much more enthusiasm!

We’ve been joining in with Nurture Store’s Art Spark group the past couple of weeks. We all love painting and creating, and having some daily prompts and ideas has been just the thing to kick-start us this month. Right now what I need is ready-made ideas that don’t require me to think or plan too much! It’s also been lovely having a community of other families joining in to chat with and share what we’ve been creating. The girls had fun making some wax resist watercolour paintings {I enjoyed it too!] and really really loved making some milk marbled paper.

The girls love doing science-y stuff, and I came across Mystery Science {on facebook I think}, It’s a site full of ready to go science lessons aimed at roughly ages 6-11 so fits pretty well for us all to work on together. We signed up for free access until the end of the school year {end of June}, so far we’ve worked through the Birth of Rocks topic and it’s been fun – videos to watch, worksheets, discussion questions and some fun hands-on experiments.

We haven’t been doing many trips out lately, I don’t know why as we used to go out lots, I think we’ve just gotten bogged down in life and work… I’d planned to go for a couple of days out last week – I was planning on Chirk Castle and a nice long hike to Erddig… unfortunately the weather was awful – so windy I think we’d have literally blown away if we’d tried to walk anywhere! So last week we headed to Chester for the day instead, thankfully the weather was a little nicer there. We took a walk around the Cathedral and then headed to the Grosvenor Museum after a yummy lunch out. A change of routine was just what we needed. We headed back to Chester on Friday on to meet friends to make some land art in the park too.

Those days out made a big difference – I’m definitely going to plan in some more trips out, I can’t wait for some better weather now so we can spend more time outside. I don’t actually mind being out when it’s cold, but pouring rain and storm-strength winds are a different matter!

<div align="center"><a href="http://thisenchantedpixie.org" rel="nofollow" title="This Homeschooling Life" target="_blank"><img src="http://thisenchantedpixie.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/this-homeschooling-life.jpg" alt="This Homeschooling Life" style="border:none;" /></a></div>