Writing

As I have mentioned here before, J was never a big writer while at school. We were told that she wasn’t able or willing (they weren’t sure which!) to write more than a few words. Last June, when we embarked upon our year of travelling, I began our school year together by asking the children to write about anything they wanted. Whatever made them most happy or that they were interested in. J chose My Little Ponies, and proceeded to write six pages, complete with illustrations, about her favourite toy.

This kind of illustrates J’s approach to writing. If it’s something she really cares about or has a great interest in then she will write and write for hours. Otherwise she  will show little interest. She’s very all or nothing! So I am on a constant mission to find the next engaging thing.

Her handwriting is also a bit spider like and her spelling can be erratic, although with some thought she will usually get there by herself in the end! We have been trying out a new pen and pencil, by Stabilo, which claims to be able to help with proper pen positioning and handwriting. J has been getting along with it rather well. I do think that the pencil is very expensive, but she seems to enjoy writing with it and, perhaps, her handwriting has improved!

(No – I haven’t been paid to write about these pens. I bought them from a shop with my own money but thought that someone else might be interested in what we think of them!)

Our Busy Week

We have had such a productive week. Here are just some of the things we have been up to!

J continued with her project on electricity and circuits, and re-wired some plugs

K did some cooking

We made pool noodle boats and talked about friction and why they travel better on water than on land.

There was a lot of reading

Multi tasking reading

Outdoor Geography

We got a free Lego Story Starters kit – and J had a great time creating her own tales with Lego

J Wrote some stories using an iPad app

They climbed, when we were so early at the library that it wasn’t open yet!

We went to a Home Ed meet-up at a splash park

K acted the fool!

Thursday was just too nice to do anything other than play Lego in the garden while eating ice lollies

K did a Freerunning demonstration at the Leisure Centre, while J did a beautiful gymnastics routine!

Competitive Uno and Other Things

Our week ended wit some work on the computer. We are returning to our theme of Writing, and talked about formatting in word processing programmes. We used a piece of text about the idiosyncrasies of the English language, and changed font style and size. We looked at both the mouse clicks and the keyboard shortcuts to underline the text, make it bold and italic. This led to looking at other keyboard shortcuts and formatting options, including cut, copy and paste, left, right and centre justify, changing line spacing and paragraph indents.

After that K spent some time crating a poster for her bedroom wall, with different fonts and sized text. She printed it on red paper and is very proud of her work.

Meanwhile, J looked at illuminated letters used in medieval documents. She coloured in some print outs and designed her own.

We finished the week by meeting some friends, which ended in a hilarious game of twister and some very competitive Uno!

Writing Week!

We are spending this week, concentrating on writing. We are looking at it’s many forms and uses and having lots of fun playing around with our own writing.

I often leave a morning challenge out for the girls to get on with first thing in the morning. This is a wonderful way to get them engaged when they first wake up and to evoke some enthusiasm for the current topic and to give them a wonderful sense of achievement when they have completed something before breakfast! Also, and rather cunningly, it gives them a task to get on with if they rise earlier than me and sometimes gives me another half hour’s sleep!

For their morning challenge on the first day of our writing unit I left them a host of different writing prompts to look at and hopefully find inspiration from. K loves reading and devours books in huge numbers, but she struggles with inspiration to come up with her own topics to write about. I left her two pages of ideas from which she picked a couple and got on with some creative writing before 9am.

Writing Prompts

When J was still in school, just over a year ago, I was consistently told that she was not reaching her full potential and that she should be doing more writing. Her teachers complained that she often did the minimum required with a writing task and quickly moved on to a play based activity. I have since discovered that school was right, she is capable of a lot more than she produced at school but not because she is lazy, she was just uninspired. She is a little fussy but, when she finds something that grabs her she is wonderful and will happily produce much more work than is needed. So my challenge is to find new ways to engage her.

I have given them the freedom to choose anything they want to write about, in any way they wish. I worried that giving them this freedom might lead to unfocussed messing about, but on the contrary it worked well! K chose to do a lapbook on Herpetology – a big project that should take a few days to complete. J started by drawing some pictures and then used it as inspiration to write a story – about a duck who likes libraries, reads a book that hypnotises him into not liking libraries any more, and is then cured by his daughter and the king by a potion made of honey. She then stood and read it aloud for us all to hear.

I loved it!

The Hypnotised Duck…

All readings should be conducted while wearing a leotard and lit by a lava lamp.