Well, here I am again after another long break. However, the home education has not been on a break (hence not really enough time to keep up with the blog). Iona is getting on well with her reading and writing, although she claims not to be able to read. She has learned a lot of phonics from Alphablocks, especially the later episodes featuring graphemes such as "ai", "ph" and "ea", although sadly this is not so easily transferred to her writing, which uses a large amount of creative spelling!! She has also learned a lot of sight words, as she demonstrates when I ask her to read chapter headings in books that are new to her. Mostly she refuses to read herself, preferring me to do it for her, but occasionally she can be surprised into reading a few words or even short sentences, very often correctly.
We haven't been doing a great deal of maths lately, just talking about it as it comes up. Iona loves using our retracting metal tape measure whenever she can to measure things, especially the heights of ceilings. She also occasionally asks me to help her to count up beyond 20 - she is still getting stuck on the multiples of tens. I am hoping this will improve now that we have bought an abacus from a charity shop. We also sometimes discuss addition and subtraction (and more rarely, multiplication and division) as story problems, which I then translate into more standard arithmetical statements, mostly verbally but sometimes on paper with the appropriate symbols, and she is definitely starting to get the hang of this. Until recently I would have said that she didn't understand the concepts of odd and even, but this changed a couple of weeks ago. When possible, I had been pointing out how house numbers on one side of a road jumped up in 2's, and explaining about odd and even numbers. Then, one day, she was playing with her set of number skittles (1 to 10) and I found she had arranged them perfectly in 2 rows, odd and even! She has also been learning coin value, from being allowed to keep any coins we find on the ground, providing she can identify them, and saving up money to make small purchases. Occasionally I find myself worrying a bit that she isn't learning as much maths as her schooled peers, but on the positive side, she is getting a feel for why maths is as it is, rather than just having to learn seemingly random facts, and she hasn't learned to fear maths, as I did at primary school.
I think Iona's greatest learning has occurred in her area of greatest interest: art. I'm sure I wasn't as good at drawing and colouring at her age as she is. She is a great fan of the Studio Ghibli animations of Hayao Miyazake, and was thrilled to get 2 of his DVDs and 2 of the story books from her uncles for her 6th birthday last week. She has borrowed a how-to book on drawing Manga from the library, and occasionally works at copying it, although is handicapped by wanting to do her own thing rather than following instructions. She has also become very keen on Spongebob Squarepants, and has been drawing very good, detailed pictures of the characters and settings on this. Her biggest problem in this whole area is a lack of concentration; otherwise she could easily win colouring competitions. I am currently considering, having recently bought a couple of historical era craft books, how I can teach her history using as many crafts as possible, as I think this may fire an interest in her. (I currently record Horrible Histories onto our TiVo box but she rarely wants to watch them.)
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