note: this started out as a blog post trying to encapsulate what we plan on doing with learning this year, but it became rather huge, so I have split it in to two parts. Another future post will talk about the whys of what we are doing this year, and the structure question.

Coding

I have already written about our signing up to Code Year. The first email was yesterday, and rather than just going by the emails, we have decided to log in and do a few lessons at a time. Willem did three lessons yesterday morning before he found his head was getting ‘complicated’. Some people have complained that Code Year is too basic or easy, or that there are better training programmes out there. I have to say that with the little we have done, it is perfect for us: it is at a level that it is challenging Willem but still understandable. He is already learning Boolean Logic, and also learning the importance of carefully reading instructions and following them – if you leave out the ” or the ; things just don’t work. And these ideas about logic are helping with Willem’s understanding of …

Maths

Maths is a tricky subject in our house. Not that we present it as tricky – to us Maths is interesting, and vital, and important and fun. And Willem will often sit work through geometry with his Dad, or the angles of a circle whether it relates to learning the points on a compass, or understanding what pi is. Willem is also pretty good at much ‘practical’ maths – for example if we are baking and I ask him to figure out how many milliliters are in half a cup he can do it pretty easily in his head. And I know there are quite a few home educators who say that kids can learn most maths, at least at this age, purely through ‘practical/everyday maths’. But I am not quite reconciled to that approach. However, Willem has a real block about ‘doing maths’. He just can’t learn his times tables, for example. Often if we sit down to ‘do maths’ he will take an hour to do work he could probably do in 15 minutes if he just got in and did it, rather than faffed around, argued about it, tried to avoid it and threw a hissy fit. So I am trying a bit of a compromise: we are still following the Singapore Maths system, in that I bring out the work book maybe once a week and do the section we are up to, using that as a rough guide of where we should be at (we are currently using the 3A level books). Once Willem has grasped the concept, we move on even if that means we don’t finish all the exercises in that section. If he is finding it difficult, I provide extra problems and activities. This is probably a once a week thing, at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week I will recap to make sure it has ‘stuck’. For example, we are up to the section about dividing by six. Once he got his head around the concept of long division, he found it all very easy. So every morning this week I give him half a dozen long division problems to solve (a three to four digit number divided by a one digit number).

We are also reading and ‘using’ some great books that present maths in a more narrative sense: the great ‘Sir Cumference‘ series and Mathematicians are People, Too. We find this ‘fun’ approach is a great lead in to maths ideas. We will read about a problem, or the biography of a mathematician, and then we talk through the idea. Of course this is part of a combination – the background ‘basics’ Willem learns through sitting down and doing worksheets and exercises now gets put in to place exploring these new ideas. The same as with the discussing problems with his Dad as I mentioned above.

Languages

Languages has been a bit of a tangled path for us so far. However I think home education is an amazing opportunity for a child to start learning a language at a young age, and one I really want to take advantage of. It is also part of the reason I am not going to be unschooling. While some children, when a bit older, will be motivated to learn a language and sometimes pick it up relatively quickly, at this age Willem needs the discipline of working on a language regularly if he is going to learn.

However, what languages to learn?

As part of my attempts to involve Willem more in his learning, I decided he had to choose what language to learn. Also, if he is learning something he wants to do rather than something he is being unhappily forced to do, chances are he will do a lot better! So what did he want to learn?

Japanese.

Why Japanese? His explanations were:

• He likes Japan and Japanese ‘stuff’
• We can get (and have) things like DVDs and books in Japanese that he can use to help learn, and they are fun
• I (Natalia) did Japanese at highschool and understand it a little bit so that helps with the learning

All great reasons, so I agreed to learning Japanese. And I was keen to revive my lost language skills as well.

However, we as a family thought it would probably be helpful for him to learn a European language. We already had a great Latin programme to work on. But Willem was not keen on Latin. It evenutally came out that the reason was that there are no DVDs in Latin (!!!) and very few interesting children’s books in Latin (fair enough). Willem wanted to learn French. And Italian. Hmm. We talked it through a couple of times, and Willem came to agree that learning Latin was probably a good idea because

• It would help him learn Romance languages (such as French and Italian) later on
• The little Latin he had already done is already helping him understand how English works, and he has fun seeing English words that developed from Latin
• It would be cool to know Latin as he continues to read and learn about Rome

So how did we decide which one to learn?

Well, we are doing both.

Now, at first it might seem a bit too complicated or overwhelming to do both. Isn’t Willem going to get confused having to learn two new vocabularies? Two new grammars? Two new ways of seeing and explaining the world? I don’t think so for two reasons. Firstly, I have met various children who speak three or even four different languages at Willem’s age – I have an acquaintance who lives in Switzerland. She speaks English to her children, her husband speaks Italian, and they speak French at school. And they speak all three languages very well. Children I worked with in Papua New Guinea were speaking English, Tok Pisin and two or three village dialects by age 10. Children have a great ability to pick up languages if it is just presented to them as what they do, rather than some hard task they have to master.

Also, Japanese and Latin are so different that I don’t think there is much chance of ‘mixing them up’.

We are not just learning the languages, but taking a cultural approach, learning history, living, culture as well as the language. And we are loving it!

To learn Latin we are using the excellent Cambridge Latin Course (which I will review in a later post). This approach is not purely language-learning based, it also covers Roman culture. We are using both the textbook and a DVD-rom that has exercise to work through on the computer along with videos. Hugely helpful, especially with pronunciation. We also use Learning Latin Through Mythology, and I am looking for other materials to incorporate as we go along.

For Japanese, we have decided to go with LinguaLift (which I will review in a later post). The two deciding factors were

• It starts on the premise you will not use Romaji (read Say no to romaji! to find out why)
• The customer service was excellent

So far Willem has been learning how to read and write hiragana, as the approach we are using requires you know this before moving on to anything else. I was worried he would get bored, and start asking when he could learn how to ‘talk in Japanese’. Actually, he is loving it! As well as using the iphone and computer games we have to help learn, he will happily sit down each day and write them out again and again until they are neat and correct. His hiragana so far is actually neater than his English handwriting!

We are also continuing to read a lot about Japan, and watching lots of documentaries about Japanese history. Being Willem these are focusing a lot on Samurai and swords

Music

Willem is continuing weekly piano lessons, and he is also doing music theory with the same teacher. He is starting to really enjoy it, helped by the fact his teacher is teaching him things like the blues and also encouraging him to compose his own work. Every learning day includes practice and theory, but at this stage it is only taking 10-15 minutes a day. We often have music playing in the house, whether it is The Beatles (Willem’s current favourite), Vivaldi operas or something from the ridiculously ecclectic 27 DAYS worth of music we currently have on itunes. However, the only music I will have on as background music when Willem is working is instrumental – he is a developing a tendency to get distracted by music and concentrate on that rather than what he is meant to be working on (I am the same – I can’t ‘do’ background music when working). We are not bothering with Music history, learning composers etc. at this stage, though of course if Willem asks about something we are always happy to talk about it and get books out or search the internet for information.

Flat on his back learning about bridges.

‘Expert’ topic

I read somewhere about the idea that kids have an expert topic each week, and they read and work through this topic (I can’t remember where I saw this idea, and if you know where I might have seen it please let me know so I can credit it). As part of making Willem more involved in his own learning he is choosing topics, and has four so far. Rather than making them only a week long each, we are just working through them for as long as they are full and interesting. The first topic Willem chose was ‘Engineers’. He started out wanting to learn about famous engineers through history, but this has morphed into what is engineering, and then looking at different aspects of structural engineering (this is because a) structural engineering is interesting for him because he can ‘see’ things to do with it and b) his Dad is a civil engineer, so he has an expert on hand ).

The way we work with this expert topic is to give Willem time to work through it each learning day by mainly presenting him with opportunities and letting him work through it himself. Our job is to provide him with the materials, answer questions and ask questions now and then to see how he is going. And to listen to him talk things through! The materials we provide include:

• A section of the bookcase in our reading room* dedicated to books on this topic (or at this stage, books on the floor. Many of our bookcases are away being repaired at the moment). Willem is free to pick them up and read them whenever he wants, and sometimes I tell him that his next activity is to read one of those books. Where possible I also put books on his Kindle relevant to the topic.
• Documentaries about the topic, whether this is DVDs, Youtube/Vimeo or iPlayer.
• Computer games relating to his topic.
• Websites about the topic.
• Brainpop videos and quizzes about his topic
• Trips to see things relating to his topic

I will write a post about the Engineering expert topic when we are finished, listing what we did and what materials we used.

What about ….

I know that I haven’t listed a lot of explicit topics/subjects that many people would consider important for education. What about reading? Science? Geography? History? Writing?

I think all of those are important too. And we cover them. Many of them through the expert topic (for example, with Engineering we have been doing a lot of science, but also quite a bit of history and  both physical and human geography).

Reading is not an issue for me with Willem – he reads fluently, and happily reads for pleasure as well as ‘learning’. Much of what he reads has a large history component, so there is more history again. We are not explicitly working on things like spelling and grammar right now however. Willem’s spelling can be ‘interesting’ at times, but it is interesting to see how as gets older and reads and writes more it is improving. I don’t think it is particularly important to explicitly work on grammar now, and it is interesting to see how much Willem is learning about English grammar while learning other languages. We will work more on language arts when Willem is older.

One last important skill that we are working on yet not really doing ‘lessons’ – touch typing. Willem had previously worked through BBC Dance Mat Typing, and while this did not mean he was a ‘touch typer’ once finished, it gave him a grounding of where his fingers should go. And now every bit of typing he does – coding lessons, typing a message, using a search engine, playing computer games – Willem touch types. It might be slow, but the more he does it, the better he gets. And he has realised for himself how useful it is.

All that other stuff

There are plenty of other things we do that I haven’t included as a topic here. We have started going running together a few times a week, which along with horse riding and rugby, could be counted as Physical Education I guess. We have bulbs growing both inside and outside, will soon be preparing a vegetable garden (and Willem has asked to ‘do’ agriculture as an expert topic) and we go walking every Saturday, so we are ‘learning’ about nature. Willem loves to draw, and construct things out of scrap, and sometimes helps me with the letterpress,  so we are probably covering Art. We often discuss religions, how and why different people do things differently, why bad things happen, so there’s philosophy, religious studies and citizenship. Like any home educating family, and plenty of families where children go to school, we realise that learning is about a lot more than sitting down and doing lessons, or even setting aside time to ‘learn stuff’. Kids are learning all the time. Scratch that – humans are learning all the time. And while the priorities of what Willem needs/could/probably should learn change as he grows, hopefully the most important thing we will be able to pass on to him is a love of learning, and knowing how to do it.

*The reading room in our house is the room with the piano, the lounge chairs, good lighting and one of our many bookcases. Of course reading happens in quite a few rooms in this house!