Home schooling

My eldest son, William, was having problems at school so his mum and i decided to home school him.

Based in Rainham,  Kent (the UK) there was plenty of support around. The only pre worry that i have is how this would work being a single parent and splitting the curriculum up.

As a year 1 and 2 teacher i was well prepared to teach him, i knew the area and the topics well.

How difficult would it be?

The planning and set up seemed as straight forward as doing my regular plans, so no problem there.

So today was the first day.

Literacy went extremely well.  He was engaged and interested and worked well producing so great  pieces of work. Something we can definitely continue and build upon.

Numeracy was a different story altogether.
Will wasn't as engaged and wanted any excuse to be distracted. I don't think the lesson was any less engaging than literacy yet he almost immediately shut down. He liked the games and activities, but the moment we started to sit down he stopped.
It clearly highlighted some major issues that i thought he would have covered in year R. His counting to 20 and back was strained. Very unsure and conscious that he didn't know what was coming next. We eventually spent a lot of time covering the basics. As for written numbers, his basic numbers 0-10 were, like his understanding, strained and needing a lot of support.  Apart from basic points like counting to 6 he really struggled.  I'll review this and possibly try to cover some more of the basics tomorrow.

We continued the lessons with Religious Education and spoke in depths about the creation story then created a 1-7 time table of the events in picture form. Again, like in literacy, he was engaged and happy to discuss different aspects of the topic.

We spent 30 minutes playing and exploring the recorder. In which William happily played two songs using the note of B and a song that covered the note of A. He followed the rhythm and notes extremely well,  only having difficulty with a song that wanted him to change between B and A, and for the first attempt he surpassed my expectations.  We will be fully having a music lesson tomorrow,  which, the pair of us are now looking forward to.

Our last session of the day was the two week topic, which, i entitled 'healthy living'. We discussed what exercise is and why we do it. Then we did different examples of exercises and how they help different muscles. By this point his brother, James, had just returned from nursery. With the two boys together it was fun, different and engaging, especially when they were together.

All in all the first day went well, it has brought concerns up with numeracy but, on a whole it was a great start.

I'll try to update on home schooling every week and update the kind of things we are doing and how William is getting on.