Home schooling Part 5

Last week, as I said in my last Home schooling post, was a difficult week. William decided not to do any work on Monday. His alternative to working was to watch TV. 

There are different ways to do home schooling, I follow the semi structured route to educating, on a whole we have a structure for literacy and numeracy and with all topic based subjects it is unstructured,  using free learning though activities, investigation,  photos etc. 

There is a lot of debate about the relevance of unschooling a child first before you reset a structure.  I've read an awful lot on this, personally, I couldn't see this working for both myself and William. And i strongly believe that it is important to work towards the individual/s involved. 

Anyway, due to the fact that we follow a semi structured route I'd prefer him to decide something unstructured within our topics, his choice,  rather than dictating tv as an option. Luckily he did this.

Following this i was weary about what the rest of the week would be like. Once again,  luckily,  William was back to doing his work.

We've continued on the geography theme 'our local area' and visited our local church. Took photos of features we thought all churches should have, we took the stance of what does our church have compared to the church locally. Once we decided the feature we made a list/photo map on the computer with the intent to compare the features within the local church where he lives with his mum. 

We've tried to continue the R.E theme by using an old testament story, continuing with, Noah and the ark.

William has also continued to progress in playing the recorder,  piano as well as general singing and dancing. 

Following up on the last post my targets i set myself:

Take William out on a trip and to be involved with other home educating pupils/parents.

I've managed to book William into a weekly lego club, designed for other children his age, provided by the local library.  This is the first non schooled activity we've signed up to. I'm looking forward to doing this with him. 

I still haven't done a substantial trip out yet, but most weeks and days we go out investigating in the afternoons.

I still have a problem with connecting with others via a forum or Facebook group. I truly believe this is because the groups are very female 'mum' oriented rather than with dads, there continue to be a negative male 'dad' comments publicly posted. This is such a barrier to someone who is just trying to make connections and spread the activities that would enhance the bits I'm already doing.