Home School - James



For those who follow our Home School Journey you will know that William is the one, out of the two boys, who is Home Schooled; James is quickly approaching school age and would be due to start school in September but usually joins in on our afternoon topic work.

The Plan has been that we, the boys Mum and I, would Home School the two boys together for at least one year and reassess the situation at a later date.

James has been going to Nursery most mornings and on the whole he seems to enjoy it. The nursery itself is lovely, friendly and engaging but in some ways it feels more like a play group than a nursery; It is based within a church hall without segregated rooms. The staff all have key children to work with and help progress through the early learning targets.

However a few things have cropped up:

James is one of those children that when asked to do work he will more than likely shut off and realistically the majority of the evidence the nursery will have is through observation and subtle learning. I think being isolated within a room of children playing against sitting and doing 'work' is far too distracting.

Since my Dads mental health became worse (more on this during the week) I decided to stop his offer of dropping off and picking James up from Nursery and this, subsequently, has affected the amount of time I get in the morning with William. It feels that it has slowed Williams potential learning down; the 20 minute commute, there and back, twice a day, really cuts into the time available especially if we are making a break through!

I know you shouldn't judge the two children against each other but between what William was able to do prior to starting school, and what I saw many children starting Reception being able to do, James seems to be a little behind. One of my biggest concerns is that he hasn't written his name before; he can identify it but every attempt I have made he always runs off much preferring to play or go on an adventure.

This week I made the decision to start Home Schooling James, alongside William, early and trying to cut down the hours he is at Nursery (Or at least the hours whilst he is with me).

My plan is quite simple: Include James in age appropriate Numeracy and Literacy and carry on having him join us on our topics.

So yesterday we started:

We started quite basically with Identifying as many letter from the alphabet and within that finding the letters to spell James.

We then, several times, traced over the designed letters until I felt he was comfortable with the motion. When he was comfortable, after each letter, he tried free writing whilst trying to remember, use and repeat the movement. This seemed to work very well and although the letters were capitalised it was definitely a good start!

My next step, which might have been a step too far but I needed to try it, was to see if James could remember the movements to write his name.

It took quite a bit of discussion and reminding of each letter movement but I am pleased to say that we had some success!

It was only a start and it will need to be done several times with lots of different letters and words but for our very first Home School literacy lesson I couldn't be more pleased and prouder.

So I hope from now on that our Home School post will feature the two boys a bit more evenly.