Week 17

My learning from this week has been that you need to have "belief" in yourself and your kid to be able to homeschool him/her. Most of the trouble arises when this belief is shaky for either of the parties involved. While it is difficult for the kid to be judgmental because he does not know enough most likely, the doubts that keep creeping up in the parent(s)' minds regarding their own ability or that of their kid's, are really troublesome and need to be addressed. It is my belief that the lack of "belief" ( :-) ) can lead to a lot of heartburn and put into question the whole exercise - I think this is what most experienced homeschoolers talk about when they refer to "unschooling". You need to find that confidence in yourself, as the newness of the whole experience of walking down the unknown path is scary in and by itself, and when you know that any solution is only possible in the next academic cycle, the problem compounds itself and becomes much bigger from a psychological standpoint.

Week 16

This week was a lazy week as we did not do much. Watched the movie Coco and he tried to write the story spine of the same. His grandmother made him do some sums and puzzles. He also went to KidZania and had fun there - it is a great role-playing place. He also joined a group of kids that are planning to get together to discuss current affairs/develop quizzing skills. While I am not completely in favor of his gathering information alone for the sake of quizzing, it seems to be a good way to keep in touch with the world around in a nutshell - kind of the effect "The World This Week" had on me as a kid. We will see how this plays out!

Week 15

July 14, '19 should go down in history as Sports Day. The Wimbledon'19 final and the ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 final, both in London, were 2 matches where none of the participants were actually winners or losers. Both were masterclasses in learning to hold your nerve and not give up in the most tense situations either. And my family enjoyed them both as we did not feel the need to get up early today. This flexibility is something I have come to covet about homeschooling.

This week I initiated him to LCM in Mathematics and he wrote the story spines for the Toy Story and Spiderman movies he watched. Story spines are a great way to try and ferret out the gist of any story and over time, realize that the architecture of great stories is actually quite simple. To be a good storyteller, you take a simple premise and then build layers around it thereby making it interesting but retaining the simplicity that we as humans value.

Week 14

I realize how difficult it is to maintain a routine! And when I cannot maintain it myself, it would be difficult for me to force it on my kids. Am I doing them a disfavor, I don't know yet!
This week was one of revelation - I asked my son to just play the fool on his keyboard and he came up with a tune that looked like the tune for the poem "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".. quite a happy moment for me to note that he developed some confidence in himself. In maths, I tried to teach him about HCF and changing number systems (decimal to binary). Lots of practice is further needed!
Apart from that, one of his friends still has holidays till this week, so he hangs around with her. As my wife keeps saying, the real test for us will start from next week when his friends go back to school and he has to keep himself occupied.