The Great Garden Grammar Game

On the way home from school on Thursday, Ferdy cried in the car because he said he didn't want a Ugandan penfriend.. (his school are twinning with a school in Uganda). Eventually I realised that this was because he already has a penfriend in Spain, and he thought this new penfriend would have to replace his Spanish penfriend. 

So on Friday, we talked a bit about schools in Africa, and how exciting it will be for them to have penfriends in the UK, and also how not all children can afford to go to school there and how that makes some of them sad. We read a lovely book called Beatrice's Goat about how a girl in Uganda gets a goat which enables her family to earn enough money for her to go to school.

Ferdy has also learnt a bit about commas this week, and Gil has started learning his vowel digraphs and trigraphs so we invented the Great Garden Grammar Game.

This involved the Sentencer (me), the Full Stop/Capital Letters Policeman and Chief Rubber Outer (Gil), and the Comma King and Exclamation/Question/Speech Marks Detective (Ferdy).

Stones were gathered as full-stops, dried leaves were commas and the rest was done in coloured chalk. There was a bit of grumpiness to start with, mainly about being outside when it was warm inside and slippers are more comfy than shoes.. But we all got quite into this, especially when I started taking sentences from Ferdy's book, Ratburger, and when Gil had his own phrases with his new sounds.

We played this game for much longer than anticipated and I was pleasantly surprised to see Ferdy adding in speech marks and even realising that a comma sometimes goes in a place to make a pause, leading to a more fluent reading of a phrase.

Ferdy's decided he will actually write a letter to his Ugandan class, so, you never know, it might actually include a few commas.

Serendipitous Stories

In The Animals of Farthing Wood, the main protagonist, Fox, is parted from all his friends and nearly drowns when he gets trapped in some debris floating down the river. Despite drifting far away from his pals, he meets Vixen, and muses to himself that out of something bad, good has arisen, thus transforming his view on how bad the bad thing actually was.

We talked quite a bit about this today; how every cloud has a silver lining, and how serendipity can occur, especially as our day entailed acting out scenes from the Animals of Farthing Wood and trying to put ourselves in the shoes/paws of the animals..

Ferdy made a list of all the perilous things that the group of animals have had to encounter in the story so far, and we went to Calke Abbey to search for them. 

Cautiously crossing the trunk road, we found the treacherous swimming pool, the army land where the woodland creatures had to flee from the fire, the barn in which they took shelter and then had to tunnel their way out of, the thorns upon which some the of new baby animals were impaled by the Butcher Bird (yes, The Animals of Farthing Wood does not shy away from the gory details of the animal kingdom, and yes, one of our new words today was impale) and Vixen's den. Luckily, we did not have to experience the horrors of the fox hunt, chapter 22 which we read whilst we were there; if I were not already against fox hunting, I would be after reading this chapter.

We also managed some Animals of Farthing Wood column addition and subtraction, (eg Farthing Wood used to have 987 trees growing in it. The bulldozers have cut down 768 trees and taken them away. How many trees are there left growing in Farthing Wood?) and Gil was also happy because I'd made him some worksheets.

On the way to and from Calke, we started listening to the Ikabog, and when we got home we watched the wonderful Amantha Edmead's rendition of the Wolf and the Seven Kids, which we get sent weekly by the Story Museum in Oxford (where we were supposed to be going for Ferdy's birthday next week). Ferdy and Gil then wrote ten minutes of facts that they could remember from the story, although Ferdy doesn't know it's ten minutes as he hates being timed! This was a good idea from his teacher and a great way to get them both to consider the most pertinent bits of a story and learn to summarise. Ferdy has a tendency to tell the whole story almost word for word when asked to explain what it's about, stubbornly insisting on reaching the end..

It was a rainy, cold and grey day and I hadn't been expecting much but according to Gil, this was his best flexi days ever. I'm inclined to agree that it was definitely one of our better ones; thanks to that little injection of serendipity we finished the day with rosy cheeks, stories in our heads and a renewed spring in our paws. 

Lockdown letters

 We did a lot of work this Friday, and not much else.

I don't really know why this is happening but we do seem to be spending a lot of time at the kitchen table, either doing worksheets or doing our learning, and I'm not sure how happy this is making any of us.

It may partly be due to having spent six months at home with the kitchen becoming our classroom. Or maybe because Gil seems to really like writing and drawing so we are a little influenced by his enthusiasm. Or also because we aren't able to go to a lot of the exciting and enriching places we usually have access to; we can't even go to the library!

But we also need to remember why we flexischool in the first place. We started because for a long time, Ferdy was very unhappy at school. But we also started because we feel quite strongly that learning through outdoor play, enrichment and study, through experience and through real life lessons, is really vital. And, despite our love of them, we seem to have strayed away a little from learning through stories. Stories are the still the most important thing in Ferdy's life (he loves books more than he loves his parents); our most successful flexi days have revolved around a story like learning about rainforests and chocolate with Michael Morpurgo's 'Running Wild', following Fred the Frog's adventures at Biddulph Grange Gardens, experiencing Victorian England through A Christmas Carol and even addressing climate change though Dr Seuss's The Lorax. 

This Friday, both boys elected to write letters; Ferdy to his Granny in Dorset, and Gil to his cousin Ade in Essex.

They also wrote the envelopes, stamped and posted them, which was kind of fun, Gil also wants us to learn about stamps so there might well be a part 2 to letter writing. Ferdy is not really enjoying writing at the moment though, so, whilst Gil was completing worksheet #124, Ferdy did some column addition.

    

In lockdown (when I had time), we did quite a few of these. Ferdy really likes combining maths with other things and rewarding his result with a letter that answers his question is a really good incentive to get his sums right. He sometimes just wants to get things done quickly (so he can read his Beano) and doesn't really mind if they are right or wrong, but because he gets a letter for his correct sum, he is motivated to go back over his results to check when he can't find the corresponding number. I'd do lots more of these if they didn't take me over an hour to do! 

Gil's learning about the lovely Owl Babies story at school this week so, after finding out a bit about Tawny Owls, we did eventually manage to get out to search for owls.

We found a bird to play in, a Barn Owl with a mouse, and a Tawny Owl sound to listen to. But perhaps the real highlight of the day was watching up close a family of squirrels stashing nuts and racing nimbly up and down trees. 

We may not have museums or theatres or libraries but we still have stories and nature, so my note to self is let's embrace what we do have a bit more.

Gil's letter to Ade