Ferdy's Law of Emotion

 Some Fridays work well, and some less well. This was a less well kind of a Friday.. We've all had colds this week and I'm still recovering, plus Ferdy's been getting upset about work and unable to concentrate for very long. And also, we often fill our Fridays with an exciting and enriching day out (this was part of the reason for flexischooling in the first place!) but it feels difficult to arrange anything at the moment, especially anything further afield.

However, many places are still open so Mum just needs to do a bit more creative thinking and stop feeling negative.

We are doing quite a bit of maths at the moment, which often works well through games, so we started with a game called Happy Maths Families. This involved me giving Ferdy a number sentence and him finding the other members (facts) of the number sentence family.

After Gil had done all the worksheets he had asked for (he is doing the letters g, o, c and k this week), he ordered numbers 1-10 and did some sums adding up to 5.

Ferdy really enjoyed his work at school this week on emotions so we then decided to look at some famous paintings and think about what they made us feel (we couldn't look at Munch's The Scream as both boys are scared of it).

Slightly frustratingly (this was one of our emotions hehe), Ferdy has denoted a colour to each emotion (perhaps from a book at school?), a law from which he won't budge. So when we looked at Dr Seuss's beautiful My Many Coloured Days, he was adamant that Dr Seuss had it wrong. He also repeated the same mantra for looking at paintings; when asked why a painting made him feel calm he stated, 'because it's green of course'.

I tried to counter Ferdy's Law of Emotion by introducing a few black and white pictures but was promptly told that black is 'scared', so that was slightly unsuccessful.

We then decided to move on and watched a video about the difference between emotions and feelings, listened to some songs and Ferdy wrote some sentences about when he feels sad, angry, calm, scared and brave. He then insisted on drawing colourful monsters to accompany these sentences (blue, red, green, black and orange). I tried to remain green and embrace rather than reject Ferdy's law.

On our way to the woods, Gil made up a beautiful song about what we feel and that 'our emotions are always there, we can't run away from them'.

The song ended with the fact that we are going to the woods to 'run away from our emotions'.

Later on, we all did some paintings and felt yellow. I surrender.

The Swap Shop

Today, Ferdy and I made up a game called The Swap Shop. This entailed me giving Ferdy a number, he then had to halve that number using dienes and two bowls and write the number sentence. Sounds a bit boring? Not when you have to visit The Swap Shop, run by Mrs Swap Shop who spoke a bit funny and had a weird sounding doorbell, to exchange your 10 block, 100 block or 1000 block for 1s, 10s or 100s.

Mrs Swap Shop was also a bit wayward and often tried to cheat Ferdy out of a few blocks so he had to be very alert. A simple game, but thoroughly enjoyable..

In the meantime, Gil worked on a few worksheets. He likes to do these on his own with the occasional interjection by Ferdy (practise saying 'd', Gil by saying 'a dog dug a dragon's dung') and definitely no help from Mrs Swap Shop.

We've never really done a lot of work on worksheets on a Friday but Gil seems to love them so who am I to argue? Ferdy then also did some of his own, as well as some important work writing about a day in the life of Bananaman.

Ferdy then decided it was time for Gil to learn about ordering and recognising numbers 1-10 so taught him a numbers game.

Gil won, much to my and Ferdy's annoyance..

With Akimbo and the Lion (Gil had requested that we listen to something about Africa as he really enjoyed learning about Africa in school this week) as our soundtrack, we then had time to head out to do some afternoon activities.

We had loads of fun doing the Activity Trail which we fortuitously had all to ourselves. Both boys, who are generally cautious, were fearless on the rather too high rope bridges and found it hilarious that I had shaky legs at the end. Gil also wanted to do the Sensory Trail (it's much easier to guess what things are if you look inside the boxes and it's still using one of your senses actually Mummy), and it was apparently amusing seeing Mum get lost in the labyrinth.

Later on everyone flagged a bit. Two weeks back at school seems to be taking its toll and we've had to wipe off six month's worth of dust from the calpol bottle this weekend, so when Gil selected a pile of books for Mrs Swap Shop please to read, no one complained.

Signs of the times

 Phew, we managed to get through the first week back with only a few tears, a sprinkling of nighttime worries and just one nervous tummy ache. The boys were fine though...

When questioned about what they wanted to do this Friday, Gil asked for a playground and the woods, and Ferdy suggested going on an aeroplane. We settled on Gil's request and decided to go to Hicks Lodge.

But first some maths: Ferdy did lots of work with number sentences and times tables using dienes, numicons and even money. Gil did some adding up to 10 with the numicons; he was pretty excited that he recognised them from school.

Gil has learnt the letters s a t p this week and is thrilled to actually have his own work on flexischooling Friday (how long will this last? ponders Mum cynically..) so completed about half a dozen letter formation worksheets, whilst Ferdy and I looked at sentence types in his books and with some videos.

Ferdy is probably the slowest breakfast eater I have ever met; he even pointed out to me that during breakfast I had covered all the four sentence types we were learning:

Is Ferdy eating his breakfast? (question)

Ferdy, eat your breakfast! (command)

Ferdy is eating his breakfast. (statement)

What a lot of breakfast Ferdy has eaten! (exclamation)

So after an hour of eating breakfast, he was pretty much able to collate different sentence types from the book he's currently reading aloud, The Haunted Ark.

At Hicks Lodge we ticked both the playground and woods boxes, we also scooted around the lake, saw buzzards, horses, geese migrating, and lots of dogs, played hide and seek in the woods, climbed trees and ate ice creams.

There were signs everywhere. So when we got home, Ferdy colour coded the sentence types, and Gil circled the letters he had learnt.

We noted that a lot of the newer signs were commands; a clear indication of the world we live in right now.

Introducing Gil

Lockdown was mainly not a bad experience for us. In fact, the boys generally had a lovely time playing Lego, reading Tintin/Asterix/The Beano/ every single Horrid Henry book until Mum wrote her own book entitled 'No More Horrid Henry Ever', listening to audiobooks, running around the woods, seeing friends and relatives (when allowed), going on scooter rides and of course, making countless Lego ships.

Despite being pretty busy, we did manage to do some work and it was quite a good opportunity to see how Gil and Ferdy can work simultaneously on similar but ability appropriate tasks. Perfect preparation for flexischooling Fridays with Gil, who will now actively participate in flexischool.

Gil also started school this week and thoroughly enjoyed it. Fingers crossed for a child who likes school...

We began the day with some maths; place value practice for Ferdy and number formation practice for Gil.

Then it was time for some BBC Bitesize videos about expanded noun phrases (Gil loves these videos too). Ferdy dictated and turned a few sentences into expanded noun phrases, although I wasn't that impressed when Mummy's tummy became Mummy's big, fat tummy.

Because we had to ease ourselves back into the term gently, we spent the afternoon in the woods in Worcester.

Later on, we even managed a bit more place value practice with dienes - Ferdy really likes using something tangible when doing maths, and Gil likes counting them.

And we got into these brilliant Art for Kids Draw Alongs over the summer - great practice for Ferdy who often finds it really hard to copy what he sees in front of him so we drew Frozone and Mr Incredible.

All in all it was a good start to the term and we are very content with our new flexischooling classmate.

Oceans Apart

Before the world changed its course, and we only homeschooled on a Friday, we often brought what Ferdy was learning at school to life with a day out.

Last week (sorry no time for a blog) for the first time in three months, our lessons on countries in Africa culminated in a trip to the zoo and searching for African animals.

All pictures by Ferdy and Gil

This week the focus has been on the oceans and journeys around the globe, but we decided that doing a trip out to see the ocean would not be a good idea: a) because we live as far away from the sea as is possible in the UK and b) because we did not fancy parking on a roundabout and relieving ourselves in peoples' gardens.

So we didn't go anywhere.

But hey, surely we have now realised that we can experience places vicariously through other people and animals in books, songs and films.

Luckily, Andy was doing a wild workout on the beach so we joined him. We read some lovely books about oceans, (and we couldn't read about oceans without learning about the tonnes of plastic amassing within them) and Ferdy wrote a piece about giant starfish in Flotsam. We sang Moana songs from the South Pacific, and we also found a catchy tune about how to remember the names of the oceans.

Best of all though, for our journey, we decided to follow and discuss the directions of some of the migratory routes of five different animal species: a blue whale; a leatherback turtle; a monarch butterfly; a red crab and an African elephant.

Plotting the migratory routes

When Ferdy enjoys doing something, he immerses himself fully into it. Fascinated by footage of the leatherback turtles emerging from their eggs on the coast of Costa Rica, he decided to write a diary entry by one. When I pointed out perhaps he should write the names of the Frigate birds who preyed on the turtles, who was his silly Mum to argue with the retort that this turtle has only just been born of course he doesn't know what the birds are or what the name of the ocean is...  Vicariousness indeed.

The Kingdom in the Sky

Craving adventure this week, we started a new book of African Tales. Each story comes from a different country in Africa and is prefaced by facts about the country of origin.

Ferdy suggested that we learn ten facts about each country, find it on a map, look up favourite landmarks on Google Earth, then read the story.

First up was Namibia.

The boys were most intrigued that it houses the world's largest metiorite, the Hoba.

©Google Earth

We found some quirky videos about facts about Africa.

A day or so later it was Malawi, also known as the 'Warm Heart of Africa' (which gave me the excuse to have a boogie to the classic The Very Best's 'Warm Heart of Africa'; I must have lost the picture Ferdy took of this..), and finally the Kingdom in the Sky,  Lesotho, a small mountainous country surrounded totally by South Africa.

Ferdy's favourite story from our book was the one from Malawi about a boy called Makhosi who has to save his village with the help of a talking bull. On Friday, Ferdy wrote part of and dictated the rest of one of his own much loved tales from his audiobook, Nelson Mandela's Favourite African Folktales.

As retold, verbatim, by Ferdy

I was slightly stumped when Gil asked if we could go to Africa for our Friday outing, but Ferdy proposed we climb a mountain and imagine that we were in Lesotho.

So, not far away, we managed to find our very own kingdom in the sky. 

Bunster Hill: 1079 ft

The boys who have plenty of time

We read a beautiful book this week called Ocean Meets Sky, about a boy who goes to seek a place his grandfather has told him about and experiences a magical and dreamlike journey to find where the ocean meets the sky.

As well as this, our current chapter book is The Phantom Tollbooth where a boy named Milo ventures into a strange land in which everything is unexpected and not as it seems..

Most of our adventures recently have had to take place in our heads and at home, and it is such books that are inspiring and feeding our desire to discover new things and characters and words and places.

We have, however, been able to get out a bit more in the last few weeks and, although it is a bit tricky to find adventures as everywhere is rather crowded (and covered in litter) and everyone else is outside too, we found a stunning stretch of ancient woodland to explore called Hawksmoor. We had to drive for a while to get there, but Michael Rosen's Jelly Boots Smelly Boots audiobook was just the right length.

We've also managed a swim in a lake, to scoot around a lake, and to run up some hills.

On a day where we couldn't go out, we looked upwards and found dragon shapes in the clouds, learnt some of the very complicated names for clouds and we attempted to draw them.

The story of the Phantom Tollbooth begins when Milo, a bored and discontented little boy who is stuck in the monotony of life, finds a package in his bedroom addressed to, 'Milo, who has plenty of time'. In many ways, we have had plenty of time in the last few months; time not taken up by school, or swimming lessons, or meals out, or weekends away, or people visiting, or visiting relatives, or planning holidays, or going on holidays, and we are having to find ways to utilise this time in creative ways.

Sometimes this is hard especially when it rains and we don't have the motivation to do any work. It is hard when we wonder when this is going to end, and what life will be like when we can get back to normal and how on earth it's going to be possible to live, learn and work in an environment where many of our human instincts like hugging, and sitting closely, and high fiving, and comforting, and picking our noses, will be curbed.

But, having so much time is also great: Ferdy and Gil have made up so many different games, and each room in the house has become a gateway into another world or story (although I am less happy that our bedroom is where the game 'The Knights of Wonder' seems to have to take place). I applaud them for their lack of boredom and ability to create endless elaborate adventures from a combination of imagination, Marvel films and Mr Gum books.