So it’s been a while!

~ raisingmyka ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been super busy lately with starting a new job and almost moving house, so haven’t been able to update this blog at all, however Myka has been busier than ever. She’s been very proactive in her learning and subsequently has come on leaps and bounds with both her reading and her maths.

She’s chosen to switch up the online resources she was using and now uses Reading Eggs and Maths Seeds daily. These seem to suit her style of learning much better. Myka has completed multiple maps and earned six certificates since she switched and we’ve seen a great improvement in her reading especially. Alongside these resources we also support her learning with various worksheets from multiple sources. Some from our twinkle subscription, some from reading eggs and some we sources via google. She thoroughly enjoys completing workbooks also and we are making good headway with a maths based one currently.

Creatively Myka is drawing, painting and using play dough and slime to create things, the latest being a paint your own unicorn and this play dough man with an angry face. She has also recently drawn herself as a Mountie, as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is her main interest and focus right now. This means that we as a family are learning a great deal about the history of the Mounties and their uniform!

Socially Myka has attended a few of the Home ed social meets near us with her Auntie when I’ve been working, she also attends Ballet, Tap and Theatre Craft, Swimming and Music lessons. All of these have found her making friendships and she thoroughly enjoys keeping so active.

Hopefully it won’t be quite as long before I find the time to update again!!

First term officially Home Educating.

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It still seems strange to me that this would be considered Myka’s first term as officially home educated.

As far as we are concerned education starts at birth and choosing not to send Myka to school is just an extension of this. We have already been contacted by our LA, despite the fact that Myka has only been compulsory school age for a few weeks. So I expect in due course to have to produce an educational philosophy and a report after that.

Thankfully Myka has a real thirst for learning, which certainly makes my job a little easier. We have good friends who have downloaded different curriculums and graciously shared them with us, so we have some fun activities planned for the following year. I intend to stick loosely to the national curriculum too, and am on the look out for a comprehensive curriculum to help support us in our planning.

Currently Myka has a full roster of extra curriculars and new apps which we are using to support her learning. We also spend a good amount of one to one time with her to keep her learning fun and personalised. This helps us guage how much she is developing and achieving.

I’m aww so excited to continue our journey and see what Myka learns this year. I have included a photo of her using her Skoolbo subscription this morning, she literally begs me to spend time on this one, so I find I have to limit it a little as I consider it a part of her screen time. I’m pleased that the programmes she uses are enjoyable to her though!

Loving our Apps right now!

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We are really finding the apps we downloaded a fab resource at the moment. Myka seems to flip between having more interest in her maths app and her english app, we don’t like to force her to do one or the other, so we tend to just go with what she’s feeling that day. Currently she has much more interest in DoodleMaths than her Teach Your Monster to Read app. She genuinely enjoys doing both, but Maths is definitely what she’s having more fun with right now. The stage she is at you basically have to do the ‘What’s new this week’ and her ‘five a day’. She loves that you can collect stars to build a robot for the answers you get right, it’s a nice little incentive, especially as she is at the very beginning of her learning journey with this app.

We obviously include mathematics in our everyday experiences as well, things like measuring out ingredients, money handling etc. She’s still quite young so nothing too pushy yet and she doesn’t necessarily ‘get’ it yet, but we’re building the foundations for when she does. No doubt in a week or so she will decide that learning phonics is much more interesting, and that’s absolutely fine. One of the biggest benefits to Home Edding Myka is that we can roll with her interests and tailor her education to her. There is no rush for her to learn these things, and it feels much more organic and natural for her to learn this way.

I think once she really gets the hang of reading then everything else will come on leaps and bounds. She is noticeably better at recognising written letters and sounds since starting to use Teach Your Monster to Read. We do also have DoodleEnglish, but she isn’t really identifying with this one just yet, which is cool, because we all react better to some ways of learning than others. Perhaps in the future she may find it useful, maybe not! Who knows!

I’m really enjoying watching her thirst for learning, so I’m just taking it all in and tagging along for the ride right now, there will come a time when it benefits Myka for me to direct her learning a little. But for now I’m more than happy to follow in her wake. Constantly just a little amazed at how she processes life.

The beginning isn’t really the beginning…

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So, we’ve known that we wanted to home educate Myka since she was about eighteen months old, she turned four in May last year and as such isn’t compulsory school age until this September. However, we have been educating Myka her entire life, much in the way most families do, so even though she is not officially home educated until she reaches compulsory school age, she has been learning for years.

We always intended to keep her education very freestyle and play based until she turns seven, this will no doubt evolve as time goes on. This does not mean that we will be leaving her education up to chance, neither will we be unschooling. While I have seen first hand the many benefits of home educating in this way, it simply does not work for us as a family, much in the same way school doesn’t.

Myka is very good at initiating her own learning, and so far letting her learn things in her own time and her own way has worked incredibly well, so we will be taking a much more child led approach, she is a fan of the work books and sheets at the moment and her letter recognition has come on leaps and bounds through this method. So for a while we are using apps such as Teach Your Monster To Read, Doodle Maths, Doodle English and Doodle Tables to support her work with workbooks etc.

As she completes work, and learns through daily encounters, day trips and every day family life I intend to document her experiences on here, and hopefully one day this blog will serve as a sort of portfolio of her learning journey.

Feel free to join us for the ride, I’m sure it will entail many roller-coaster moments!