Due to the holidays and a nasty cycle of insomnia and migraine, I've been slacking off on weekly reports.
Example relaxed homeschooling day, yesterday:
We "slept in" late, as it was Izzy's first day back at work after the holidays and Cai was clingy. We played with his baby doll, Cai initiating toothbrushing, feeding, giving him water and talking about teeth: how they grow, how they decay, how adult teeth push out milk teeth. This is an issue that gives him a lot of anxiety, and I've noticed he uses his baby doll a lot to work through anxieties.
Side note: Cai announced the other day that his baby doll is mostly a boy (called Baby) but is a girl when called Izzy after his other mummy. "That means he's an insect."
It took us a few moments to realise he was trying to say "intersex." :D
Oh, well, that's one educational goal down. Our child, before five, has a better concept of human biological sex being a non-binary continuum than a lot of adults. Score one for a pro-science kindergarten education.
We also did a lot of wordplay in bed, something Cai loves. I remember reading somewhere that it's an ASD trait. Whatever it is, he loves combining and inventing new words.
We also played Fight List. Obviously Cai is as useless at categories like Justin Bieber songs as I am, but in some categories--reptiles, for example, or symbols of Christmas--he comes up with answers faster than I can Swype them. Fight List has become a daily routine.
Once we got up, Cai played with Lego a lot, which I love because it works on his fine motor skills, and did a lot of pretend play.
When I suggested "Let's do some homeschool work!" Cai elected to do workbooks yesterday,, and ran eagerly to the table. In practice it didn't go very well, perhaps due to my headache and general exhaustion, but we finished off the Learning Addition workbook--way too easy for him, but I liked finishing--and did some Thinking Skills work.
The only real success from that was that he liked using coins to measure the height of clowns--which matches with an Australian Curriculum goal, measurement using everyday objects, so yay. He also liked to put them on the clowns' buttons, and cover clowns completely, and count them. This is a general thing: Cai doesn't tend to stay on task. He chases rabbit trails. He answers things differently--in the same session, questions about words starting with the same sound, he delighted in answering "wrong" but by twisting the word--"Frog" matches "frelephant", for example. These are things that are great in a one on one context, but would be disruptive in a class, which is one of the reasons I think homeschooling suits him.
He also never stays still while working. He gets up, bounces around, moves. He "answers" by spinning a mini fidget spinner on an answer. All things that are probably helpful in a kinetic learner, but would be a major pain in a classroom.
He also struggled with writing answers. When he had to trace out letters, he insisted on using two hands, or didn't press hard enough to make marks, and resisted correct grip. He defaulted quickly to ignoring the shapes and making circles, which are easier for him. So this remains something we need to work on.
So now I list it, we got more out of the workbooks than I thought. Nonetheless, he got sick of it soon, so I suggested playdough, thinking of the fine motor skills lacking in his attempts at writing. We made it together, Cai assisting with measuring, and we played with that instead.
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| Vax game in progress |
This turned out to be the perfect example of serendipity in relaxed homeschooling. Cai was fascinated by the process of preventing the spread of disease through using vaccination to isolate disease carriers from the herd, and the way "grey" (unvaccinated) people could be protected by other people being vaccinated.
Now, Cai is rarely sick. He saw a paediatrician and occupational therapist for a while because of his low height and weight and autistic and sensory issues, but he sees GPs as terrifying places that stick needles in him for no reason. "To prevent you getting sick" has no weight with him, maybe because he doesn't have much memory of being sick.
But this game really resonated with him. We looked at the people who were protected, and the orange vaccine refusers who make it harder. We talked about people who aren't vaccinated--tiny babies, for example--and how they are protected by being isolated off from potential disease carriers by vaccination. We talked about the diseases his mummies and our parents got before there were needles for them, I showed him my chickenpox scars, and we looked at googled pictures of chickenpox, measles and mumps, and I talked to him about how scary it must have been for my parents.
He looked at the circles in the game that were larger because they link to most people and can spread disease faster, so are vital to be vaccinated, and he brainstormed people they could be, being proud of himself for thinking of childcare workers.
He was really, really into the idea of protecting babies from getting sick. Cai loves babies. He really got the concepts of herd immunity, cushioning and social responsibility. He went from hating the idea of needles to stabbing his finger at the screen saying "everyone gets needles!"He finally accepts that, yes, flu vax will happen every year. Frankly, he now understands the concept of vaccination as a social responsibility better than many grownups.
We also had productive conversations about vaccine refusal and their reasons. I avoided the MMR autism myth as yet, because there is too much autism phobia and shaming for me to want to approach it with my own ASD kid just yet.
We did talk about how people don't remember epidemics and just how bad and dangerous they were, because they've been protected so long, and a little about relative toxicity (not in those words) and how people don't always understand it, and that people don't always understand how the digestive, renal and circulatory (not in so many words) systems work so they think that eating something (formaldehyde) in an apple or steak is safe but much tinier amounts are dangerous when injected.
He's wanted to talk about it this morning, too, and why my being sick is different and people can't catch it, so I can predict a lot of little rabbit trails into biology and social studies from here. And this is what I love best about homeschooling: rabbit trails.
I foresee a Pokemon badge with Bissey holding a syringe in his future...
Anyway, this was a day in which I had low energy due to pain, we didn't leave the house, and I didn't think Cai had learned much: until I started to think about it. It was a day in which, frankly, I played a lot of Love, Nikki and Cook, Serve, Delicious--and that's another thing, Cai initiated creating a "healthy" menu for the game and picking out balanced and healthy foods. More incidental, child-led learning.
I may not be a radical unschooler, but I am very, very grateful to them for teaching me to "see the learning" and understand that education need not come from traditional sources. I mean, as I type this, Cai is watching a video on the life cycle of rattlesnakes that he found for himself on Youtube.
Other catch up things:
There have been lots and lots of board games, rarely missing a day.
Thanks to his Australian Nanna and Poppa, we added Pop to the Shops to our board game lineup. Cai loves anything shopping themed, and Pop to the Shops is excellent for numeracy because it involves paying for purchases, giving change and figuring out if you have enough if you draw an expensive item--bearing in mind that you "get paid" in the centre. Really lovely game.
I've been really pleased to see Australian Poppa get into the idea of incidental learning, teaching Cai about things like water safety flags and channels in the harbour. It's awesome.
Social skills: lots of incidental playing with other kids, family celebrations over the holidays, and something I was really particularly pleased with: picking out presents for family members that he thought they'd like, and taking into account their feelings and tastes. He saw Poppa playing with my fidget cube, so Poppa got a fidget cube. Izzy mummy got a necklace in her favourite colour. I got perfume, and he was very serious about smelling samples (bless the kind and indulgent Chemist Warehouse perfume counter lady!) Australian Nanna got a candle in peppermint "for Christmas".
Cai is also interested in learning card games now. We've started simple, with things like Snap and Fish, to teach him procedures.
Speaking of games, I joined a Facebook community called Gameschoolers which looks at using (mostly board) games for educational purposes. They run the gamut from school-at-homers who allow strictly limited screen time and only educational board games to radical unschoolers, with lots of eclectic homeschoolers in between. Nonetheless, they are my tribe, I think. I'm particularly intrigued by those who see themselves as using a purely game and experiment based curriculum.
Personally, I've been letting my own goals drift a bit, and I need to get on track. Every health and social professional I've seen reminds me that I am not just a mother and it's best for Cai if I pursue my own things as well. So I want to get back on track with my writing career, toy making (which I have already revived) and Japanese learning in particular. And get back in contact with a couple of old friends.
Speaking of looking after myself, I still have post-migraine malaise, but I have a prescription to fill today, and I really want to get Cai out of the house and playing with other kids, so I need to go out. I have a lot of housework to catch up on, too, and some shopping to get done by tomorrow, as Cai has a play-date with two little friends.
So time to stop analysing and start living!
