I’m in the process of compiling a guide of our top 100 book recommendations for each age category. So, we’ve all been busily researching and reading away to make sure we haven’t missed anything exceptional to recommend on top of our existing favourites. To give you a taster, here are some of the best books we’ve read recently in the 9-12 and teen/young adult categories. … More What We’re Reading
“My child hates writing. I can’t get him/her to write anything,” is one of the commonest complaints I hear from parents. I can empathise. Although I have one writing-lover in this house, I also have a writing-hater. And yet that child is now a competent writer. Here are our top tips for how to support your child in developing this essential skill. … More How to Teach Writing in Your Homeschool
Bean11 recently had to write a letter from her future self (from the year 2060) as part of an acting creative challenge she’d been set. This quote from her letter really made me smile:
“In this decade, there are billions of books in thousands of genres. In fact, the first of each month is a ‘reading day’, where everyone, all across the world, devotes their entire day to reading.”
To me, this sounds like bliss! Sticking with this theme, here are the books each of us are currently enjoying/have just finished. … More What We’re Reading
Seven weeks into our new homeschool term and we’ve settled into a happy rhythm. Although I believe the very beauty of home education is the flexibility to tailor plans to your own family’s needs, it’s always helpful to see how others are doing it. So, here are our high-level curriculum plans for 2020/21. As we progress through the year, I’ll share short posts to give a flavour of how the different subjects work in practice. … More Overview of our Curriculum Plans 2020/21
Today we have a treat: a guest post from Bean10 about her favourite books of all time. Because let’s face it, in this period of lockdown, is there anything better than snuggling down (or indeed sitting up in a tree!) with a good book, letting its words flow around your head, and carrying you off into another world? Hopefully you’ll find some inspiration from her selections. … More Bean10’s Favourite Books
Recently, I’ve had lots of questions about how we homeschool. Although I wholeheartedly believe home education should look different for every family, I’ve personally found it very helpful to see how others do it. So, I’ve written a series of posts sharing our plans for the current school year by subject area. Here’s the first: English skills. … More Overview of our Homeschool Plans 2019/20 – English
Reading is a hugely significant part of our life; books are integral to our home education journey. As I reflected on what we completed in homeschool last Wednesday, I realised the variety of literary genres covered in just one day was fairly substantial. So, for anyone interested in what homeschool looks like for us, I thought I’d share a day in our life through the books we read. … More The breadth of reading in one homeschool day…
A post for your budding author – some simple ideas to inspire children struggling to get started with their story writing. Use exciting story openers, change the perspective from which the story is written or have a go at imitating the style and structure of a successful children’s author to create a fictional story based on a true historical event. … More Igniting their Imagination: Story Writing Ideas for Children
“You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax all you need is a book!” – Dr. Seuss We’re book obsessed in this household as you might have noticed from previous posts. Here are some of the magical books we’ve been reading this month: As part of our marine biology unit study (see … More September’s Beautiful Children’s Books
Europe is the focus of this week’s Read the World Summer Book Club, hosted by Jamie C. Martin from Simple Homeschool, which we’re thoroughly enjoying. Rather fortuitously we’d planned to be in Spain for the first half of the week, practising the children’s developing language skills, so we decided to keep it simple and focus … More Read the World Summer Book Club: Europe Week!
Five escape the classroom 