Home education and adaptation to any life event

Our new year started off with a lot of disruption to our lives. 

After experiencing a devastating life changing event we have had to use my coping strategy of finding the positives in a very bad situation.

We have not been at home for many reasons and are looking to move to Lincolnshire as soon as finances and circumstances allow, how this would have transpired if we were schooled and not home educating I dread to think.

The fortunate thing is that we do home educate and so the kids education has not been affected unlike it would have been if we had been in the school system.

The great thing about home education is that you can do it anywhere under any circumstances.

Despite all the upheaval we have been undergoing in our lives and the massive amounts of change, things have stayed the same, as far as the twins education goes.

In this short month of January we have been learning about Kind Henry 1V and visited the remains of Bolingbrook Castle, the twins also researched King William The Conqueror and the monarchy hierarchy with kings and queens and the marriages and inheritance, we manage to incorporate our theme of places and how they are named into this by looking at his wife Matilda of Flanders which led us onto the  poem of Flanders Fields and we read and decoded the poem, this lead to looking at world war 2 and the Dam busters, we visited the museum where they have started the restoration of the Lancaster bomber.

 
 
 Due to us being near to a beach we have also started to look at the geology and geography of the beach and have been collecting some fantastic precious stones and various rocks along with the obligatory shells discovering all about what we find.

 

We have even embarked on buying a metal detector to see if we can find some amazing archaeology finds on the beach, which will make Oliver's dream come true of finding some ancient relics, whilst Olivia has intentions on finding precious stones to make jewellery from.

Our project on changing places that we have been working on as a theme for the past few years has taken the form of a powerpoint presentation where they have been brushing up on some IT skills and are researching road names and where they come from, learning that the historical industry of a town or important person from a town can be seen in the road names, we even spent an afternoon getting to know the new town by looking like nutters and walking round photographing road name signs whilst they homed their photography skills with their camera, so they can add the signs to the powerpoint.

They have learnt the meaning behind the names, such as the theme around where we live is trees, so we have been looking at the particular trees and learning about them, they were delighted to find out that the red berries they keep seeing are actually hawthorns, as they have been asking what they are for some time, so we have been learning about native and non native species.

We are doing a compare and contrast on our home town and this new town and will also visit  nearby fishing village town and do some street research there.

I love the contrast between our home town being a textile and mining town and the new areas being fishing villages, it makes for a great compare and contrast exercise.

In between all that we have been doing our usual Khan Academy and IXL Maths sheets, reading lots mainly of the books they requested for Xmas amongst many other things.

We have also met another home educating family in our new town and look forwards  to meeting them again, we have discovered new groups that we intend to meet up with but with the coastal flood warning that was sadly delayed that plan, although we did learn about tidal flooding and the connection with the moon and coastal erosion, so all was not lost with that, even that was a learning curve.

So while it may seem to others we are gallivanting and doing not very much, it has been a very busy and productive January, all unplanned and all very exciting and new, in between my devastation emotionally....

I am pleased my plan of making good out of a bad situation, has been successful and without home education things would have been rather dire.....