0
0
I’ve been really struggling with trying to spread my time between Draven (6) Cosima (4) and Camilo (4) keeping up with the work sent by school, uploading pieces completed. Whilst giving them the attention they need to do each task, Draven needs more help with maths and English work that is sent. When my attention is focused on his needs, the twins well especially Camilo who will start messing around, disrupting everyone else.
For the last week or two I’d all but given up attempting anything with the twins, and focused my attention on Draven, helping him complete tasks, but the task set by school are supposed to take around 20 minutes and these were taking him well over an hour! Despite me sending the twins off up stairs to play (destroy) in their rooms.
Monday (11th May) was an awful morning, the house was a mess and school work just went completely out of the window, the twins wouldn’t listen to needing to leave Draven to complete his work. I had a really long think about how to move things forward, especially after the news on Sunday that schools may go back in June, and frankly I’m not happy about that. So if I’m keeping them off until September at the earliest, I need to find a way to homeschool more effectively. I understand that this isn’t homeschool in the traditional sense and just a stop gap, and maybe they won’t fall behind, but I can already see Draven becoming less inclined to read, do spellings etc. No doubt that is because he isn’t at school, doesn’t have his peers with him to compete with and strive to do better. But I do feel I need to do something, they need structure in their day, and school work in the mornings provides that.
After a long think, I decided to try and structure things each morning around a topic that they could all become involved with, that I could break down so the twins can focus on mark making, colouring, and story sequencing. Whilst Draven could do missing words in sentences and writing / spelling.
I chose the very hungry caterpillar for our first topic, Twinkl has an amazing supply of resources open to parents currently because of the pandemic, you just need to create an account. These are the resources their school uses within the classroom too. I’d love to share what we used but their copyright laws won’t allow for sharing, but if you have an account just search for the very hungry caterpillar.
I printed off sheets for mark making, and story sequences for the twins and Draven had a missing words in sentences worksheet to do, on another site Sparklebox had a mini booklet to print out, whereby he needed to write down what the hungry caterpillar ate each day, cut out and then fold into a booklet.
Tuesday morning we all sat down and I popped youtube on to play the story, it felt so much better having everyone engaged in the same thing, and working together. Camilo protested a little saying he had too much work to do, but he eventually got on with it and then coloured in the pictures on his mark making sheets. I carried on with the topic the following day, giving them large cutouts from the story to colour in to make puppets, with the puppets we’re going to film the kids re telling the story using props, and we also had a session with air dry clay to make our own caterpillars.
They’ve all really enjoyed the sessions more, and I feel more chilled about doing school work, I’m still not focusing too much on what school are sending for the twins, but I do keep checking and then I will be trying to incorporate it in to our sessions. I do however upload files of what they do to their schools account, so the teachers can see progress they’re making. Once we’ve completed our shared topic, the twins are sent off to complete a tidy up task, giving me time to sit one-on-one with Draven so he can complete a couple of tasks set by school.
Nicci xx
