September Home Education Diary 2023

Apologies for only getting round to writing this now! I only just realised that I hadn’t written about last month! September was a busy month as usual and the first full month back to activities after summer holidays. As usual we have no ‘lessons’ and our home education lives is nothing like school, the kids don’t have to do any official learning or workbooks etc., but every month they learn so much. It always amazes me how much knowledge they retain!

As a home education blogger I hope this inspires others to understand the home education doesn’t mean sit down schooling at home.

Table of Contents

History

The kids knowledge of history is surprisingly good, they certainly know a lot more than I did at their age! Most of this knowledge is from podcasts that we regularly listen to. Favourites for history are definitely National Geographic’s Greeking Out, Live From Mount Olympus and Who, When, Wow.

I highly recommend podcasts for car journeys, great for the kids learning!

We’ve also visited various other places throughout the month. Including Clachtoll broch in the Highlands and The Hermit’s castle in Achmelvich. These were part of our visit to Achmelvich youth hostel, which was a lot of fun in a late summer heatwave!

It was also my eldest’s birthday this month. As he had been asking to go to the National Railway Museum for ages, he was excited to head there for his birthday day out. Which meant lots of visiting trains and taking photos with different locomotives, plus a virtual reality trip on the Flying Scotsman. We had a little time to kill before catching our train home and so also managed to walk the walls in York too. Another nice bit of York history!

Science – Home Education Blogger

Again science always begins with podcasts, the kids favourites being Wow In the World, Tumble, Mysteries of Science and How To Be An Earthling. The kids learn a lot from these whether it’s about pandas or how colours affect the temperature of buildings.

Once a week the kids also have a coding session using Minecraft education. They’ve learnt a lot and are at a stage that they don’t need any help from me so I have no idea what it going on! But basically they use code to make their agents or themselves do cool stuff. Last time I watched they were making copies of houses by using a code. They also do lots of fun battles using code to make others fly away, jump etc.

We also went to Edinburgh zoo with home ed friends in September. The kids favourite part are still the play parks. But we did see quite a few animals, including tigers, Giant Pandas, penguins and red pandas. I also did some work with Great British Racing and the kids had a fab time at the stables learning about race horses and how they looked after.

Other science at home includes the snap circuits sets that the kids have re-discovered. This holds true to my ‘never get rid of things’ philosophy. As even though they hadn’t used them for over a year, this month they are being used daily and with much more understanding!

At the beginning of the month we stayed in the youth hostel at Achmelvich for a few days. It happened to be during a heatwave and we had a great time on a boat trip looking at seals and then learning about crabs at the harbour.

As it was warm the kids also made some more s’mores using a solar oven they made. It worked very well and very quickly in the blazing sun!

The youngest also went on a bat walk with Cubs and was very excited to use my bat detector to listen to them!

Even using kites is great to learn about wind and air dynamics, how to keep them up in the air and how the wind moves the air. Everything can be learning really!

Geography

There hasn’t been much extra geography going on, but we always have maps on the walls and globes around the house. So the kids are always exposed to maps and our world geography.

Additionally they can’t help but notice how towns and cities are constructed, due to driving and walking around them! So there is definite human geography happening without knowing it too. We often talk about other types of geography when out walking, such as frost weathering in rocks or sand dune habitats, ecology.

English – Home Education Blogger

The eldest is working his way through the Wings of Fire series. Occasionally reading other books in-between as he has to wait for the next to be available at the library! He reads so much that it seems a lot cheaper to just borrow from the library than buy!

Littlest is still using Reading Eggs and also reading some easy readers to practice his skills. He definitely seems to learn reading in a different way to his brother. With a need for whole word reading rather than simply phonics.

Both children have started writing their own stories. The eldest finished one story and has started a new one using my tablet. This time he’s chosen a. Chapter book and I’m impressed with the language he uses. It’s certainly much more mature than I expected! I guess that comes from reading a lot of books!

Maths

The kids are really into Prodigy Maths right now, they ask to play it every day at the moment! It’s basically a maths app in a computer game, all for free. The kids have to complete a maths problem to cast a spell to attack different beasts in the game. So it’s a lot of fun to them!

We’ve also been playing a fair few board games again, most have some sort of mathematics involved.

Clubs and Groups – Home Education Blogger

All the kids clubs and groups are back on again, plus meeting up with home ed friends several times each week too. Currently the kids both do Cubs/Scouts, a home ed climbing group and dodgeball. Littlest also does gymnastics twice a week (one is a home ed group!), two lots of dancing – tap/ballet/modern and acro/commercial. Then he has two lots of drama classes and rehearsals for the panto in December once a week. I also send him swimming, although he is much better at swimming now and as it’s mostly about perfecting strokes we may stop that class!

The eldest isn’t as interested in clubs and groups, but the littlest loves them. So we find a balance so they can both do what they want to.

Art and Music

Throughout September the kids have also had an art class (4 week block). So it’s focussed on making sculptures from different materials. The willow sculptures were probably the favourite! Although they had great fun making random junk sculptures too!

1000 Hours Outdoors

As the weather has been so nice there has been a lot of time outdoors. The kids certainly seem on track to finish their 1000 hours this year! We’ve been outside with friends playing, swimming in the sea, walks in the countryside, playing on the beach and even an outdoor film night at home. Lots of awesome adventures!