July 2024 Scottish Home Schooling Blogger Diaries

Another busy month gone by. Although this time it is the summer holidays here in Scotland! We’ve been busy visiting various places and ferrying the youngest to and from various holiday camps. The eldest is happy to just meet up with friends, holiday camps are not his jam at all! Funny how different two children in the same family can be!

And as usual, we are an autonomous home educating family. So there is no structure to their learning, it’s child led. Which includes suggestions and encouragement to do different activities too. The children have always been home educated and this works well for us, with the children learning about what interests them and what is needed at the time.

Table of Contents

History

Going through all the images from this month, history seems to be rather popular! The youngest has had 2 separate weeks at drama and dance camps. So the eldest and I were busy doing other things on our own or with friends. We also listened to history podcasts, including Greeking Out and Who, When, Wow.

We hadn’t visited the Dunblane Museum in a while, so that was a nice day out. The museum is small, donation entry, but fascinating! Lots of information about various battles, including the Battle of Sherrifmuir, involving the Jacobites. We also visited the cathedral across the road to learn more about its history and see the Pictish stone inside.

During the first week of the holidays, when the littlest wasn’t busy, we went to Cairnpapple Hill. This is a small historic Scotland site in West Lothian. It’s been used at various different times throughout history, from a timber henge, to Bronze Age ceremonial purposes and then Christian burials. The views from here can almost stretch from coast to coast on a good day!

Another visit with grandparents took the kids to Smailhome Tower in the Borders. We had never visited before, but it’s an interesting building, and feels rather remote. Our main aim was to gain our final Historic Scotland collectors card and pin badge. But the kids also enjoyed listening to all the local legends using the headsets.

At the beginning of July we went on the historic Waverley steam ship. The last ocean going steam powered paddle ship in the world. It was fascinating to watch the engine’s moving when it was underway. Unfortunately it was too windy to dock at Arran as expected, but we had a lovely day out.

Stanley Mills was another Historic Scotland site that we visited this month. Somewhere else we hadn’t previously visited, but lots of interactive activities for children. It was all about the history of the cotton mill, how it worked and the conditions of the people working there.

The eldest has always loved trains and we made the effort to go to the Glasgow transport museum, The Riverside museum. Here he admired the different trains, cars and other vehicles. Along with the Tall Ship, Glenlee, docked beside the museum.

A trip to visit Gigha coincided with some work in the Historic graveyard. Cleaning gravestones and reading what they said. We also headed to Kilmartin Museum and glen on our way back home. The Kilmartin Museum was recently refurbished and is a fantastic place to learn about the history of the glen. It’s been used for thousands of years and has many ceremonial monuments in place. From henges and standing stones, to burial cairns and cup and ring marked rocks.

The kids and I also spent a few days exploring Oban. Historic places included Dunollie Castle and Museum, McCaig’s Tower and the heritage centre and Castle Coeffin. You can read more about this visit in our Oban hostel post.

Science – Scottish Home Schooling Blogger

Lego, as always, is a big part of the kids STEM education. Both are adept at building and re-building things. Although they got some surprise kits in the post recently, which meant an afternoon of building new things!

We have also been listening to our usual science podcasts, including Tumble and Wow In The World.

Litter-picking along the South Queensferry coast was eye opening. Seeing how much litter is left or washed up on the beach was useful to show the kids the affects of this. We discussed how plastics affect marine wildlife and were surprised at how many plastic bottles and McDonalds litter there was.

Whilst walking on the Isle of Gigha we came across a bee colony under the grassy pathway. Fascinating to watch the bees coming and going! But even more interesting was one single bee that had a huge number of bee mites on its back. These occur naturally, but the number this poor bee had seemed to be making it disorientated and confused.

A visit to Five Sisters Zoo for a lemur experience was very exciting. It was a wonderfully warm day and the lemurs jumped all around us as we fed them, weighed them and learned about wild lemurs. It was a definite highlight of our visit! We also loved seeing the groundhogs, penguins and of course the otters! The otters were especially noisy whilst we were there!

Geography – Scottish Home Schooling Blogger

Geography as always involves a fair bit of discussion around the globe and world map already in the house. And discussions of places we’ve already visited too.

We also looked at maps during our trip on the Waverley steamship where we sailed around the North of Arran, Isle of Bute and along the Clyde. I still would like to get a Scottish map to show the kids everywhere we’ve visited. Train travel to Oban was also helpful as the kids could easily see which stations connect to each other along the line.

Finally we had some discussions of Lemur habitat in Madagascar and deforestation in relation to palm oil plantations.

Maths

I signed both children up to Beast Academy, but of course we’ve been so busy that we haven’t managed too much this month. Other maths activities have included playing various different board games.

English

The youngest has been improving with his reading, reading to me for 10 minutes most days. There are obviously words he still trips over, but he’s certainly getting there.

The eldest on the other hand is constantly reading and we’ve been to the library a LOT! He’s finished the Summer reading challenge already too. I’ve started him off on Night Zookeeper to see if he likes it and he LOVES the programme. It seems to involve making a lot of different animals and stories around them. It helps improve spelling, grammar etc., which is something that he wasn’t interested in before.

The kids read their own books and we also read to them too. I’ve finished reading Beastlands by Jess French to them both and now we’ve started on the 2nd Arkspire book by Jamie Littler. I’m also reading the 5th book in the Harry Potter series to the youngest.

Clubs and Groups – Scottish Home Schooling Blogger

Clubs and groups are all off for the summer holidays. However, the youngest has taken part in the local drama group weekly camp, a Matilda production. Which he loved and of course we’ve had Matilda songs on constantly since!

The 10 year old also had a week learning West End show songs and dances. He had a great week and has lots of new songs on his playlist!

The eldest went a 1-day forest school with a friend. He had a fantastic time, but was happy only to go the once!

Socialisation

The youngest has obviously been socialising a lot at his weekly camps, which he loves. The eldest and I have been meeting up with friends during the week instead. So both kids can get enough time socialising with both peers and adults in the community.

Physical Education – Scottish Home Schooling Blogger

We’ve had some beautiful weather this month and spent a lot of time outdoors enjoying the sunshine. Plenty of walk in Oban, Lismore and Gigha. Swimming in the sea, trampolining, paying at parks and with friends locally. We also spent a lot of time kayaking on Gigha too, both children are adept at kayaking their own kayaks now and have fun jumping in and out, ferrying each other rounds some rocky islets where we often see seals.

The youngest also had a lot of dancing at both his holiday camps this month.