Friday 9 March 2007

A perfect day

Is this how other home educators live?

We get up at 8am and the children get dressed, have breakfast and brush their teeth. They get in the car to go to their art and play meeting. In the car we listen to a Music Box story which explores the Paganini Rhapsody by Rachmaninov. We arrive at the meeting on time. Here the children take part in a drama workshop. We eat lunch in the car on the way to swimming. When we get back home the children spend an hour playing with a French language site on the computer, and watch a short Help to Read programme on the TV about the sounds made by 'ou' and 'ow'. Then they complete some of the maths and art puzzles in their Nature Detectives packs while listening to Roald Dahl's story of Matilda. At bedtime I read Ponies on Parade and everyone goes to sleep.

Well they really did do all those things. And I'm not going to say anything about the fight on the stairs which involved Shark chanting 'Tomato face! Tomato face!' at Tiger, nor about our Music Box story stopping half way thanks to the batteries giving up on the CD player. I'm not going to mention that Tiger removed herself completely from the drama workshop and hid behind the garden ivy, and I'm not going to confess that I made a mistake about the start of the swimming lesson which I'd already had to rearrange from Wednesday. It started at 2.30, not 2 o' clock, so I gave myself an additional 30 minutes of pool torture. And I'm not going to shout out that the kids chose the only non-speech and non-reading screens on the French language site, and I'm not about to say that the Nature Detectives site kept crashing or that the Internet Radio wouldn't work so that I felt like taking an axe to it. And neither am I about to tell you that I set the tea towel on fire or that I spent most of Ponies on Parade scoffing at the crap plot. And I'm not saying that Squirrel had a fit of the fears at bedtime and ended up taking herself off to Dig's empty space where she'll kick and snore all night long.

No, I'm not going to mention any of those things. I'm just going to live the home education dream.

1 comment:

Michelle said...

You see, it's what you don't say that makes all the difference. :-)

You had also made lunch. I'd have been forced into a mad panic dash to the supermarket to buy something!