Homeschooling

It was very strange for the school year to start and not to be part of it. Ella was sad not to be going back, and part of me was sad too; to miss the routine, the cool mornings, catching up with friends. We started homeschooling in the summer to get a head start, knowing that we’ll have some busy days ahead when squeezing it in might be trickier. Here is one of our first homeschool sessions in Auray:

And here are the kids’ faces when we told them they had to write book reports. Yes, we are bribing them with cake while we sip coffee. They were not impressed.

But they both completed their book reports and presented them to us. They did a fantastic job and were so proud of their work.

We are planning to do 144 hours of homeschool and we generally sit down and do two hours at a time. It’s not always easy. I’m not a natural teacher, and I lose patience easily. My experience at school was so different than my kids’. They learn in such a different way than I did, so it’s hard to shift my way of presenting information and correcting their work. But we’ve gotten into a pretty good rhythm and Jon and I take turns working with them. I am relearning so much math, one of my worst subjects ever. I am practicing my multiplication tables with Ella but I still use a calculator sometimes (shhhh!).

They each have workbooks that I bought in Quebec. They are not the perfect equivalent of the Nova Scotia curriculum, but it’s close and it’s challenging for them. I also have homework pages that I got from the teachers. Ella was in a 5/6 split last year, so I got her teacher to send me all the Grade 6 homework last year. I went online and found all the homework that Ella did in Grade 3, which is a good starting point for Theo. I waited until the first week of school to officially take them out and sign them up for homeschool so that I could establish a connection with the teachers and get on their email lists. I’m told there is no guarantee they’ll be in that same class in January, but this means we can follow along. They are both going to prepare and send presentations back to their classes. They are doing mostly French and Math, but also art and science.

The 144 hours doesn’t include the lessons they get on the road and the learning they are doing just from being exposed to so much. Sometimes their education looks like this (Paris):

Or this (St-Malo):

We use opportunities like hikes to talk about the natural word and climate change.

San Sebastian:

We have also seen a lot of Palestinian flags and signs related to the war in Gaza, especially in Spain. We even found ourselves in a loud demonstration in Logroño one day and used it as an opportunity to talk about the recent developments in Gaza.

We are even getting them to do some art projects based on what we’ve seen and learned about on the trip.

Sometime when we aren’t very active, they do gym class with Monsieur Jean Charles:

Here they are learning about the Romans in Lugo (Spain):

We’ve completed about 45 hours so far, so 100 or so to go… stay tuned…