Academic progress update

It is interesting that since we have had a reasonable break of a few weeks since we tackled much specific maths work, we have come back to it with lots of enthusiasm. Caden practically begged me this morning to do maths. We made a huge amount of progress, he flew through the entire subtraction section for the entire work expected of Year 1 in the national curriculum in just this morning. He totally gets it now so it is easy to teach him. I am glad we had a break when he didn't want to do it. He is very pleased with himself for getting 100% across the board with the subject and getting a platinum certificate. For anyone interested we are working from the conquer maths program which is an online study program, based on the UK national curriculum. It works very well for us because I always know what level he is at on the curriculum scale, what he needs to learn and we can pick and choose what topic, year (we could go right to the top level in one area if he really wanted to only stick with one topic, for example). We can go as quickly or slowly as we like and that suits us all well, he can learn at his own pace. This is clearly working for us anyway, as long as he leans everything he needs to in the end to get a good grade in his GCSE maths, it really doesn't matter what order he does it in.

Miles did some more reading work with me today. I noticed in the last few weeks that he seems very ready to learn reading. He is showing an interest in words and seems to be picking them up fairly quickly now his spoken language skills are much improved. He also is starting to understand how a laptop mouse pad works which means reading eggs and mathseeds are much more accessible for him. I plan on getting mathseeds started next year, no rush. We are already 5 eggs into level one of reading eggs and on level one of the 'Your baby can read' program which supplemented Caden's reading learning very well. The current plan is to do this with him early every morning (while I have my morning coffee at 8am) for as long as he is interested and this will be 'Mummy and Miles' special time where we cuddle and read the words together.

Another thing I thought worth mentioning today was that while I was working on subtraction with Caden, he wanted to sit on my knee and cuddle while we worked. I thought how nice that was, that he was feeling relaxed, loved and happy while he was learning. I hope this means he feels warmer towards the subject than I did when I was at school, I really hated maths when I was a child. I was told I was rubbish at it, so I was. I can see now that there are important fundamental aspects of maths that I wasn't taught and that no teacher that I remember ever identified and helped me with. It meant that I personally didn't get the later stuff at all and subsequently thought I didn't have a brain for maths. Now I can see that with maths you are just 'scaffolding' the learning, level by level.  It is important to me that they enjoy the things they learn so getting these basics right and fully understood for the kids is vital. I feel they won't struggle later on with more difficult concepts.

So there were lots of academic developments today. Caden has been playing a shark attack game on the iPad which he loves. It has radar type grid maps that he has to follow and has a fairly realistic graphic of a shark that he controls. He now wants to 'study' sharks (his words) so we went to the library today and found a book on marine fish which has lots of shark-facts among other fish-facts. Miles found an extreme dinosaurs book and we got the first Harry Potter book to start reading a couple of chapters a night, I will attempt it anyway. I am hoping Caden gets into this because I loved it so much. It's up to him though. He still likes the short picture books like the Gruffalo, just as much. Bletchley library has a really excellent children's factual lending library. An entire wall of books about every subject you could think of. Such a superb resource to have access to.

There has been an explosion of intelligent questions from Caden lately too. Clearly cognitive developmental leaps have been made. Today's most memorable was 'Does the moon make noise?' (when it orbits - we were talking about orbits again).  He has been asking questions about the stone age and the middle ages, he learned the words 'rennaissance' and 'ancient' (from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece) so I am now on the hunt for a massive timeline poster of world history by Christopher Lloyd which will hopefully inspire lots of learning about human history. This will be a nice background to our tour of England's Castles and other historical areas of interest that I have planned for them in a couple of years to support their education. They look pretty invaluable. https://whatonearthbooks.com/shop

We haven't been going to Woodcraft folk as much in the last couple of weeks and Forest school is taking a break but I am hoping they will both start up again soon. I am looking forward to the Summer so much. There are lots of exciting things planned in this year.