Just one day

After feeling that not much has been happening on the activity front. Jessy surpassed himself today by being super busy! It also feels like a natural balance to the extra screen time we had for a while, and as you’ve probably noticed by now, I do like to notice the balance on our journey. So I thought I’d do another micro-focused blog of our one quiet little day in the world of autonomous education.

Jessy has been really enjoying creative writing recently, particularly first thing in the morning when it’s quiet before I’m even out of bed. He’s working on a story called ‘Jessy McAlister and the Secret Monster’ where he imagines a Hogwarts School for younger witches and wizards. He wanted me to fold the paper out to take the photos, but it folds up into a nice little book. He’s also been ingenious at using both sides of the paper by refolding it to get to Part 2!

Jessy McAlister and The Secret Monster.

The ongoing story.

I’m so happy that Jessy loves writing. It isn’t something that has come easily to him and if I were to hazard a guess at his future career based on his hand writing I’d say he’ll be a doctor for sure. 😉 We have done some brief work on letter construction and lower/upper case letters etc as well as punctuation, although he doesn’t seem to apply much of this theoretical knowledge in practice. I honestly don’t mind though – he is writing more and more and enjoying it. He has the rest of his life to neaten it up!

Moving on from Literacy to Numeracy (I want to giggle just writing that!) I found a wooden Sudoku set in a charity shop yesterday and thought Jessy would enjoy it. He didn’t want to go to bed last night because he wanted to carry on with it. He went back to it this morning.

Sudoku

Jessy’s first completed sudoku.

He swears he completed it himself, although I have a suspicion there may have been copious amounts of checking the answers. Either way he’s finding it compelling!

Late morning was given over to his invention. It was apparently an invention that allows locks to be opened using a tin opener. It involved destroying several of my newly acquired hair bands (I have literally bought hundreds and they all disappear!) I didn’t quite understand all the thinking behind it, but he worked on it very seriously for quite sometime. We talked about inventors and the importance of learning from failure and persevering.

Getting the band positioned correctly.

Comparing cutting the band with a knife with the cutting action of the tin opener.

Nimbus keeping an eye on the invention.

Success!

After lunch he began creating a robot out of smoothie boxes and cartons after seeing the idea on the back of the box. It’s been a beautiful sunny day, so we went outside.

Making a robot.

The Jessy ZOM-BOT 3000.

Our cat Nimbus has spent all day with us, and after he began chasing flies comedy style, I suggested he might enjoy Jessy playing with them, so he ran around the yard with a big vine for a while!

Playing with Nimbus in the back yard.

I asked Jessy to do some of his Home Ed Fund scrapbook. He’s always reluctant to do it. I guess he’s just not used to having these kind of activities insisted on! We use it to keep a record of the things we have bought with the money my Aunt generously gives us to help with Jessy’s home education. I agreed to buy him ‘Munchkin’ (a card based game he loves) with the fund on the condition he would do some work to bring the scrapbook up to date. (He finally got dressed at this point, but only because he was actually sweating in his sleepsuit!)

Doing his Home Ed scrapbook.

After that we played Munchkin. It’s very entertaining. It was devised by Steve Jackson who wrote the Fantasy books where you choose your own story that I loved as a child. Jessy enjoys them now. After dinner I felt we could both do with a bit of chill out time, so Jessy went on Minecraft and I watched a documentary about Ina May Gaskin who wrote ‘Spiritual Midwifery’.

This will be a good blog to look at when I’m having one of those ‘we don’t do anything!’ days! Bye for now!