An up and down home schooling day.

38 weeks pregnant!

The tolls of late pregnancy are catching up with me. Today I am 38 weeks along.  My sleep is disrupted, I wake often and most nights have bouts of insomnia in the early hours of the morning - usually around 3am to 5am. Physically I am experiencing lots of different aches and pains, and while I try to go for a 2km + walk every other day, it's very slow and uncomfortable. But all of this is to be expected at this stage of pregnancy and I know it won't be much longer! However, it means I am finding it hard to be enthusiastic and patient when I am teaching the boys. Today was one of those mornings where I felt tired and irritable. That's when it is especially great to have my husband around to step in and help.

The old railway line at The Gulch

One of our formal home schooling lessons for the day was completing the second half of a History lesson (from First Class Resources) entitled "Getting to Know a Town or City". We had to complete a timeline of historical events in our chosen city or town. We chose to study the little seaside town we are living in. We researched the history from the original Aboriginal inhabitants, to the European discovery of the area by Captain Tobias Furneaux in 1773, early developments in the area, up until more modern day advancements.  We learned that there was an old railway line leading up to the ocean, in an area called "The Gulch", which was used to transport sheep, timber and fish to load on boats to distribute to other areas in the state and interstate.  The history book we referenced indicated that remnants of the old railway line could still be found at The Gulch, so we decided to go and have a closer look as our excursion in the afternoon.

Looking at old photos, this one was very interesting
to my 9 year old, depicting a shark captured in 1940s

It was really good to head out to explore our area and my 9 year old was excited to find the railway line and bits of corroded metal that had fallen away from the railway line.  We then went into a history room situated in a nearby original fisherman shack that has recently been restored, and looked at some old photos of the region.  The shack is an information station that also serves coffee and ice cream, so we treated the boys to an ice cream afterwards - with a stunning view from the sitting area!


It was refreshing to go out and look around at some of the areas that link into the history we are studying. Being able to see and physically explore the areas we are studying seems to enhance the boys' understanding and learning and interest.

And it's good when the day ends happily!

Ice cream with a view!

Home schooling newbies!

In 2015 as we planned for our year of coastal living, we knew home schooling would be the best option for our boys. They are both on the autism spectrum and experience anxiety, particularly when faced with new situations, so the thought of plonking them into the local public school -  which would be a completely new and unfamiliar situation with no familiar faces around them - did not appeal. The only real solution was home schooling. Initially I felt a fair bit of trepidation about this prospect, having no idea where to start with planning for teaching the boys ourselves, and overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility for meeting their educational needs for the year. My husband never doubted we could do it.

As 2016 drew closer, I linked in with some home schooling groups on Facebook, sought advice from friends who have home schooled their children, read information about how to include Australian National Curriculum into home schooling and started researching curriculum options. We submitted our application to the state body for home education registration and we were successfully approved right at the end of December. 

After researching various resources, I decided to purchase lesson plans for Maths, English, Science, History and Geography that aligned with the Australian National Curriculum. There's a vast array of content available but I was able to narrow down our choices and bought some excellent complete lesson plans from First Class Resources and RIC Publications. Once I had the curriculum sorted, I felt much more settled about commencing homeschooling and even began to look forward to starting! 

We started on 3rd February. The boys were fairly enthusiastic and actually had been asking when we would be starting for a few days beforehand. I drafted up a schedule and we experimented for the first few days to see what would work best. A few weeks into home school, the schedule has been refined somewhat and seems to be working well. Obviously this will be subject to change! I'm a bit anxious about making sure we get through enough formal learning content each day, which from my reading of others' experiences, seems to be a common concern for home schooling newbies. I'll probably relax with it as we grow more confident and comfortable. Fortunately the boys seem to be happy with home schooling most of the time, aside from the expected hiccups as we transition to a different way of doing school and add in much more structure to life at home. We finish our formal learning around 12pm - 1pm most days and this means the afternoons consist of more fun, experiential learning tasks. 

We set up a designated space in the living area to do our formal work and this seems to help the boys get into a good head space for doing "school". Eventually we plan to build on an additional room to our shack, which can serve as the home school space and will offer more work space to set up computers and so on. 

Thought I'd add some photos of our early days of home schooling! 

Our formal learning space - the table was a fortuitous second hand find 
that is perfectly suited to our needs

Our weekly schedule as it stands currently 

The boys working together on a Health task 

Big smiles on our first day of homeschooling.

Our year of living differently

This blog has been created for the purpose of chronicling our year living in a small coastal town on the east coast of Tasmania, while my husband and I have leave from work, commence home schooling our two boys - and in March, welcome a new little baby girl into our family. 

It will be a learning curve for all of us but one that we are excited about. Our hope is that this year will be a time of interacting more closely as a family, building upon our relationships, living life more simply and enjoying a more relaxed pace of life. Living beside the ocean seems to facilitate a less hurried and a calmer approach to life. Our boys love the beach, as do we, and they seem happier and more settled when they can swim in the waves, draw in the sand, and skip along the shore, on a daily basis.  

We feel privileged to have this opportunity to live life differently to our "normal" for a year. It will be an interesting journey!

Our local beach

The boys in their happy place - no matter how cold, warm, sunny, l

ight or stormy it is - they love being on the beach