Monday 20th April 2020
With the Easter holidays officially over, and Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary) announcing yesterday that there were no plans to open UK schools through the summer holidays or for the next three weeks, it was back to home schooling for warp-girl this morning. This term she had a new topic; Jack and the Beanstalk; and our tasks today consisted of some reading and some measuring. As we didn’t have a physical copy of the story we watched someone reading it on YouTube (that counts right?!) and then had a very philosophical discussion about the morality of Jack being the hero of the story when he had stolen from the giant, not once, but three times… We then decided to incorperate the topic into our measurement work by making a Duplo ‘beanstalk’ and measuring warp-girl and warp-boy. warp-girl really enjoyed this and began measuring anything she could find against our makeshift measuring stick; that was until warp-boy really enjoyed knocking it down, Godzilla style. After this, we had less fun putting the blocks away (for a toy which is very un-round, Duplo has a strange habit of rolling around until it covers the entire floor in the living room equally). Next it was my turn to do some work – emailing, planning, etc. When warp-girl’s school work is on the laptop, it is relatively easy for me to sit alongside her and work, but when it is hand written or involves hands on activities, my work either has to be done before or after hers. Later on, whilst watching people eating out of date food on YouTube, jef and I discussed the morality of Jack and his mother stealing from the giant. When we were kids these stories seemed much more clear cut, with meaningful rights and wrongs, but re-reading them now they seemed a lot more ambiguous. Things were getting a bit too deep…let’s get back to the man eating 30 year old spaghetti hoops!