Education in Bed

After yesterday's excitement in the morning, Ram became very tired in the afternoon. At first he wanted me to read aloud to him.

Oh, lets just back track there a bit! At the moment, and for the last couple of months we have been reading our way through the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. They have proved to be highly educational, not only the regular books themselves, but also the three 'Science of Discworld' books.

By reading these books aloud to Ram I can do a verbal annotation, like the ones that are available on the Internet. It is a wonderful example of how purposive conversation works. We will read a line such as "'They were myths and they were real,' he said loudly. 'Both a wave and a particle.'"
which is from Guards! Guards! and that will lead to a discussion about how light acts as both a wave and a particle, bringing in the science that we learned from the Science books! It takes us much longer to read these books that reading the actual words, as we often stop to discuss things!

Not only that, the Dxh is also reading them so when he comes on Saturdays we usually discuss the whole thing again. This can bring in other opinions, which is helps Ram learn that people can have differing opinions about the same thing, as well as a greater level of science understanding.

Anyway, back to yesterday. Even through Ram was eager to start the next book Feet of Clay, he wasn't really happy about it. He decided to go on the computer instead. I then had another conversation with Glow the farmer and suggested that Ram and I help with the clean up operation. Ram then said that he was too tired to do anything like that. So I left him looking up Pokemon data!

It is actually lovely to see him doing this, as a few years ago when he was into Pokemon he couldn't read it for himself. He is now really excited reading his own Pokemon books because he realises now how much he was missing when he couldn't read.

In the evening we watched the wildlife programmes on Channel Five, then The Tudors. At 10 o'clock there is a mad dash for bed so that Ram can watch Q.I. Live. At the end I turned over briefly to BBC1 to catch the weather, a topic that is in the forefront at the moment. Ram noticed that there was a particularly low temperature on the top most island above Scotland, so when we turned the TV off I reached for the atlas.

Yes, we keep an old physical geography atlas in the bedroom, just for moments like this!

This is a very old atlas that we bought from a charity shop. One reason I got it was because it is physical geography (weather, ground level, and so on) rather than the social geography that is more popular now, and another is to show how countries and their names have changed.

The first thing we noticed was that the island in question was not Shetland, but Zetland! So one of my jobs this morning is to look up when the name Zetland fell from use so that I can drop that into our purposive conversation today!

Then for some reason Ram wanted to look at Canada, so we had to go though the whole atlas to get to Canada (yes, I new it was at the end but didn't tell him so that we would have to go through the whole book!) looking at many interesting things on the way.

The great thing about home education, is that it can take place at any time of the day – or night!