A Lesson from Nature! · Friday March 28, 2008 by Christine
One of the most exciting things about Home education is that it is never boring!
The sheep are lambing in our village at the moment and we’ve been watching our local farmer taking them up the lane to the field behind our house.
Thomas went down to the farm on his bike the other day and was invited to come and see the lambs any lunchtime and to bring his friends. Well of course that was it, Caitlin and Christopher wanted to go there and then and were most disgruntled when they had to wait untill dinnertime the next day!
Promptly at 12.00am we set off and knocked on the door of the farm house. Paul showed us round the lambing sheds , introduced us to the lambs and let us all cuddle one!
This year the sheep have been allowed to lamb in the fields and then they’re taken straight down to the lambing sheds for 24 hours with their lambs , as the lambs need to have an injection and have bands placed on their tails. It also takes that time for the sheep and lambs to bond.
If a sheep has three lambs, one can be removed from it’s mother during this time and placed with a singleton sheep otherwise it will need to be manually reared as it’s mother won’t be able to feed it.
The kid’s loved it, especially Christopher ,who demanded a job!
They’ve been back and forth all week to help bottle feed the lambs. What better way to spend the Easter holidays and learn about the lambing season?
Thanks for your info. I’m just struggling into the idea of homeschooling and am interested in this flexi-schooling that I’ve just learned of through your blog.. Peter is 8, is somewhere on the autistic spectrum and in mainstream. WHile I’m happy with the good-will of the school, I’m unhappy with their expertise and lack of follow-through. It takes an enormous amoutn of coaxing for them to stick with an intervention—we and the Autism Outreach worker have to gently and constantly remind them of very basic stuff and I’m getting fed up with it. It’s not surprising that they fall short, as the class size is 30 and the teacher this year is chronically absent with ill health, hence a string of supply teacher. I;ve tried independent schools, but he’s now too far academically behind as well, plus his autistic features frighten them off. The biggest problem with schools – both independent and state schools is that there are certain skill sets that they are never going to come to grips with, e.g. social skills training. Noone has mentioned flexi-schooling to me before. How many hours can I take him out for ? He’s statemented for 15 hours, but the allocation of this borders on the ridiculous – e.g. 10 min of 1:1 time with a TA, tehn 8 min of ‘small group’ time (none of the other kids have ASD), etc, etc. It must be done with a stopwatch in hand! What hurdles did you have to overcome? My thougths woudl be to set up a set time table with core skills, for 2 hours per day or so (1:1 with me or with a tutor, if I can find a good one). Biggest problem will be making this compatible with my work schedule, I fear, but I’m also scared that I won’t have the patience or the skill to pull this off. I’m also fairly sure that teh school staff will be very discouraging, when I bring this up..They seem put out when I suggest that more could be done or that I feel anxious about how he is doing academically and socially.
— Liz May 7, 06:08 am #