Charity shops - A Treasure Trove for Home learning? · Sunday March 30, 2008 by Christine
Reading took the form of reading us 1001 jokes today, or at least that’s what it seemed. Amazing what a Charity shop purchase can achieve. The 1001 Joke book provided, reading practice, use of homophones and figures of speech (very useful if you have Aspergers and can take things literally.)
Education is no longer a separate part of our lives. since we started home educating Christopher it’s become an intergral part of our lifestyle and has effected us all, hence Saturdays are no different from the other days of the week.
Christopher’s condition (Aspergers and oppositional defiant disorder) can make him very difficult to ‘teach’ and we have learned that an autonomouse style of learning, mostly led by his interests is the most effective way for him to learn.
Today he spent an hour with his brother Thomas building towers from dominos. He established that if he built up the towers with dominos at alternate angles (like the breeze blocks on daddy’s pallett) they were stronger than if they all lay the same way. Similarly if he doubled the thickness of the tower it was less likely to fall over when you rolled a tennis ball at it because it had added strength.
They then proceeded to work out how they could make letters of the alphabet from the dominos and spell words.
In the years before home education, board games played little part in our family life as we were all so ‘busy’. Watching the children learn so much from them and socialise together has been a huge suprise and we are constantly looking for games we can use to help them learn, we scour Charity shops whever we go. They are a treasure trove of educational books, games and videos.
