A fresh new year...

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was writing a post about my intentions for the academic year back in September, now here we are at the beginning of a new calendar year and it bearly seems like any time has passed at all! 

   

Our learning journey so far has been pretty relaxed, but fruitful too - Bear has picked up phonics well, having already known most of his alphabet, but now has a grip on all but a couple of letters, both their names and their sounds, and has started to blend tow and three sounds together to make simple phonetic words. I followed the SATPIN guide and used a Ladybird book which led us through the sounds in order, a few at a time, and then I relaxed over December because of the amount of other activities planned for the festive season.

Now, with a fresh new start again, we are going to jump back in a refresh our memories on the 26 letter sounds and start using them to make simple words, before adding in some of the other phonics sounds. Bear is pretty receptive to our set learning times so I am confident in our approach so far. We try to do some sit-down 'official' learning every day, but we also play a lot of games that have phonetic or number involvement, and Bear is always full of questions and is learning all the time.

I plan to refresh his memory of the numbers 1 to 20, and then move on to recognising the other numbers up to 100. He has started doing simple adding and subtracting all by himself when eating and playing, so I am going to start including that in our learning journey too.

Our reading pile is never ending - both boys still love their books, and we got new ones for Christmas that they are still working their way through, including a couple of new chapter books for Bear that we need to start at bed times. I hope to use Books Are My Bag's Book of the Month again over the course of the year for new books, as well as the many I see come through the shop while I'm at work - we're always open to suggestions too!

I am going to introduce the calendar and time to Bear now too. He has a basic idea of how the clock works, by hour, but we're going to dip deeper into that as I think it is something he will pick up quite quickly once he knows how.

We have our Winter study to do - we plan to head back to our pond and tree of choice to do our study and then our respective journal pages, and our weather study should be able to include snow and frost over the next few weeks. 

And of course, we have planned outings to places like Boston Park Farm and Potteric Carr for their Home Education days, plus our adventures to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park, plus the many trips organised by our home ed community.

What are your plans for the start of 2025? 

Mama Bear x