Home education diary, Sept-Oct 2002
September 4th
We're going camping with our island-wide home educators' group tomorrow, just for a day and a half in Troodos. Then on Monday we're going to get back to ACE. Tim is quite looking forward to something structured and a bit of intellectual stimulation... Daniel as ever has so many projects and things happening that he's worried about lack of time. But he does want to get the level 1 certificate, and preferably level 2 as well before next Summer, so I hope that will motivate him.
September 23rd
Life is almost back to 'normal' (as normal as ever, anyway!) after the summer now, with activities for the boys starting up again gradually. Clarinet lessons for Dan don't begin till October, but Tim's guitar lessons will start again this week, and his piano lessons re-started a couple of weeks ago.
Daniel's drama group started officially last week too, although with various performances and rehearsals over the summer it doesn't feel as if it ever really stopped! He's still thoroughly enjoying it, even when just working backstage, as he does in the Greek productions of 'Nuts'. There are going to be a couple more English performances, however, and he's also going to be in this year's pantomime. So he'll be quite busy in the next few months.
September 30th
I do like the way that home education is a complete lifestyle, and enables the boys to learn life skills informally. This week, we've finally got around to starting painting the house, after discussing it for, probably, about four years! We did Daniel's room on Saturday, in a way that felt reminiscent of Anneka Rice by the time we'd finished. He cleared it out (and he has a LOT of stuff) then did the ceilings with a long extension pole on the roller, as the ceilings are four metres high.
We took it in turns as it was quite tiring; really only Richard and Daniel managed the high parts, but we encouraged the boys to do as much as they could. Then we all painted the lower part of the walls in the blue that Daniel chose, put the carpet back, and even shampooed it, all by 11pm. There is still a large amount of his stuff in the main hall, though, as we didn't gloss the skirting boards until today. We're hoping to get it all back tonight, then Richard wants to do Tim's room tomorrow, since October 1st is a bank holiday in Cyprus.
October 29th
We finished Tim's room in the first week of October. There were problems with his ceiling, so it took a lot longer than Dan's and was very frustrating along the way. We then did my study in the same colours as Tim's room, the following weekend, as there was paint left over. Then we started on the other rooms, but we'd rather lost the inspiration. Perhaps thinking of doing the whole house in one month is too much.
Richard has been working very hard and couldn't face the thought of more painting last weekend so we took a day off on Sunday. Daniel - who is now sixteen - is in the theatre group pantomime, having rehearsals three mornings per week from 8am-10am. He's also doing lots of music and is in the middle of building a commercial web-site.
Unfortunately he's started having 'repetitive strain' type pain in his right arm. We bought a roller-ball mouse which is much bigger, as his large hands were cramped around the old mouse, and Richard made a new table-top for their computer, since the old one was quite small and didn't leave much room for the mouse, but it hasn't helped much.
Previous (June-August 2002) - Next (December 2002)