English in the Bath

One of the many benefits of educating your kids outside of a conventional school is you get to adapt your routine to when your kids want to learn about particular things.

Rather than forcing an 08:00 to 15:00 schedule of prescribed learning time, you can improvise and go with the flow a little more, so if your kids are evening bunnies like ours, then you can capitalise on that and take advantage of when they learn best.

Furthermore the whole process of 'learning' can be much more natural, and based on normal human conversation and play that follows their interests, which after all is how we learn best in the first place.

Making the story interesting

Today the kids were in the bath and I asked them:

"What types of questions do you know?"

Silence ensued, followed by... "what?"

"Exactly!" I replied "What? is a type of question, like what are you doing? or what is the time?"

Smiles began to appear on their faces, and they started suggesting more:

• "Why?"
• "How?"
• "When?"
• "Where?"

The only one they missed was 'who?'.

We then got onto the topic of telling and writing stories, and how to make stories more interesting. I explained to the kids that you can make a sentence much more interesting by simply answering each of these questions in turn.

For example:

The chicken crossed the road.

So I asked the eldest - 'when did she cross the road?'

"Yesterday" came the response.

Yesterday, the chicken crossed the road.

I then asked - 'why did she cross the road?'

They pondered for a minute - looking at one another for ideas - before replying "To find chocolate."

Yesterday, the chicken crossed the road to find chocolate.

'Okay then, how did she cross the road? Did she do it quickly, carefully, slowly, what do you think?'

Again more time to think, followed by "Quickly and quietly".

Yesterday, the chicken quickly and quietly crossed the road to find chocolate.

And finally - 'Where was the road?'

"In the city!"

Amazing answer.

So we ended up with:

Yesterday, the chicken quickly and quietly crossed the road in the city to find chocolate!

I asked the kids if they thought this was a more interesting sentence than the one we started with, to which they nodded with delight before promptly returning to playing with their bath toys, and we didn't mention it again.

Fifteen minutes later and we're out of the bath, wrapped up in towels and looking for pajamas, when the middle child exclaims, "Let's look for really cozy pajamas in the bedroom because we need to go to sleep!"

You only have to show them once.