A Day In The Life Of Our Deschooling

I thought it would be interesting to do a day in the life of our deschooling so that if anyone else is new to this and wants to see what other families are doing whilst deschooling then they can. If anyone reads this and does one of their own on their blog then please could you leave a comment as I would love to read what other families do. This is taken from last Thursday, 20th December.

At 8.50am I got up, showered, dressed and did a quick tidy up and washed the cups from last night.

Josh came down at 9.30am and tidied the dining table for me without me asking. He found a book of Christmas poems and wanted me to read him a couple so we sat down together for 5 minutes and read ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas’ by Clement Clarke Moore to him which he loved and I also read ‘Just Doing My Job’ by Clare Bevan about playing Herod’s Henchmen in a nativity play which he liked too. He then went on the computer for 20 minutes or so playing Commandos 3 PC game.

He went back up to his room to play with his pokemon figures. At 10.10am Ellie woke up and I could hear them playing together in their room.

They both came back downstairs at 10.20am and watched Peppa Pig (Ellie’s favourite programme) and Super Mario and ate their breakfast.

At 11am Ellie went back upstairs to play with her My Little Pony toys. Josh watched Yu-Gi-Oh. When Yu-Gi-Oh had finish at 11.30am Josh went upstairs to play with Ellie.

At 12pm they came downstairs and drew some pictures using some stencils they got free with a KFC kids meal they had a few days ago. They spent ages doing this together and then colouring their pictures in.

At 12.30pm they’d had enough of doing the stencils and Josh did a lovely picture with his favourite pokemon in it. Ellie was pretending to be a waitress and asking what we wanted to eat and wrote it down, asking for help if she wanted to know how to spell something.

At 1pm I made lunch then we put on Christmas songs on my ipod and connected it to the speakers and had fun singing them together. They were so funny as they were singing Jingle Bells really loud (so Santa would hear them!). It’s a good job our house is detached and there is no other houses within 100 feet of us as they were really going for it!

We listened to the ‘Fairytale of New York’ song by the Pogues and we all had fun dancing to that by linking arms and spinning round and then onto the next person. It was really funny.

On Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings Josh usually goes to Drama and then has a singing lesson on a Tuesday afternoon but he didn’t want to go today as he wanted to go to kids club at the hotel where we have our shop. He didn’t go last Saturday or Tuesday either but it is down to him whether he goes or not. He says he does want to carry on with it after christmas but he wanted to go to kids club with Ellie and make some christmas cards.

Kids club runs from 3 – 5pm so I got some time to myself to go to the internet cafe and do some blog reading. We still don’t have the internet at home yet but hopefully we will have it soon. We got home at 5.30pm and Ellie helped me make a mince beef and onion pie for tea whilst Josh played Zoombinis Maths Journey PC game which he loves on the computer. We had a bit of shortcrust pastry left over so Ellie decided she wanted to make mince pies so she rolled it out and got the cutter and cut out 5 circles. I helped her put them into bun cases in the tin and she put a spoonful of mincemeat on each. I placed them in the oven for her and she sat on the breakfast bar and waited for them to be ready. She checked on them with me and helped decide when they were ready. We got them out and left them to cool for a while. She played with her dolls. When they had cooled for about 15 minutes we decided to put icing sugar on them so I got the sieve and she poured some icing sugar in and shook the sieve over each mince pie giving them a nice dusting of ‘snow’ as she said. Then of course she had to test one before dinner. She thought they were ‘the best mince pies ever’ and I asked her if she would like to help me make some on Christmas Eve to leave out for Santa with almond pastry and she said that she’d like to do that.

They both went upstairs to play a game together but after 10 minutes I could hear them arguing so I went upstairs to see what they were arguing about and Josh was accusing Ellie of losing his Pokemon Ranger DS game. Ellie said that she hadn’t had it so we looked around their room and found it in Josh’s toybox. Josh apologized to Ellie for blaming her.

At 6.40pm dinner was ready so I called them down for it. Then we watched ‘Santa Clause 3: The Escape Claus’ movie. They both enjoyed it.

Then it was time to go and fetch daddy from work and when we got back Josh got really interested in a ‘World of Mysteries’ program on Sky Three about the Curse of Tutankhamen. We talked a little about the programme and he was mesmorised by Tutankhamen’s death mask. We are going to London in February to see the Treasures of Tutankhamen Exhibition and he can’t wait.

After the programme he went upstairs and played with Ellie nicely and they went to sleep at about 12.15am. They are night birds like me and Vic.

That was the end of a lovely deschooling day.