Home Schooling in Koh Samui

 By Mum

We have been on Koh Samui for just over five weeks and I am happy to report that school is going well. We have spent some time on studying the weather this month. The cloud formations here are amazing and we thought we should make use of theses natural wonders to learn more about them.

The boys researched different types of clouds and how they are formed. They produced a fact sheet and presented it to us.They moved on from clouds to thunder and lightning. We have been lucky enough to witness some incredible thunderstorms while here and we even got some video to share with you.

With regards to the main subjects of numeracy and literacy the kids have been working well and showing progress. Am trying to keep on top of where they should be in relation to the outcomes required at school. I don’t want them to fall behind while we are here, but I am confident that is not going to happen.

We have worked on shapes and their properties, both 2D and 3D. Area and volume is another topic we have covered. The boys enjoyed the lesson on volume when they had to get the measurements of cubes and cuboids in the villa and work out the volume.We have worked on co-ordinates and handling data, including bar charts and carroll diagrams.

With regards to literacy they are continuing to read and write reports. Tom has been working on his writing skills and is showing progress in this area. He has a great imagination the only problem is getting him to concentrate long enough to get the work done!

Ben has been doing lots of work on nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. He has also been using these to extend his fiction writing. I have been learning along the way with the kids!

Maths and numeracy are my strong point but literacy not so much as I’m sure you can tell, but I have enjoyed learning about clauses, anonyms and all the other fancy names for things we use every day.

We have had fun doing “how many words” can you get from Saint Nichols etc and the kids have surprised me with some of their words. A few more weeks of hard work coming up and then I’m going to give them a break for Christmas.

All work and no play makes for unhappy kids and Mummy.

Additional

We continued to work up to Christmas and then had a few days break.  Lots of work covered with some new topics.

I am so proud of the boys and how they have settled into home schooling. They don’t complain very much and get all the tasks I set them completed.

Home schooling has turned out to be much better than I expected, my only concern now is if I am moving them on too quickly. We revise work and if I feel they have understood it and can apply it to different scenarios then we move on.

I only hope I am doing the right thing!