A snippet of conventional education stuff..

I've been doing a bit of English work with the boys: S doing spellings along with word meanings when they come up. I take words from the series of Unforunate events books he's been reading. Last year or maybe it was the year before, these were recommended to me, but he found them too wordy. Now they're about right for him. We've been doing words like 'mischief' 'orphan' 'assume'. M seems to have the greatest difficulty spelling dipthong vowels (like many children I expect) and their various spelling, e.g. 'ow' 'ay'. This ends up being a difficulty with homophones e.g plane, plain.
H is really needing to practice his writing, and I can see the effect that left handedness has on it (ie makes it harder) He's never been keen on putting pen to paper, drawing etc. Funny, he' s just asked me if he can do some drawing, did he read what I was writing from across the room?
Today H has just asked me how cement is made and can we make some! After looking it up, it seems little chance of this being possible as we need a stone crusher, and an oven that goes above 1000C (mine only does 250C) so maybe we'll head out to the sandpit and make some pretend cement.