URGENT - Please read ALL of this and take it seriously before it is too late :(

The petition still needs more signatures. If we can get 20.000 names they will pay so much more attention.
Plase read THIS if you have any doubts as to why ALL parents should be concerned.

TMA 02 done and dusted :0)

Ok. So this is really supposed to be about my children's education and not mine, but I am SO HAPPY that I have finished my TMA I just had to come on here :0) Oh yeah, TMA=Tutor marked assignment aka 2,000 word essay. It's been a slog especially seeing as how my children refuse to go to bed at night. No matter how hard I try to explain to them that if I don't get this in then I will cry.....lots.
Anyway, it's done now and we've still managed to do loads of Home Education stuff too :0) Hooray! We went to the Imax last week and saw a 3D film about Mummies. Very interesting. Pumpkinboy liked the bit best where the Egyptian dog/god was coming to eat us. The girl liked the bit best where they found all the Mummies. I liked the bit where we shown the open Mummie (Mummy?) of Rameses the Great and told that his was the only face we'd ever see from the Bible!! Amazing.
We had one of those nice, yes there are advantages to being Home Educated days last week too when we all got to go the big playgym in town for free - special offer only available during school hours. I'm not overkeen on the place really as I think it's a bit expensive so we don't go often. Last time was during the school holidays when it was throng and the noise level was horrible - and that was before the playscheme turned up!
Today we went up to the storage attics in the local museum. It was FAB!!! Pumpkin was a wee bit bored though - he ran in circles round our friend for about five minutes. Hmmmm! I don't think exquisitely embriodered and beaded handbags were quite his thing. He loved the microscope though. And I think we all discovered why there are so few butterflies about these days. They're all in glass cases in an attic. Lots and lots and lots of them. I'm dying to know what's inn the other seven rooms. Me and the girl would have a field day in there :0)

Windy Wednesday

We've had a pretty productive day today :0) One of those lovely days where everybody gets on with stuff and there's no shouting (me), very little arguing (them) and extra jobs have been done.
The car went into the garage this morning so we had a lovely windy walk back, getting home just in time to miss the rain. The boy raced through his work boxes as per - French, writing, 'reading', maths = number jigsaw, calender and electronics kit. He loves that :0)
The French is going well. He's learning colours at the moment and we do the same thing every time. We read the colour book and play colour pairs. He also has a small shoebox with a few different coloured cars in and a car-mat. Sometimes he just tells me the colours of his cars, other times I show him 3 and ask him to find the red car etc until we've gone through them. I try to use as much french as possible and we put in hand actions and car actions too. It seems to be working, he knows more colours this week than last but the main thing he's having fun. Of course, he gets to play with all the cars afterwards.
The girl managed to get through 4 boxes today. The maths went quicker than usual which helped. Other than that, she's finally finished the minibooks for the lapbook she's making for Little House in the Big Woods which she started AGES ago when we read it for bookgroup. It's been a hard slog in lots of ways but she was absolutely DETERMINED she was going to finish it. I thought she didn't want to because she moaned every time it appeared in her boxes :0?
She's decided that she only wants to do one activity per chapter for her Beyond Five in a Row book. Mainly because she just wants to hear the rest of the story and partly because she want to finish it soon. Her activity today was to do with newspapers. It tied in nicely with last weeks story circle group where they had to devise headlines from random words cut from newspaper headlines. We looked at a copy of Positive News in the hope of avoiding all the scare stories in the press. She made her own frontpage using photos from the paper - her headline - "Crazy Guy Puts Poison in Children's Food". So much for avoiding scare stories!!
All this was interspersed with much Lego playing. This is not the norm in my house and therefore worth mentioning especially since we've all somehow managed avoiding to get little holes in our feet ;0) I joined Boykin up to Lego Club Jr - it's free :0) - and he loved the magazine and made the models in it. So, for the last couple of days my dining room floor has turned into Legoland :0) We keep getting all cosied up winter-fashion, they build together and I read to them :0)
I SHOULD really be doing my essay while they're so happily occupied.....:0/

Urgent petition

The government is trying to rush through a bill which will
fundamentally change the role of the state in family life. It is
against Human rights laws and UK laws, and will put a size 13 foot in
the door to having compulsory CRB checks and monitoring of parents.
Please act now and tell others

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Home-ed-families/

Anglo Saxons Project

As a bit of light relief from Badman and Balls, impact assessments and clause 26 I decided to play with photoshop and make a slideshow of our Anglo Saxon project :0)




The kids had a lot of fun, they made lots of stuff with clay, cardboard and wood, we read lots of stories, we played games, we went out for the day, we dressed up, we had a feast - yes, we used the 10 course menu in our notebook. I discovered that one of my children would have happily survived and the other would have starved. My mum was roped in to feast and day out and thoroughly enjoyed herself too :0) She's great, my mum :0)




The notebook was made using mainly mini books from the Hands of a Child project pack, but other bits were added from lots of other places :0) These are some of the stuff I used to learn about Anglo-Saxons with my kids.


ARCHEOLOGY
Guardian newspaper article on Staffordshire hoard
Archeology site with interactive games, lesson plans and printouts for Anglo-Saxons

IMAGES
Lindisfarne Gospels 1
Lindisfarne Gospels 2
The Alfred Jewel

TIMELINES
Of English language - hear spoken Anglo-Saxon

INFORMATION PAGES
- for children
Early British Kingdoms for kids - interesting, has staffs hoard info, colouring sheets available on request (we used some to make paper dolls)
BBC primary history - info, games, printables
Ashmolean Museum - info, games, printables
British Museum Compass - info, printables, teachers notes

-for adults
Anglo-Saxon Britain with map

LISTS OF LINKS
lots here for parents to gather info from

MAPS
Blank outline Map of Heptarchy
UK & Anglo-Saxon Homeland

ONLINE GAMES
Anglo-Saxon coins
Hierarchy, crime and punishment
Anglo-Saxon village

PRINTABLES
Posters, timeline cards, runes, maps
Settlers game with lesson plan
Flashcards - info and pictures

LESSON PLANS
For teachers with printables may be adapted or useful for groups

MISC
- recipes
- Old English poetry audio
- BBC schools video clips
- story
- Horrible Histories on Youtube
- Horrible Histories on Youtube 2
- Time Team Anglo-Saxon Cemetery pt1 - with links to other 5 parts
- lyre being played
- lyre being played again

BOOK LIST

Non-Fiction
Invaders & Settlers - Nicola Baxter, Watts Books
Step-up History: Anglo-Saxon Invaders and Settlers - Peter D. Riley
Starting History: The Anglo-Saxons - Sally Hewitt
Your Saxon & Viking Homework Helper - Alison Howard
Anglo-Saxon Raiders & Settlers - Dr Brian Knapp
Anglo-Saxon Village - Monica Stoppleman
The Smashing Saxons - Terry Deary

Our Island Story - H.E. Marshall

A Speller's Companion - Hugh & Margaret Brown

Out of Print
The Story of Saxon & Norman Britain Told in Pictures - C.W Airne
Piers Plowman Histories: Junior Book II - Mary Sarson & Mary Paine

Fiction
Beowulf - Micheal Morpurgo
A Camp to Hide King Alfred - Roy Apps
The Anglo Saxons and Vikings - Andy Hammond
The Dragon & The Raven - G.A. Henty

PLACES TO VISIT
Bede's World
West Stow 

COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS
Anglo-Saxons in Britain Project Pack

History and halloween

A ghost spider :-0


Things have been a bit different this week. The kids built a huge den in the dining room which covered the whole floor and made workboxes inaccessible - so we didn't do any:0) The den stayed up all week and they slept in it too for a few nights. They loved it :0)
We started an Anglo-Saxons project - almost by accident really. I got a free project pack from Hands of a Child to review which I was initially chuffed about 'cos I've only ever read rave reviews about their stuff. Unfortunately, I wasn't so impressed with it really but we are using it albeit in a much adapted fashion. I'm using library books rather than their info - which I have read (and found a bit dry to read straight out to the childer). I learnt some bits from it and learnt tons more when I double checked it all. (If I'm reviewing something I want to make sure it's accurate!) I thought that loads of interesting bits were missing...well, interesting to me, I like all the legend stuff about Alfred and Canute and think my two will too. Anyway, usually people say what a time-saver these packs are. Not for me :/ Maybe I'm just fussy, but I spent ages re-jigging the whole layout so I wasn't using so much paper - I estimated I used about a third less that way. (They did say they are going to update this particular pack and have made the layout more economical paperwise). I also added some mini books of my own as I thought it was too much writing for mine - it would probably be better for older kids who like writing. It has been useful though as it's helped me to formulate a loose plan of order which is still manages to stay flexible as well as giving me a good idea what to include and more importantly, where to stop. (Left to our/my own devises we/I can drag a topic out for weeks.Ooops! )
Other than my own little learning journey with that review millarkey, we've been to a rare breeds centre and seen some owls and got some owl pellets from them and dissected them :0)

Would you believe this is the same bird? It's a Scops owl.


Owl pellet dissection.

They've also played with train tracks , built with bricks, played out, been foraging, finished the book group book, watched Beowulf - an old 20 min animation - v. child friendly NOT the new CGI version, made maps of France, written about Calais using Openoffice and learnt how to get fonts how you want them (the girl), practiced some French, practiced cornet, sung lots, read loads of stuff about Anglo-Saxons, started an Anglo-saxon village...

This is their Anglo-Saxon village brick version. No roofs but lovely plank walls :0)

Then celebrated halloween with Girligig's drama group trail of terrors in the local park. She was a victorian child ghost playing on the swings - very eerie! They did really well and the weather was lovely and mild for them. I hope they do it again next year.
Oh yes, and we've been swimming, been to gym, had friends to play and sleepover (lots of different ones), and played and read and made felt in the library and been to story time and made halloween spiders and webs and baked bread and squeezed in some Maths ;0)

Well, what have we done this week? I've sarted 'thinking' about my essay that I have to write for my OU course and learnt lots about Anglo-Saxons as I got a free lapbook to review and I wanted to check it all out properly before I ues it on my children....
The kids on the other hand - went to a birthday party, went to French club, out for tea and Brownies, went to our local HE creative writing group and swimming, more swimming and brass band, went out the cinema, art group and choir. Today at last is a full day at home. Lovely! ;0)
Highlight of the week -the girl joined the local brass band (learner band) this week and was given a cornet to play. She loves it and can play Hot Cross Buns by heart already. I hope the enthusiasm lasts and she just practices without prompting every day. It's such a cheap way for her to learn an instrument and looks like it'll be fun. The bandleader is very relaxed with the children who all seem to have fun and be learning happily. It's so funny though to see some very small children with brass instruments that are almost as big as them! The girl was relieved to see quite a few faces that she already knew :0)
Other than that, we've made bread for our BYFIAR activity. We made it by hand - no machine!!!!- and we're puuting the results of brown vs white into a venn diagram. We've only done white so far, not making brown till the white's all gone ;0) They we're amazed by how frothy the yeast mixture got.
We listened to part of a tape of 'The Instruments of the Orchestra' with Yehudi Menuhin. A charity shop find. That was much enjoyed with lots of dancing ;0) Then she matched the instruments to their sections in a file folder game from Teacher Book Bags. I think I'll just print these things out as a cut and paste activity in future cos she can do it straight away. Mind you, the boy hasn't had a go yet....
We went to see Ice Age 3 as part of National Schools Film Week. I love free stuff! :0)
They've also done the usual MEP, Mega English, Science (looking at rubbish this week), French, other maths activities and whatever came up in conversation stuff.
We did finally manage to get to go for a walk in the woods to try out some of the ideas from the Nature Detectives Autumn book.

Elf houses:-



Autumn scents potion how happy was my boy !!!! :0D

Owls and Green ham

Well, I think we've done with owls for the time being. The wee man put his lapbook together tonight and I realised there's loads more we could have put in - like a life cycle and a little book about diet :0/ Ah well, there's alwaysa another day ;0) Actuall, I'm going to take them to an owl day at a rare breds centre in a week or so, that'll finish it off nicely. The main thing is that he's enjoyed what we've done :0)





We started with FIAR and 'Owl Moon' which he has just loved. We've had loads of fun pretending to be owls, acting out the story, discovering his favourite bits and going for moonlit walks. He wanted to do a lapbook on owls and unfortunately I got bogged down by searching the internet and came up with lots of good sites and not many minibooks.

We also read:-
'Owl Babies'
'The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark'
The Story of Little Owl by Constance Boyle
Little Owl
The Littlest Owl
Twoo Twit (not a good one from a HE perspective - implication is that you won't learn anything if you don't go to school)
The Owl and the Pussycat
Owl Puke
Wild Predators - Birds of Prey

Finally, we made rice crispie owl buns.



Here are some of the links I found, some we used, some we might use later.

owl cookies
owl buns
owl movies
owl worksheets

Other than that, he's racing through his Mega English workbook, still enjoying MEP reception (which he calls proper maths as opposed to all the lacing shapes, threading beads and pattern block pictures he's been doing).
The girl is working on her French (oh she hates writing sometimes!) Keeping up with her MEP. I'm trying to time her a bit now because it really souldn't be taking us an hour and a half per lesson :0/ I have to say that we're busy decorating here and the children have mostly been playing zoos with the boxes that her prize came in last week. She's done lots of socialising this week and swimming.
Her choir was in a competition and came third, which was great as the senior section of their choir came first :0) They really cheered the youunger ones on, it was lovely.
The other main out-of-house day this week was our local group monthly meeting that had the theme of Dr Seuss :-) I took Green Eggs and Ham for our activity

The boy took an activity too :0) He invented a chasing game based on 'Whatever was I scared of?'. They all had great fun running away from ' pants with nobody inside them' ;0)



They thunk great thinks, invented their own characters balanced rhyming words on the Cat.


And made junk model Dr Seuss houses (ties in nicely with the recycled art for Chapter 5 Boxcar Children Beyond FIAR).

THe DCSF Home Education Consultation

I finally filled it in here. It closes on Monday 19th October. I wonder if it'll make a difference? I was number 2636 which is pretty high by all accounts. Fingers crossed!

Fluffy animals

There was great excitement here yesterday, my beautiful girl won a competition that she'd entered in National Geographic Kids :0) A HUGE box containing 5!!!! LARGE soft toys from the Ocean Marine Society. She was so chuffed - she loves soft toys (I don't - they seem to breed in the night:0/ ) And in great children-with-large-cardboard-box-style tradition, they spent ages playing Jack-in-a-box - lol!
It was also a good day workbox wise - it's the first time in a week that they BOTH got through all their boxes :0)
Boykin is still working on Owls.....he wants to make a lapbook.
He did a cut and paste owl picture
we read extracts from Birds of Prey and did a sorting activity of what owls do and don't eat. We also looked at food chains using pictures
.
He stuck spots on an 'O is for owl' worksheet. I set my printer to do 4 on a pge and I get just the size I want for spot stickers. He then

Next he used a useful thing my mum gave me to find the word 'owl' and happily declared that he's starting to read! Bless :0)
We then read 'Owl Babies' and did a minibook to go with it. It's one of those books with the DVD on it so he was more than happy to watch it too :0)
The rest of the week he's done - pattern blocks, owl mazes, owl hunting, owl number recognition and dot-to-dot, pretended to be an owl, ice science experiments, been introduced to nouns, talked about Autumn, some phonics, some MEP, listened to lots of stories, danced, played with cars, spoke french, played with cars, gone to a birthday party, listened to some music, played games in French (and English) , played with cars, climbed and jumped and watched DVDs and played with cars......


Girligig is on with The Boxcar Children....
she's played at vets,

looked at first aid kits, and made a paper one by printing out a picture of a bag and then sticking some plasters, bits of bandage, important phone numbers (NHS DIRECT and 999), and making a packet of paracetamol out of foil and coloured paper :0)

discussed being an encourager and read about Louis Pasteur and completed a notebooking page. When we put all these pages together it's going to be a HUGE book :0)

She's also got on with some graph activities, started looking at communities with September Teacher Book Bag - especially our own, practised nouns and verbs, done some French, played Boggle, is showing great perseverance in finishing her Little House in the Big Woods lapbook and had another go at finding the continents :0)
She's also been to Brownies, gone swimming, been to drama, been to gym, had a choir concert (and pactice), been out for tea, been to a birthday party and daydreamed and sang and played :0)

owls

Well, we've had a busy week again. We're reading Owl Moon for FIAR, and we've read chapter 4 of Boxcar Children for BYFIAR. We've also done a few of this months activities from Teacher Book Bag as well as the usual MEP maths and various bits and bobs that they fancy. In and amongst all this we've been swimming with HE friends, been to HE gym and the start of the Not Back to School Picnic - we had to leave before the main event for the girls regular pre-Brownies tea date. She's also been to drama, both children have been to choir, they'v had friends come round to play (HE and nonHE) and most impoprtantly - ta-ra-ta-rah - she got her grade 2 swimming badge :0) She's over the moon and I nearly cried for her. She's been in that same class for so long I was beginning to think we'd have to give it up :0/ I'm so chuffed for her.
Workboxes seem to have been a bit of a struggle this week. Everything's taken such a long time to get through and yesterday was the only day they actually got to the bottom of both their piles!
DDs completed boxes have been The Little House in the Big Woods lapbook - this is getting easier for her as she now has the incentive of having the other books read to her as I just found them all in our local charity shop for 10p each!! She finished her paper house and her collage as well as making a map of the boxcar and its surrounds. The Teacher Book bag for September had some mapping/graph co-ordinates exercises in so that tied in nicely :0) She's written a song for a competition in NGKids and I've signed her up for Livemocha to practice french. Its not strictly speaking a childrens language course (you're supposed to be 13 to sign up for it) but she's enjoying it and does it happily , going over the time I give her :0) We started doing the first aid lesson, which involved playing at doctors, vets and discussing how hard she'd have to study if she really wants to be one.... Oh, and she also did a couple of pages in her spelling book.

Panda has been enjoying Owl Moon. We've talked a lot about self-control and rules and why we have them...not that it seems to be having any impact on anyones behaviour unfortunately :0(
He tried very hard at the art lesson and managed to draw a lovely tree based on the one in the picture :0)

We've discussed and made a minibook for similes and have all played at making up our own.
We played this owl-related maths game today, making fantasy owls :0) It went down better than the FIAR units of time lesson :0/ Although he did manage to sulk for 60 seconds!!!!


For French we've repeated the colours game with his cars. He also did a couple of the Teacher Book Bag co-ordinates and simple map reading activities. He also had the Dora DVD from the library in 1 of his boxes for a treat :0)
We've also read other Owl books and listened to 'The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark' in the car :0) More to come....

We finally finished "the Little Red Lighthouse..." lapbook :0) Panda is very pleased with it and enjoyed showing it to my mum who read the story and also enjoyed it very much. The compound word stuff has REALLY stuck with him, but his geography isn't so good ;0) He thought the story was set in Australia - bless!
The girl is still working on her collage of her ideal one-room home interior. It's getting quite complex, complete with opening wardrobes and paper people to live in it :0) She's having so much fun.
She's also continuing with The Little House in The Big Woods lapbook - which sometimes causes problems for her as she wants to dictate parts of the story for me to rewrite but finds it difficult not just to repeat back Laura Ingalls words. She managed it in the end with a bit of roleplaying and lots of questions on my part.
She's nearing the end of MEP Yr 1, which I'm very excited about. She does it, but the workbook part of the lesson goes more slowly for her. She's so easily distracted and suddenly gets massively interestd in what Panda's doing - even if it's playing with cars...which she NEVER does!
We've started the new bookgroup book - The Secret of Platform 13 - which they're both enjoying.
Workbox wise, Panda had this weeks Charlie and Lola comic and did all the activities in that. It's not bad really, it came with a little craft kit and lots of activities based around the season with ideas for bigger crafts to do and a game to play.
He played a shortened version of Operation - good fine motor skills game - we missed the money part out.
WE did MEP recption book with the lesson plan which went a lot better than without. (I hope they get the other lesson plans up soon).
He did some French, using a bilingual colour book and lots of small cars. I also put his car mat in so he cold just play with them for a bit.

Then we did some painting mixng primary colours into secondary colours, incorporating a bit of phonics using alphabet colouring sheets.
Non-workbox wise - they've been watching a Little Einstein DVD which I got for £3 from Asda (Bargain! ;0) I bought it because it's also in French and Portuguese so I'll get them to listen to it in 3 languages :0) It's really good though because it's all about classical composerse and music, listening activities and terminology are included in it. They both love it and it'll tie in nicely with this months Teacher Book Bag that we'll start next week too. They've also got a freebie about instruments in the orchestra which I'll use to go along with it.

First week back - second day in...

It's taking some doing getting back into our non-school-holiday routine:0/ So much so that we slept in on Monday and missed gym :0( We started back up with the workboxes though which both children were happy about despite being a little emotional from late nights at friends houses over the weekend. We're still doing chapter 3 of Boxcar children looking at homes. I've found a little paper house to make that will go well in a workbox I think.
Other than that we've started using Galore Park for French at French club this morning which seems like it will be helpful for us to have something to focus on as a group as well as still playing lots of games.

The MEP website has started to put the reception year workbook and lesson plans online :0) I've just bought the book so the lesson plans are really welcome and will hopefully make maths more enjoyable for Panda (who enjoys it anyway.)
I put his trainset in one of his boxes yesterday just to let him play a bit more with bridges. He got so into it that he never got any further.... ah well...it means I've got less boxes to fill tonight ;0)
Today was a out-of-the-house day - french club, friends for lunch, swimming, drama and shopping. We should be able to get some workboxes done tomorrow - the girl didn't finish hers either on Monday but she did get further down the pile than her brother. Let's see how we get on tomorrow.

Free Lapbooks

Just a quick post - there are 2 free lapbooks at "Handle on the Arts" on Ancient Egyptian Architecture and Leonardo Da Vinci. I wonder if there'll be more in the future? I like freebies :0)

Home agian ,Home again, Jiggety Jig!

Well, it's been a while since I posted but that's because we've been on an adventure :0) We've spent two weeks travelling through France, blatting through Spain, to Portugal and back. We loved France and the great thing about it is that both children have come home with new words and new enthusiasm to learn the language. We learnt lots of french history, saw chateaux and churches, marvelled at the free camping service areas, swam in the Med, went up the Eiffel Tower and generally loved France :0)
For the science aspect of The Little Red Lighthouse.... we looked at bridges and how they were made in "How it is made - Bridges" by Jeremy Kingston. I'm so glad we did as there were lots of different types of bridges on our journey and it made the journey more interesting - that and recognising compound words! (I'll mark that book down as a success :0D ) One of the bridges we saw was the Garabit Bridge, totally by accident - there's an amzing view of it from one of the service areas. It was great how it tied in with FIAR - Eiffel built the bridge and also mdae the Statue of Liberty in New York......(and we went up the Eiffel Tower) - an engineering holiday?
We carried on with maths etc on our journey, packing all the books in a picnic basket :0) It looked so much more welcoming, despite which my two still complained about not having workboxes!!!!! We started the MEP Reception book that I got for Panda. He's really enjoying it and always wants to do more than one page even though his concentration span is definitely up by then. It's got games in it, lots of discussion and observation and spends quite a lot of time developing pencil control. The boy finds that challenging so I adapt some of the exercises by letting him use sticks etc to complete the maths side of the task.
We continued with the Boxcar Children too but only did one chapter while away. We finished the water cycle stuff from chapter 2 and took our sealed watercycle jar with us. Then we looked at the homes aspect of the story and they built lots of dens :0) The girl also started reading The Story of Houses and Homes from Ladybird and also did some exercises from a workbook that related to different types of home. We read "Mr Tucket moves to town" by Joan Snapes as a go along and she's really keen to make a collage of an ideal home in the style of the illustrations. There's a notebooking page and a minibook at HSS for homes, as well as cliffhanger and descriptive story pages - both of which she enjoyed doing :0) There's so much moore that could be done with this chapter, but she can't wait for the next and I was hoping to do 1 chapter a week...... all the best plans....
Anyway, now we're home, I'm going to pick another FIAR for Panda and put out the boxes for Monday - not that they'll complete them all as we go to Gym, but they lilke to know they're there and are just as liable to bring them to me at teatime as any other time .... hmmmm:/

We started to row "The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge" this week. It kind of tied in with a trip over to the East Coast a couple of weeks ago when we went to Spurn Point and drove over the Humber Bridge. It's a nice little story and the boy enjoyed it. We were doing really well the first couple of days and then me and the girl caught this nasty 24 hour stomach bug that's been going round. We did manage to get a few things done though.
Panda enjoyed looking at photos of the real lighthouse and bridge. He likes making lapbooks so I made some minibooks for him for some of the FIAR vol2 lessons for language and art.

• personification (cover & pages)
• comprehension
• compound words
• 'my art' (cover & pages)

It's been an appropriate book to do with the boy (unintentionally really) because it's gone really nicely with Chapter 2 of the Boxcar Children. We decided to look at water as our main topic from this chapter - mainly because I can tie it in with last weeks nutrition stuff and also because I already had lots of resources in the house. We used a CD-Rom that our local council put out about the importance of water and local waterways. I also had an activity book from the local waterboard about water treatment and collection. Then I found a workbook online and some hands on activities to explain and demonstrate the water cycle.
We showed evaporation by boiling a kettle and then condensation by holding a frozen fish finger box (empty!) in the steam, then precipitaion as it dripped 'rain' .
There's a good explanation here with links to printables and games etc
We'll continue with this for a couple more days and tie it in with the boy's story when we look at rivers. She's also going to keep a diary of how much water she drinks in a week. I've got a book about bridges to look at and then all 3 of us will work together to build our own suspension bridge. We'll also do the FIAR lesson on rivers and build some hills in our sand pit, pour water on them to see how rivers form.

Soap

We've had a fairly constructive day here I think. Hurray!! They both got stuck into their workboxes quite merrily this morning. I decided to put the MEP maths in a box for a change (we usually do it before workboxes). The girl complained and said she wanted it for an extra!!!! Sometimes you just can't win ;0)
The boy changed the calender, did some pegging doinosaur maths pattern cards and did some more graphing activities from Teacher Book Bags. He did a page each of his letter and number scrap books (started when we were doing Letter of the Week - eek!!) Then he had his Electromag set. He chose one of the hardest circuits to make so it took ages and lots of patience on my part as we did it together but he was so pleased with his flashing lights :0)
The girl did maths, Little House lapbook, Teacher Book bag sentence activity, recorder to finish, but the main bulk of her boxes today was the Beyond FIAR Boxcar Chidren stuff on soap. Panda joined in too :0)
We read a page from 'The Story of Medicine' by Brian Ward about Ignaz Semelweiss and Joseph Lister. The we did a lovely little activity that I got from somewhere to show that soap is important in getting hands clean.
Rub veg oil into their hands.
Sprinkle with cinnamon to represent germs.
Wash in cold water. What happens? (Nothing)
Wash with soap and warm water. What happens? (Clean hands)
I told them the soap lesson from the Beyond manual supplemented with further explanation and another experiment.
The girl filled in a notebooking page from HSS about the science of soap.
In the next box was 2 different methods of soap making - sort of...
We did an activity that I remembered from the TV programme 'Why Don't You...?' that I did when I was a kid! (It's actually meant as a means to use up al the scrag ends of soap).
We cut different coloured soap up into small pieces (along with the ends of a couple of other bars) and put the bits into a polystyrene eggbox. Then we poured water on them and squashed them down. Muffin put cellophane over hers and weighted it with stones. They'll take a couple of days to dry out I think, but hopefully we'll have stripey eggbox-shaped mini soaps when they're done.
For the second method, we grated some pieces of soap up.

Put them in a bowl with some dried lavender and a few drops of lavender oil.
Add some water and mix.

Squeeze the resulting gunk into balls...

and hey presto!! lavender soap balls ;0)

I think it would work better with unscented soap really, we didn't have any. Wright's Coal Tar proved to be a stronger smell than oodles of lavender oil :0/
However, I found another method to try next time we have a go. Of course, there's always melting soap and pouring it into moulds too. Lots of ideas for nice xmas pressies I think ;0)
soap in a mould and a bit more
soap and bath salts

Anyway, we got all that done in the morning and then went visiting in the afternoon. Luverly!!

FIAR and Beyond ;0)

We're back on with workboxes at the minute. My 2 children are very happy about this which makes me very happy too :0)
Everything seems a bit random at the mo because we're taking full advantage of all the free stuff that's on offer during the school holidays. We're very lucky in our area that the local council puts on activity days at the museums and libraries all for free. This week we saw a local poet at the library who kept the kids enthralled with his very energetic style of making poetry interesting. We made balloon propelled cars at the museum and the girl impressed the museum staff with an amazing map she drew. We also went to see 'Monsters vs Aliens' for free on Bookworm Wednesday.
We've also been to a Safari Park which the kids loved - especially seeing as how a baboon sat on our sunroof and promptly pooed!!!! It was all really exciting - camels put their heads in the cars and we got to see wilderbeest racing each other too. It's so much better than any zoo I've been to. Just being able to see them running about in a more natural enviroment with SPACE. Oh, and there was a baby rhino too - aaah!

Yesterday we went to Spurn Point and got swarmed (literally) by ladybirds! I've not seen any at all this year anywhere else so it was quite amazing and a little bit disconcerting for the childer :0( Still, it was lovely - the sun shone and the beach was practically deserted.
Workboxes...that was where I started.....
The boy baked biscuits, sponge printed Scooby Doo symbols for his Scooby Doo lapbook that he's making, Mega English, car mat and cars, Electromag, maths activities, Grassland animals activity book, Humpty Dumpty sequencing activity that my mum gave us, games, large size KNex, A Hand for Spelling workbook and jigsaws.


The girl skipped, sewed, worked on her Little House in The big Woods Lapbook (so far so good), did MEP maths, Mega English, Handwriting, and her new Beyond Five in a Row stuff :0) I split the activity over a few boxes so that it didn't look too overwhelming for her. She listened to the first chapter of 'The Boxcar children' and we did the first lesson suggestion on nutrition. This is a really useful topic for us to do and I've included the boy in on it as well. It's an ongoing topic really but it was nice to focus on it and introduce it in a meaningful way rather than me just telling them what's good/bad for them.


They're both members of The Great Grub Club so we made use of the activities on that site, read the magazines which coincidentally came 2 days before, played online games, printed out a minibook to go with the FIAR manual, made a collage of an Eatwell Plate (rather than the US equivalent food pyramid), planned healthy meals and picnics - which also ties in with last weeks challenge from the Nature Detectives Club. (Don't you just love it when things synchronise perfectly and unexpectedly :0) ?) I'm going to extend this activity in our everyday and let her plan tea and picnics for 2 days next week when her friends are coming to stay.
picnic menu planner
lesson plan and printables on nutrition

We also did some combined workbox stuff about seasons/adaptations/world. Nice hands-on activities from Teacher Book Bag for August. There's a few activities from this that will go in workboxes, but the season one is part of an ongoing project from them that is added to every month. Again, it was an activity that I spread between more than one workbox.