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.