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.