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:/