Friday 18 September 2009

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:/

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