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....