Terrific Tigers

A few weeks ago I posted about a giveaway for the Download 'n' Go Terrific Tigers Unit. Well. I won it :) Thankyou Melissa X

It's the first time I've used one of these units and was keen to get going with it because I've heard good things about these packs and mainly because I won it :D

There's a lot of pages in this unit and lots to print out. There are links not only to information pages, stories, poems, recipes and crafts but also links to videos and audio files. The videos were particularly popular with my two who ooh-ed and aah-ed over all the cub ones. Bless!
The unit covers Geography, Maths, Art, English and of course Science (Tigers=Biology doesn't it?) There are some lapbooking pieces and some notebooking-type pages. There is even a certificate to give to your child when they have completed the unit.

The unit is divided into 5 sections as the idea is to do it over 5 days. Each section focuses on a specific Tiger subspecies and, at the end, has extra links to colouring pages, crafts and ideas for fun stuff. I have to admit it took us a bit longer than 5 days, mainly due to chicken pox, Youth hostel camps and other HE groups :) The first 3 days went brilliantly and both kids were engaged and interested. However, by day 4 they were losing motivation so it took over 2 weeks to finish the last two days worth :/

I think if I were to do one of these units again, I'd do a lot more of it orally and just concentrate on the lapbook pieces for written work. A pdf that you could type directly into would be useful but, saying that, they did get a lot of writing practice. Because we wanted to stick the work into a notebook, I found I had to cut up the sheets I'd printed out to take out the bits that gave the links to various sites or came between the questions and the answer spaces. I'm sure there are other ways to do this and I'm just being a bit dim. Any suggestions would be most welcome :)

One of the things I liked most about this was that I could divide the activities between both children as the material required different levels of ability. I had to adapt the booklist because it's an American product but tiger books are easily available in libraries and charity shops so it wasn't too much of a problem. Would I use more of these products? Yes, I suppose I would but I might try doing them one day a week over five weeks rather than doing them so intensively over five days. I also have to get over my habit of wanting to do every single last activity just cos it's there :)



I made a slideshow of our photos because there are a few :) The tiger buns didn't quite work (note to self- mixing food colouring is not quite like mixing paint. use a pipette and 1 drop of red so that you don't need to use a WHOLE bottle of yellow to try and get orange!). The plasticene tigers were interesting, unfortunately the Girl wouldn't let me take a photo ofhers and kept giggling every time I looked at it and commented on how well she's done. She eventually revealed that she'd 'cheated' and covered one of her toy tigers in plasticene. Little monkey :D

Useful Links:
Pipecleaner
finger puppets
Bun
inspiration - be warned - our buns look nowhere near as good
as this :)
loads
of crafts


Books we used:
Fiction



Fact & Fiction (Faction?)


NonFiction


And a really nice book called Tigers by Meredith Hooper which I think
came originally in a pack of four books published as Oxford Literacy Web: Animals


Films we watched:

Home Ed christmas camp

Obviously not in tents in December :)
Last week we went on a pre-xmas xmas camp in a Youth Hostel in Devon. I have to admit to being a bit nervous about spending 4 days with 70 people of which I only knew 5. But guess what! It was lovely. Everyone was really friendly and welcoming and we had a great time :) It was nice to get to know the people we already knew a bit better and nice to make new friends :)
The youth hostel was one of those where everyone has their own family room and ours was even ensuite. How posh is that?
We joined in with the history group form Cambridge and learnt about Phoenicians making fimo lucky charms, glass bead bracelets and paper-plate frogs. It's always interesting to see how other groups of HEers do things.
The next day we went to Pennywell Farm and joined in the nativity play there.
The Girl was an angel ... ...Boykin was a shepherd.
Such good timing as he said only last week that he wanted to be in a christmas play :) It's a shame it's so far away from where we live because I'd like to take them there again when it is not so very freezing. Brrrrr!

On the way back to the hostel, we visited the House of Marbles and were fascinated by the complex marble runs they have there. We even got to see them making glass but unfortunately no blowing was involved. Best of all, it's free :)

Then on Thursday we had Christmas Day complete with turkey dinner, crackers, secret santa and carols. I really enjoyed myself joining in the music and was really impressed with all the kids' musical skills.

The Girl was really chuffed that she was part of the bell ensemble. A group of children, including my two, created and performed a play for us. My Kiddywinkles were in their element. It was the perfect holiday for them :)
And as for me, it was great to spend time chatting, cooking, getting to know people and generally just relaxing :)
I hope we get to go again next year. Thanks so much to everyone who was there for a fab holiday :)

Rubens Barn doll giveaway

There's a giveaway over at a Patch of Puddles :) I like giveaways :)
Anyway, this one will only happen if they get 100 comments. At 200 and then 300 comments more dolls are added to the giveaway. The dolls look lovely. They are new to me but look like something both my 2 would like. We're very much a doll household here - The Girl loves them.
Fingers crossed! (And toes! ) ;)

Lego Creation Thursday

The Lego Club magazines arrived today which prompted a Lego building fest :) They built a city complete with playground. And seeing as how it is Thursday, I thought we'd post them as part of the Lego creation Thursday meme hosted here :)

This is a climbing frame in the playground. you can see the slide in the background :)

This is the street :) One of the houses even has a helipad on the roof of the garage :)

p.s I know it's technically not Thursday here anymore, but it was Thursday when they built them and I haven't gone to bed yet, so it's still Thursday to me :)

Chicken pox boy

Boykin has chicken pox. At last! And fortunately he's not too miserable or too itchy. He's had a few days on the sofa under a quilt listening to stories and watching films. Today it's Home Alone 3 [DVD] [1997] because the main character also has chicken pox :) I remember my eldest loving Home Alone when it first came out.... he booby-trapped the whole of the house!
Because he's not really ill with it, we've caught up on some reading :) For book group this month, we've all got to read a Roald Dahl book. Boykin chose Fantastic Mr Fox and The Girl chose Matilda. We finished Boykin's book ina few hours and he drew a lovely picture of Mr Fox to go on our group display board in the library where we meet. We've got half way through Matilda and have also started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I'm hoping to finish before the film comes out.
Boykin is suffering spottiness and the Girl had a bit of a sore throat. Nothing too serious so she's happily gone with friends to Tropical World for our local HE group trip.
Whilst her brother languishes on the settee, she's enjoyed listening to the stories and has done some reading of her own - Living Long Ago by Agnes Allen. As she's decided that she wants to get baptised, we've been reading What is Baptism? and looking at the Christianity section in The Usborne Encyclopedia of World Religions. I like this book as it gives an interesting and fairly full description of the world's major religions without bias. It also has internet links which eventually lead her to this site which contains loads of maths and english games which she enjoyed playing for about an hour or so. Best of all it's British so the spelling is right and the money is sterling :) They even have a page of games with a Christmas theme :)
It's been a nice gentle few days all cosied up at home in front of our newish open fire. But I have to admit, I'll be more than happy to leave the house again when the Boy is no longer contagious. Roll on Saturday!

Books in this post

Living Long Ago (Living in History S.)

Lego Unit

This was a more independent project for The Girl which she approached with enthusiasm. Obviously this is the way forward for her now :)
I downloaded this Digital Lego Unit from Walking by the Way blog. This was really fun and easy for her to do as all the links are included in the text of the file. In fact everything is provided including the lapbooking pieces :) It's a while since The Girl made a lapbook (Boykin is the one who's really into them) but she thoroughly enjoyed this project and cut out and constructed all the minibooks herself - something she usually asks me to do for her. She made the cover herself in Photoshop :)


She did pretty much all the activities except for the extra graphing and the digital designer as we couldn't get it to work on our computer :( She also built a car from the instructions in one of her own Lego sets as she didn't have the right pieces for the taxi. I knew this unit was a good thing for her when on day 3 she declared it was "really fun!". Yay!

Unfortunately, as is the case with lots of internet stuff, some of the links on the Lego website don't work but this doesn't stop it from being enjoyable. For Day 3, I found this site that gives an explanation of how Lego bricks stick together so that she could complete the minibook. I couldn't get the film of how Lego bricks are made to work but found a youtube video that did. There are other links to other videos showing some of the amazing things people make with Lego too. Our favourite one is this :)

Follow The Drinking Gourd

This week Boykin rowed Follow The Drinking Gourd. He has really enjoyed it. It's been really obvious how enthused he's been by it from the way he described it in great detail at bookgroup :) However, it's really obvious he hasn't got to grips with the idea of an analogy. Every time he describes the underground railroad (railway to us) he makes it quite obvious that he thinks the people were really under the ground. Bless!
We did most of the activities in the Five in a Row Manual through discussion. It has been lovely to see what he added himself - drawing a compass - and what he pre-empted in some of the lessons - looking at detail, counting and finding the clues from the song. One of the beauties of FIAR is that by reading the book five times in quick succession, you get a really good chance to look at the pictures and get familiar with them by the time the art stuff comes up (day 3).
The book itself has some ideas for activities and also has the music for the song in the back. Even without the FIAR manual, you could still cover quite a bit just from the book itself. We learned the song and sang it together when it came up in the story. It also had an extra appeal for Boykin because it is based on fact.
For fun, and to add to their knowledge of slavery (by this time the Girl had become interested in what we were doing), we watched this clip from "The King and I" to compare the two stories of escaping slaves. The play performed for the King is based on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe.




To look at time, I got all the time telling devices we had in the house and tried to guess when a minute as passed. This was a useful topic to look at with the Boy because he is forever asking how many nights until christmas/birthdays/easter etc. I also read a story from Two-Minute Kitten Tales, just to see if it was two minutes long.

For the cotton part of the science stuff, he did some sewing, filled a minibook with different types of cotton, tried his hand at 'spinning' cottonwool between his fingers and looked at the growing a pair of Jeans section in The Global Garden. (His idea) :) We also got out a a mini cotton bale that had been sent back with one of our Flat Travellers.

For the constellations bit, we made a mini planetarium from Simple Experiments with Time. We used a pringles tube, black paper, sellotape and some red paper to cover the outside of the tube. It's quite a simple idea but if I were to do it again for this story I would simplify it a little. The idea is that you mark out the constellation of The Plough and the Pole Star and Cassiopeia on the black paper so that it fits within the diameter of the pringles tube. (This is where I would simplify it and would not include Cassiopeia. It's not really relevent for this story and it just confused my Boy). Cut the bottom off the tube. Make holes in the paper where the stars are and tape the paper to one end the tube. We covered it in red paper at this point just to make it look nicer. Shine a torch through the tube and it projects the image onto the wall. We found that we had to hold the tube very close to the wall to get a clear image. It's actually much easier to point the tube at a lightsource and look through it like a telescope. All good fun :)

And then he put it all together in a lapbook :)

This is cute :) This is his version of one of the illustrations in the book where the runaway slaves hide under a barn floor. His hiding slaves are happy because they are playing with a bouncy ball so that they don't get bored :D

Useful links

NG Underground Railway game
HSS resources and lapbook
cotton worksheets
Alphabet song (youtube)
Paul Robeson singing Go Down Moses (youtube)
Johnny Cash singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot (youtube)


Books we used

The Seasons (Finding Out About Science)
The Stars and Their Legends (Ladybird books)
Cotton (Giraffe Books)

Blackpool

Today we went to Blackpool :)
My mum suggested we took the kids to Blackpool for the illuminations before they finish this weekend and it made sense to go up the tower as autumn is well and truly on its way into winter.
We went up the Eiffel Tower last year so I was looking forward to taking my two up the British just-over-half-size version. Unfortunately, it was grey and windy when we arrived so we never got to go up the top :(

The kids still enjoyed it though and it's not bad value for money at £12 for adults and £10 for kids. (Would've been better if we could've gone all the way up - I wanted to send my eldest a postcard from the top which would get it's special postmark.)
There's an aquarium.


A dinosaur animatronics walk with 3D 10 minute cinema.


A circus - which we weren't allowed to take any photos of :/ It was a 2 hour show with chinese acrobats. The best bit was when they lowered the floor of the ring and it filled up with water and had a fountain in the middle.
Jungle Jim's play gym - where Boykin and The Girl had great fun and we had a well-needed cup of tea.

And of course, the famous Tower Ballroom which they very much loved, surprisingly.



After all that, we did what must be done at the seaside and went for fish and chips in the cheapest chippy possible.


Then we braved the wind and rain to find a tram to see the lights.


Well, my two have never seen them before nor ridden on a tram before so they were most impressed and very happy and excited. Success!

Download 'n' go giveaway

I seem to be blogging about giveaways at the moment and not much else....hmmm. Will have to do something about that in the next few days I think.

Anyway, here's a Download 'n' Go unit on Tigers being given away here.

The review sounds good and I think it would be something The Girl would enjoy. She's starting to enjoy working a little more independently and I think, from what I've read of the Download 'n' Go stuff, that this would be right up her street.

I hope I win :0) But don't let that put you off going for it yourself :)

Down Down the Mountain

Last week we rowed Down Down the Mountain by Ellis Credle. It's quite a long story about two children growing up in the Appalachian Mountains. They want some squeaky, creaky shoes and try to earn the money to buy them by growing turnips. It's a familiar plotline with the characters almost missing out through there own generosity. In the end, of course, they are justly rewarded and return home happily. Boykin enjoyed listening to it every day and his sister enjoyed reading it to him too.

We had a lot of fun with it but I think Boykin's most favourite part was the maths lesson which meant playing shops. They used real food, weighing scales and real money. Great fun! The girl loved it to :)


It proved a good opportunity to get the sandpaper letters out and do some spelling/reading practice.


Boykin made a lapbook.




Boykin's turnip picture - note the curly tail that twists around the stones in the ground :)

We ate turnips - which Boykin hated - and Polenta. Polenta is the nearest thing I could get to corn bread. Nobody seems to sell cornmeal flour around here. The Girl enjoyed it but again Boykin wasn't too keen :(

Just for fun :)



Useful Links
Turnip facts
Lapbook at HSS

Books we used

Goddess jewels giveaway

Goddess Jewels are having a giveaway on this facebook site. Her bracelets are beautiful and the winner gets to choose the one they want :)

Just leave a comment on her page that you've shared the link on your blog, twitter or facebook page for entries. It closes midnight tomorrow so hurry up and enter :)

By The Girl

Her first, very short animation short :)



This came about as a result of reading Swallows and Amazons and joining in with Boykin's river project when we 'rowed' Mr Gumpy's Outing. She did the animation a while ago and finally got round to adding music to it. Needless to say, she's pretty chuffed with herself :)