Friday 5 March 2010

Friday Funday

What a lovely day we've had :0) We got up nice and early, it's so easy when the sun is shining. It was one of those seemingly rare days where we didn't have to go anywhere or meet anyone. It just felt relaxing from the start. Now, don't get me wrong. We've not been lazy - far from it. We've just been easy. No rush. No stress. No deadlines. No being late. Lovely!

The Girl did the next page of her maths book. We're using the lesson plans but it's mostly just going over what we did in the Yr 1 book. It feels like a bit of a step backwards in some ways but she's happy to do it although we seem to have stopped the song bit in the middle of each lesson. I'll stick it back in if she asks or when the work becomes more challenging for her again, whichever comes first.

She also wrote her letter for Story Circle - a local creative writing Home Ed group that we go to. The challenge was to pretend to be a fictional character and write a letter or send an invitation to a friend, or write to an agony aunt. She found it hard to get going but once I took the Boy into another room to do his Five in a Row book she was well away. Tomorrow, she's going to write it up neatly and look at the spelling and punctuation. She likes writing letters so the actual format was familiar to her. Then the letter is to be actually posted to another member of the group to be brought to the next Story Circle session.

We're rowing Three Names this week. It's a story of a dog and his owner who live on the Prairie, probably late 19th century. I'm going to post all about it when we've finished :0). The Girl came and joined us for the lessony-type bits at the end.

Their monthly magazines came today too. They get a magazine subscription from my mum for their birthdays. They love it, a year long birthday present :) Last year they had NG Kids and NG Little Kids but this year they have DiscoveryBox and StoryBox. I like them cos there is no advertising and they're educational ;0) They like them cos they're bright, full of stories, have puzzles and quizzes in them and they're educational. They always lead to some sort of discussion - the comic strip in the Girl's was about 19th Century child labour with a short piece about modern-day child labour. For the Boy, one of the delights is the serial wordless story and the comic strip superhero called Samsam - same name as his doll :0)

Oh and this afternoon. What joy! You should've seen their little faces :0D Proper beaming they were. And if my eldest DS hadn't borrowed my camera for his Uni project you would've seen their little faces. We did Thomas Edison. Today's BYFIAR lesson was chucking eggs!!!!! Not chuckie eggs, no, they really were chucking eggs. Yes!
In the story, Edison and his family are moving house. How ingenious. Have a lesson on fragility and packing. She took half a dozen eggs, threw one sans packaging as the experimental control to see if it broke. Prediction - yes, it will break. Result - yes it broke :0) She spent the next hour wrapping the remaining eggs in various bits of packaging and taking it in turns with her little bro and his mate to throw them as hard as they could up the garden to see if they would break. Only one survived, which surprised me cos there were some VERY well packaged eggs. Being a true scientist-in-training she recorded all her results on egg-shaped pages for her notebook :0) Most effective packaging = egg in empty toilet roll tube which was in turn wrapped in tissue paper and stuffed into a cardboard box. Lots of sellotape was involved too.
SO wish I'd had my camera! I heartily recommend EVERYONE to try this at home with their kids. Loadsafun! :0)

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