a quicky lapbook - letter m

On Wednesday Tiny had her first introduction to Reading Eggs. She has been drawing letters on her drawings and generally showing interest in what things say so I decided to see whether she was actually interested in it... and she was. She really enjoyed the first lesson (letter m) and wanted to start immediately on the second lesson. However, we put the second lesson off until today and she enjoyed that one too, although perhaps not as much as the first one (it was the letter s and she was nervous about the snakes that kept appearing!).

After doing the lesson today I thought a little bit of work that she could do with her hands would be nice, so I did a quick search and printed off a couple of letter forming worksheets, a foldable minibook and a couple of pictures from google for a lapbook on the letter m. I wanted to do something that was quick and would only take the morning to complete, and we managed to get it done before lunchtime.

Here is her finished letter m lapbook:

Tiny's first lapbook - colours

Aged 3y, 5m.

Obviously I did the writing, and I also cut out the pictures. But she decided which picture belonged with which colour, and did most of the gluing, and did all the colouring and sticking.

Brown is missing as I cannot for the life of me find our brown paper, only brown felt. So the pictures are there but have yet to be stuck in as there's nothing to stick them on to.

Little's account of forest school

Yesterday we went to forest school and we took M-L as well. We all got on the bus together When we got there, we saw Annie at her car. Then we all walked into the field nere the forest. We saw lots of mole hills and I stepped on them all! When we got to the wall, we all climbed over it and went to the fire circle. The fire circle is logs and big rocks to make a square shape. In the middle is a little circle of sticks and in that is a dish. When we got there M-L lit the fire and then we went to get fire wood. After that we all went down the hill and Annie put a big green mat on the floor and we got some small rocks to put on the corners of the mat to hold it down. Then  some of us sat on a log leaning on a tree. The rest of us knelt on the big green mat with Annie. Then she got a small yellow and blue box and got a bow saw. Then Annie got a small log, put a glove on one hand and then one of the little boys also put a glove on one hand and then they started to cut the log. Everyone got a turn to cut the log. After that Annie got a bill hook and split the logs in two. Then we made bows out of holly branches and string. We cut the branches off the bush with some secateurs. Next we got a stick and sharpened one end of it. This is the arrow. Then we went back up the hill and had hot chocalate! We talked about the day and what to do next time. We all went back on the bus and M-L went home and so did we...

home ed in the basement - a quiet one, but a good day

This morning was one of our home ed groups. We were expecting it to be quiet as lots of people had said they weren't able to make it. As it turned out there was only us and one other family, so it made for a very quiet but quite enjoyable session.

First the older kids spent some time using midget gems and cocktail sticks to make 3D shapes... experimenting with what structure shapes worked (ie, were strong shapes) and what didn't (ie, were weak).

 

Little accurately concluded that cubes are not strong but pyramids and triangles are.

Meanwhile Tiny and I spent some time making salt dough "fossils" using creepy crawlies to make impressions and dinosaurs/farm animals to make footprints.

We left those to dry in the basement and plan to paint them up next time we are there.

After that we decided to make our footprint butterflies. The original instructions for these suggested that they could be made with paint on the feet and then printed onto paper but we decided on balance that drawing around the sprogs feet would be less messy and also mean that they could finishe their butterflies the same day rather than having to wait until next time.

The only flaw in our plan was that the other kids there both decided they didn't want to have their feet drawn around. So one of them didn't make a butterfly at all, and the other opted to have his feet painted instead. His butterfly got left behind to dry at the end of the session. Once Small finished his butterfly he decided to use the paint to make a firework picture with the bottom of a plastic pop bottle:

And when she was finished Little decided to do a picture on black card with chalk, but I failed to take a picture of that. At the end Little and I both made snakes out of some of the remaining salt dough, and left them to dry out for painting next time. Overall it was a good session, the sprogs enjoyed all the activities we had brought and had a few ideas about what we could do on future sessions.

Once we had finished and cleared up, we went over to my parents and ate our packed lunch there and the sprogs spent the afternoon playing with the playmobil in my parents dining room. Meanwhile I got a sneaky peak inside one of my parents beehives, and managed to get quite a good picture of the comb:

For those of you who are interested, the bees have built comb on the outside but not used it yet - they are currently only using the comb in the middle, but will expand into the comb on the left and right sides as the hive grows. If you click on the picture you can just see the many bee bodies on the comb in the middle. Oh, and the yellowy splatty stuff on the perspex is bee poop!

About mid afternoon we set off home. The sprogs weren't quite tired yet and wanted to stay and play for longer but I figured that it would be better to do the journey while they were still in good moods rather than waiting until they were getting fractious. We brought back Little's tower to show to Podd, and I took a less blurry picture of it.

As we were walking up our road, Small suddenly shouted "I can do some more Reading Eggs when I get in!" and raced to the front door. So once we got in he logged on to the computer and started his next lesson...

... although he had to stop when the website inexplicably froze.

All in all, we've had a very good day :)

starting up on gymnastics and Reading Eggs again

On Monday we went to gymnastics as usual, but for a change Small joined in with the lesson. He has been practicing his handstands and bridges and felt a lot more confident in his ability to do things and decided that he wanted to join in with the others and show their instructor what he could do. He really enjoyed the lesson, and came over telling me all the things he had discovered he could do. The instructor came over to speak to me at the end and said how proud she was of the progress Little was making and that Small had done brilliantly too and she was really hoping to see him in the lesson again next week. Fingers crossed he has gotten over his emotional hump that was preventing him from taking part before.

Today we had hoped to go for a walk to take some bottles to the bottle bank and perhaps play in the park. However the wind and wet changed our minds and we ended up staying in and working a bit on our spring topic, playing some games, and I decided to start a 2 week trial of Reading Eggs for Tiny. She has been doing pretend writing a lot recently (to the extent of "writing" on a rather important form that Podd and I had filled in but not yet posted), and has also started forming letters of her own accord (like A and i), so I wondered if perhaps the time was right to give it a go. We started at lesson 1 and she took to it immediately. She was thrilled at the different parts of the lesson, and couldn't wait for her critter to hatch at the end. I think when we have finished her colour lapbook we will start on a letters lapbook, or perhaps individual letter lapbooks.

While we were doing her Reading Eggs lesson, Little and Small started watching... and were laughing at the various lesson parts (having neither of them started at the beginning when they got their subscriptions). Once we had finished Small asked if he could have a turn so we went to his next lesson and he whizzed through it.

Then Little had a turn (although on the laptop rather than the desktop as the desktop won't run the floating island of Reading Eggspress) and did a comprehension lesson which she also whizzed through as quick as anything. Small commented that Little's was a lot harder than his, and we spent a while talking about how Reading Eggs teaches you how to read, but Reading Eggspress is more about making sure you can understand the things you are reading. Anyway, after Little finished her lesson one of her friends from over the road came round to play so she and Tiny went upstairs and Small did 2 more lessons and then his end of map quiz, which he sailed through amid excited cries of "I can really do this!" and "I can read it!" He's excited to do another lesson tomorrow :)

I am pondering what we can do with these:

They are wooden boxes which we have been buying our strawberries in (partly because the strawberries were really yummy and partly because the boxes were so lovely!), and now we have three the sprogs want to "make something" with them. Podd and I are thinking about spray painting them first, but after that we are unsure what we might do with them.

Little's Code of Chivalry (dated 16.7.10)

Found this after fb rearranged the timelines and my notes became more obvious. I had forgotten about this but I think it's great! She wrote this just before her 6th birthday.

1. Tell the troof.
2. Don't smak.
3. Don't kick.
4. Never lie.
5. Do-not kiss.
6. Do-not swer.
7. Do-not push.
8. Don't drag popple.
9. Don't un-saif pappe clips.
10. Don't sai poo in the play-grownd.
11. Do-not sgnunch pichs up.
12. Do-not punch.
13. Do-not rip.

lunch and lego and cleaning windows

Yesterday the sprogs and I went to lunch with a friend and her kids. We didn't get to spend as long there as I would have liked - we ended up leaving the house later than I wanted because every time I thought we were ready to leave I discovered another something that I needed to do before we left like putting some food in the slow cooker, or hanging the wet washing before it got so musty that it needed washing again! Despite only being there for an hour and a half it was nice for the sprogs to have a bit of a play and it was nice for my friend and I to catch up in person. Tiny managed to leave her hat behind when we left and we agreed that would be a good excuse to see each other again soon!

After we left we walked into the local town centre and went to Construction Club. Construction club is basically Lego Club - a huge bag of lego and knex and the kids can make what they want or follow a theme... this week it was easter and easter eggs so we were trying to make a big easter egg shaped contraption into which you could fit a little chocolate egg. I managed to make the bottom half of one but not the top half, Small spent most of the afternoon rolling lego wheels up and down with his friend and Tiny kept 'borrowing' everyone else's creations :)

About 15 minutes before the end I nipped outside with Little as she had arranged to stay at her friend ML's house last night as it is ML's birthday today, so I took her out to meet ML's mum. She has been very excited about this all week and had her bag packed and ready first thing in the morning. Tiny and Small and I went home after Construction Club and Tiny kept asking where Little was, and gasping and looking worried and saying "we've left her behind!" it was very sweet.

This morning Podd and I pottered about downstairs and Small tidied his bedroom (which he does without argument because he gets to hoover it afterwards). He then went outside and has spent the whole of the rest of the morning cleaning the patio doors.

With the weather being so lovely today we were looking forward to having the doors and windows open but unfortunately our next door neighbours are having an extension built and their builders have decided today is a good day to burn stuff in their driveway so the whole place stinks if we open the doors :(