NOTE ON PICTURES: This shouldn't be necessary but I have, sadly, noticed growing cases. Please DO NOT link directly to pictures on this website - it steals my bandwidth and is BAD! I CAN trace you if you do and I will take action.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
A little break and a little planning
We've kind of stopped homeschool work here for the time being - taking a summer break for a while. We haven't put any stop/start dates on this - we'll just take a break until the kids start making "bored" noises and then we'll start work again :)
Anyway, I'm using this break to do some planning for new work - here's what I've decided on:
MEP Maths - yes, I was going to use this before but I got annoyed and bored with having to continually print the practice books (shame on me!) The lessons themselves were very, very good. Anyway, since April didn't complete Year 1 in the end I'm going to start her there and with Rosie I'm doing Year 7 (even though "technically", she's Year 8) because MEP is academically challenging and year 7 is the first of the secondary years. Year 7 is a good place to start with an older child who's not done MEP before because it reviews work done in previous years and gets them used to the MEP style (which is quite unlike anything else!) Really lucky living in the UK because I can get the actual practice books from Plymouth Uni meaning I don't have to spend hours printing and binding. The whole years curriculum (lesson plans are free online) cost me £11.00 for BOTH kids!
Read, Write, Think. This is a wonderful site for language arts lesson plans for K-12 - excellent interactives too.
Thinkfinity - lots of free lesson plans on all subjects.
Teachers Domain - Brilliant multimedia lessons which you can save to a folder for future reference (if you sign up - free). I'm getting some great science lessons saved up.
PBS Teachers - again, great multimedia lesson ideas.
PBS Island - lovely, interactive reading programe we're using for April - she loves it :)
BBC History for Kids - games, videos, worksheets and other lesson ideas.
BBC Wildlife Explorers - excellent wildlife site with video clips.
So there we have it :) Some of the very best resources I think - although there are many, many more obviously. Back to our break now - see you soon!
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Fly away ladybird!
Our ladybird life cycle viewing is over :) The ladybird hatched from it's pupa in the early hours of this morning and we woke up to find it crawling about - it was a harlequin ladybird! We're getting more and more in this country even though it's not a native species.
So, we took a picture of our "baby" (sitting on a leave on our dining table!) and then set it free on the same plant we originally found the lavae. Bye, bye little ladybird :)
Friday, June 25, 2010
Work pics and a download!
I'm a bad homeschool blogger to be sure!
Anyway, here are a few pics from today:
April built words with some phonogram cards I got from a Yahoo group I'm on. She then wrote them in her book and drew a little picture to go with them. She was sat on the floor in a very strange yoga-y type position here!
She also did some addition using dice to get the numbers and dried beans to help her
She also made a little book with some drawings she did
Rosie did loads of stuff but the only thing I got a photo of was when we played a fractions game. We had to throw 3 fractions dice and then take the right "pie" pieces and add them together. The first person to build a "whole" was the winner. We're going to do this in reverse tomorrow and start with wholes and subtract fractions.
Now for my download! Some while ago I made a set of types of sentence cards (which are going to be offered as a freebie on my shop ONCE it gets finished .....). Well, I'm going to put them here again because I've now made a set of mini books to go with them. I'm intending to make a few more grammar related mini books and, hopefully, there will be enough in the end that you could put them together in a lapbook.
Anyway, here are the sentence type sorting cards.
.... and here are the mini books. Once made, you can write examples of the different types of sentences inside (perhaps some of the ones from the exercise above).
When making the cards, you need to glue the coloured dots (at the end) on to the backs of the sentence strips. The dots match the dots on the heading cards and can be used for self checking when all the strips have been sorted. For the mini books, simply cut out and fold in half - the coloured cover obviously goes on the front and you should be able to see where to fold - here's a piccie of the completed books anyway.....
Friday, June 11, 2010
Froggy things!
So, we've been doing some frog related work - here are some things so far ...
April's moving frog craft - complete with pond! Not sure about the shark being in the pond though .... *laughs*
Rosie did a frog report wheel about the Poison Dart Frog and then made a collage rainforest pocket to keep it in her project book
April working with the parts of a frog cards
.... and starting to make a "parts of" booklet
For her parts of a frog, Rosie labelled a picture
We've also looked a lifecycles and painted lifecycle pictures. April wanted her frogs, tadpoles etc to be cutouts so that she could Blu-tack them onto the page and move them around! So, here is her painting without figures
.... and with figures
Here is Rosie's gorgeous painting :)
That's it so far :)
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Work update!
Very quick tonight because I'm off to watch Springwatch very soon! Here, I'm finally posting the pics from Rosie's number patterns work plus some of April's ladybird maths and also something April did today with the continents pictures :)
Number patterns first:
Using a 100 board to work out number sequences
I made some cardboard number tiles to build Pascal's Triangle
We cut out some graph paper and wrote the numbers on the squares to create a stick-in-book version of the triangle we'd made
Next, April's ladybird maths :) She did odd and even using a maths mat (from Math Wire I believe) and some black counters, then recorded her results for her book
She also did some adding up
Finally, today, April got out the continents map and pictures and sorted the pictures out under the correct puzzle piece
Then, she chose Europe to draw a couple of the animals and trace the puzzle piece in her book (she made me right Wild European Rabbit because "it's tooooo long!" *laughs*
Finally, she put some of the cards onto our big world map
Next, we're going to have a bit of a frog theme going on :) .... and that, as they say, is that! Sorry it's very short on words - off to watch telly now!
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Crazy bookbags
I wanted to make some nice bookbags for the kids to keep their homeschool project books in and ... well... here they are!
They chose their own fabric from my fabric collection and ended up with a rather curious mix of chick fabric and dinosaur appliques! Very crazy and cool I think :) They have pockets on the front so they can keep their own pencils/glue sticks/erasers etc in (to stop them arguing over them!) and are big enough for all their other bits and pieces.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Finding the time ...
.... to blog is becoming increasingly difficult lately! We are still here, still working hard and getting lots done - I just don't seem to have the time to get it all written up!
I'm still working on the shop website and really hope to get that done soon so that I can start transferring all my materials from Lulu to the new site. It's just a case of Tim being off work and NOT doing anything else so that he can help me with it.
We've also been doing plenty of lovely outdoor things, in particular tending our little vegetable plot - we're in the process of thinning out the carrots at the moment because they're growing like wildfire!
Rosie and I have also been having a rethink about her "out of homeschool" activities - she's very, very keen to work in wildlife/conservation when she's older so she's decided she wants to star doing things to work towards that. Consequently we've put her name down for the Young Rangers at Moors Valley - they take them from 13 years so she'll start in September. It'll be a wonderful step in the right direction for her :)
There has been plenty of "academic" work going on too (so much that I haven't taken photos of yet!) - here are just a couple of things they did this morning.
April working with a homemade lacing card - I just drew simple shapes onto card, cut them out and punched holes round them. She's using a piece of string sellotaped to a cocktail stick to thread through the holes. Excellent for hand/eye coordination.
Rosie (or Rosie's hand!) doing a coordinates activity
That's all for now - I will (honestly!) get round to photographing a load of their recent work soon and putting it up here!
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Number patterns day 1!
We are a bit late getting started on this - had it planned for days but for some reason or another just didn't get round to it!
Anyway, today, we got going. I just have to say before I start, that I gather my ideas for maths lessons from various resources but we do (mostly!) follow the Year 7 curriculum and I have a Letts textbook which I use to see what we should be covering (like the number patterns!) We also, as you know, use the Conquer Maths for some online practice also.
Today, we started with the idea of a restaurant and tables - one table seats 4 customers so how many customers could you sit at 2 tables or 3 or 4 and so on......
Rosie used paper squares as a manipulative (we get through soooo much paper in this house!) and then created a table in a little match-book to hold her results. Eventually, all the little booklets she makes on this topic will be stuck together into 1 big book.
Tomorrow, we're going to expand this concept and look at what happens if the restaurant pushes tables together :)
Saturday, May 01, 2010
More maths!
I seem to post aabout maths a lot at the moment! :)
April did this activity yesterday - I had some blank Unifix cube printouts so I glued them onto some paper then she drew random amounts of cubes and made addition sums with them.
Rosie, who finished her work on angles by drawing and measuring triangles, decided she wanted to make a game she'd seen in a Murderous Maths book. It's for adding/subtracting positive/negative numbers and you use playing cards - the black numbers being positive and the red ones being negative. The object of the game is to start at the boat and then add and subtract up and down the number line but avoid being frazzled by the sun or eaten by the shark :)
I think she drew it really well .....
The next stop on Rosie's maths "tour" is number patterns .... watch this space :)
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Owls!
This Sunday just gone we visited Liberty's Owl, Raptor and Reptile Centre in Ringwood - really lovely place if you're ever in the area! :) Anyway, we watched a great display and looked at all the lovely creatures and also found some Siberian Eagle Owl feathers down on the floor by their enclosure. So, we grabbed those to put in the girls nature notebooks :)
Today, they got notebook updating - April drew a picture of an owl and stuck her feather in her book (I just added the date and place found and the name of the owl). Rosie put her feather in with date/name information and then went a bit further and wrote some information about the eagle owls along with a drawing.
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