Another week has flown by.  Last Saturday, Tiddler went to Dramabuds, Owl went to football and the other two had a quiet morning at home.  I think they have all given up on ballet, for the moment at least, which is a bit sad but makes Saturday mornings easier.  In the afternoon all the boys had haircuts, and we did a bit of shopping.  On Sunday after church, the little ones went swimming with daddy, and the big ones stayed at home with me.  They hadn’t tidied their bedrooms despite being given ridiculous amounts of time to do it, so they weren’t allowed to go swimming.  Instead we spent the afternoon trying to sort out their enormous jumbled up Lego collection a bit, and we made some progress.  I think we’d probably need about a week with no interruptions to finish the job though.

Monday started off badly, with lots of small things going wrong, then it got better as the boys had their piano lessons, enjoyed themselves and had made lots of progress.  The day got dramatically worse with the scooter incident (in another post), and the rain which made us abandon the park as soon as we arrived.  However our friends came home with us, and the children had a lovely time, so it ended well.

From Tuesday to Thursday we were at my mum’s house, which was very restful.   On the first day Rabbit was ill again, but she recovered quite quickly.  The children played with Lego, cars, puzzles and games, decorated some teddy cutouts, drew pictures, listened to stories and made biscuits.  They also did a fair bit of Maths (time, times tables, doubling), English (handwriting, alphabetical order and using a dictionary, reading, a mind map for an Autumn poem) and Science (space, rocks and volcanoes).  Owl did a bit of History (the Bronze Age)  and some Latin.  We fitted in violin practice, Reading Eggs, Conquer Maths, Mathletics, Spellodrome and BBC Bitesize Science.  We had two trips to the swings at the village green, and they played in the garden.  They collected leaves and conkers, played Stuck in the mud, Grandmother’s footsteps, Hide and seek and What’s the time Mr Wolf?  On one of the trips to the green, a friend (an eight year old boy) came with us, and the children had a good time playing with him.

Today we came home, and I took Rabbit and Tiddler to Musicbox.  The big three did Reading Eggs and Mathletics, Maths, English, History and Geography, and studied the Lego Christmas catalogue in great detail.  We spent the afternoon peacefully Hama beading, while chatting to our MP who kindly came to visit us after he had to cancel an arrangement to meet with us on the day we went to Parliament for the Select Committee hearing.  Some excuse about having been made deputy leader of the House of Commons the day before, I believe.  This evening we went for supper at our local restaurant, which is very good, and properly child-friendly in an Italian way.  It was a very good end to the week.

Some of the things we have been learning this week.

Maths

• Owl – rounding to the nearest 10 and nearest 100; estimating and measuring length and mass
• Monkey – 2D  and 3D shapes; symmetry; comparing and measuring length and mass; Mathletics
• Rabbit – counting and writing numbers to 20
• Tiddler – drawing circles and triangles; counting
• All – using the balance scales with an assortment of hexagram weights, multilink cubes and other objects

English

• Owl – punctuation of speech; imperatives; spelling words with silent letters
• Monkey – handwriting; rhyming phrase poem; acrostic poem; writing the names of Lego Minifigures
• Rabbit – mazes; captions
• All – reading and listening to stories

Science

• Owl – vertebrates and invertebrates
• Monkey – BBC Bitesize Science
• All – pond dipping and looking at some of the creatures using a video microscope

Music

• Owl and Monkey – piano practice and lessons
• Owl – violin practice and lesson
• Tiddler – Musicbox

Art and craft

• Rabbit – maxi Hama bead butterfly; making cards for Pre-school teachers
• Monkey – making snowflakes
• All – clay modelling

Geography

Owl and Monkey – discussion about which continent has the most countries (Owl said it was Africa with 52 countries, which is more or less right – I checked and found two different sites, one saying it has 53 countries and the other saying 54!)  We also looked in our Children’s Encyclopedia to find out more about the continents.

Fresh air and exercise

• Rabbit – Pre-school sports day
• All – playing in the garden with Home ed group friends; lots of walking and playing outside on the pond dipping outing

Other

• Owl – Lego plans for museum
• Monkey – designing a family coat of arms; making dens
• Rabbit – playing tea parties
• Owl and Monkey – making posters about healthy eating and exercise at Beavers
• Monkey, Rabbit and Tiddler – the messy flour game

One of the reasons I wanted to write this blog was so that I would have a record of the children’s learning but I am aware that it has been very patchy, so I am going to try doing a round up of the week, maybe every Friday if I remember, though I probably won’t.  I know this won’t be of interest to everyone so feel free not to read it!

Maths

• Owl, Monkey and Rabbit made pictograms and bar charts based on the Smartie tally charts we did last week.  Rabbit particularly liked this, and concentrated on it for a very long time.
• All four had great fun playing with our new Lego Duplo Educational set – number tiles, operation symbols and blank tiles on which we stuck dot stickers to match with numbers.
• Owl has done fractions (equivalent fractions, lowest terms, fractions of a number) and some work on reading scales (which he enjoyed – he likes things which have to be very accurate!)
• Monkey has done more work on bar charts; addition including number bonds to ten; simple measurement (comparing length and thickness of objects); telling the time;  Mathletics (working on left and right, and more pictograms.)
• Rabbit has been asking lots of questions about addition, “Does one and one make two?” and similar – so far she has been right every time.
• Tiddler has done lots of counting to ten, mainly because he loves playing hide and seek.  It doesn’t even have to be a real game – he is quite happy just covering his face, counting to ten, taking his hands away from his face and shouting “Found you!”  He can’t quite get all the way to ten without help, but he’s getting there.  (His completely independent counting today was something like 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 9, 10!)

English

• All four  read/ listened to instructions about how to make a treasure map and made their own maps
• Owl has done reading comprehension, spelling, and writing about treasure he would like to find in his garden (he really enjoyed the writing!)
• Monkey has done handwriting practice; read aloud and then drawn pictures while listening to a story; written his own instructions for making a treasure map; written and performed some very funny poems (all his own idea, he has just been making them up all the time at the moment) and has done Reading Eggs
• Rabbit has been working on rhyming words (she is getting very good at this) and has done Reading Eggs
• All four have done lots of reading/ listening to stories

Science

• All four have done bug hunting, and they have been observing/ drawing our butterflies
• Monkey, Rabbit and Tiddler have been pond dipping, found lots of interesting minibeasts and released our butterflies at the Ecology centre (blog post to follow)
• Owl has been reading about invertebrates; similarities and differences between insects and spiders; honey bees and bumble bees
• Owl, Monkey and Rabbit  have looked at pictures and read about insects and spiders, then drawn them; they have also played Top Trumps Bugs!
• Owl and Monkey have investigated our new Lego Educational gears set
• Rabbit made scones with Granny

History

• Owl has been reading about the Bronze Age and has drawn a map of Mesopotamia; we have also played Brainbox British History
• All four have read and listened to books about castles (brought back from a conference by daddy) – this is another topic that is in the queue of things we all want to learn about.

Geography

• Owl has been reading about animal habitats and learning about Arctic animals (started with the Usborne Animal Sticker Atlas and led to an interesting discussion with Grandpa!)

Art

• Owl visited the National Gallery with Granny, drew and wrote about his favourite picture, discussed pontillism and Seurat, and did some drawing with pastels (he is planning to blog this)
• Owl, Monkey and Rabbit looked at the National Gallery website with Granny and discussed the pictures which Owl had seen on his visit
• Monkey has been doing lots of drawing (as usual!)
• Tiddler has been drawing a lot too, naming what he is drawing (though it is mainly not yet recognisable) and working very hard on drawing circles (which are recognisable)

Music

• Owl sang in his Choir concert
• Owl and Monkey had piano lessons

Latin

• Owl has learnt some more vocabulary with Grandpa, and drew a funny picture to help him remember the meaning of lex, legis (the law has legs!); he has written some more flashcards and tested himself, me and Granny

French

• Monkey read some of the eeBoo flashcards (names of animals)
• All four have listened to a CD of songs and rhymes in English and French

Fresh air and exercise (that’s what it’s called in my “curriculum”)

• Monkey, Rabbit and Tiddler did lots of walking, running, playing, fishing and hunting minibeasts on our visit to Ecology Centre (and Tiddler took a dip in the pond, but that’s another story…)
• All four have done lots of playing in our garden and Granny’s – writing and drawing with chalk, making a pretend camp fire, playing with mud and water, bows and arrows; and also playing on the village green – walking, running, hide and seek, swings and roundabout, splashing in puddles

Other learning (too hard to categorise!)

• Owl wants to know about gold prices, and other expensive metals and their relative prices – we have done some research, but more is needed to satisfy him I think.
• All four have done lots of complex building with Lego (little Lego and Duplo)
• The big three have been watching some of the tennis with Granny, and discussing the relative merits of Wimbledon and Euro 2012 and which is harder to win; there has also been a lot of discussion about the Olympics prompted by the exciting arrival of the Lego Minifigure Olympic series.
• Rabbit has been enjoying her summer sticker book (though it feels as if we are still waiting for summer!)

I think that’s enough, and it’s getting a bit random so I’ll stop there, though I’m sure I could think of plenty more things.  I always find it hard to know exactly what to record, as I don’t think there is a clear distinction between “educational things” and the rest of life.  If you are still reading this, thank you, but are you sure you haven’t got something more important to do?