Combining Home Education with every day activities
Vinnie learns best by doing, and by talking - a lot!
Because of this, most of his day to day learning is just done naturally in the course of our days. He is not yet 5 so I anticipate keeping this style of education for a while yet.
This afternoon we baked Cheese biscuits. This was a great example of how much we learn just in the space of an hour!
First of all I found a simple recipe and copied it into easy to read steps.
This was so Vinnie could read the recipe and follow the instructions.
We had to weigh the ingredients. The recipe was in ounces not grams but I think this was a bit of a tough concept for Vin to understand so he was in charge of pouring and measuring while I kept an eye on the weights! As he gets older he can be more involved in what the weights mean.
Once the dough was made, Vinnie rolled it out and cut it into shapes. Today we just focussed on practice using the knife safely and practicing cutting things. But this could be a great way of cutting different shapes and introducing some maths concepts!
Once the biscuits were in the oven, Vinnie wanted to sit and watch them cook. We talked about how we could smell them cooking, we could hear the cheese bubbling, we could see them rising. We had also felt the dough while we were mixing it of course and soon we would be tasting the biscuits! So we chatted about our 5 senses.
Afterwards, Vinnie did some great imagining - he built his own mobile kitchen out of lego with a little cookie oven!
Vinnie really loves learning this way so it works really well for us. Hope this post gives someone some fun ideas of things to do with their own children!
(* edited 11/7/2017 to add photos)
Because of this, most of his day to day learning is just done naturally in the course of our days. He is not yet 5 so I anticipate keeping this style of education for a while yet.
This afternoon we baked Cheese biscuits. This was a great example of how much we learn just in the space of an hour!
First of all I found a simple recipe and copied it into easy to read steps.
This was so Vinnie could read the recipe and follow the instructions.
We had to weigh the ingredients. The recipe was in ounces not grams but I think this was a bit of a tough concept for Vin to understand so he was in charge of pouring and measuring while I kept an eye on the weights! As he gets older he can be more involved in what the weights mean.
Once the dough was made, Vinnie rolled it out and cut it into shapes. Today we just focussed on practice using the knife safely and practicing cutting things. But this could be a great way of cutting different shapes and introducing some maths concepts!
Once the biscuits were in the oven, Vinnie wanted to sit and watch them cook. We talked about how we could smell them cooking, we could hear the cheese bubbling, we could see them rising. We had also felt the dough while we were mixing it of course and soon we would be tasting the biscuits! So we chatted about our 5 senses.
Afterwards, Vinnie did some great imagining - he built his own mobile kitchen out of lego with a little cookie oven!
Vinnie really loves learning this way so it works really well for us. Hope this post gives someone some fun ideas of things to do with their own children!
(* edited 11/7/2017 to add photos)
If Vinnie has a problem visualising weight, use water to demonstrate. One ounce of water weighs one imperial ounce. One liter of water weighs one kilo (one ml weighs one gram). The linguistics of milli, deci deca, hecta and kilo can probably wait till another time :-)
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