Vin's Learning Journey

We've been practicing some sums recently by playing different games. We have a game called "The Bus Stop Game" where you have to roll the dice and add or subtract as people get on or off the bus. We also use dominos for adding and try to find 2 dominos with dots that add up to the same number. We also play a game called "Shut the box" where you have to turn over numbers that add up to the same number as 2 dice. Kylo Ren is a particular fan of this game! Vinnie and his dad worked together to build a robot from a set that Vin got for his birthday. It turned out pretty well! Vin got out some of his summer activity sheets that I'd made again. He could do them so quickly now! He put the alphabet magnets in the right places on the sheet, and could put the word and number for the counting sheet on so fast! We will print off some winter and christmas themed sheets soon too and he can practice cutting them out and sticking the right answers on or even writin...

Recently we have enjoyed doing some of the activities on the Mystery Science website. Vinnie has been really keen to do them so we've made sure to have a go at one most weeks. One of the activities we did was learning about wrecking balls! We watched some videos of wrecking balls, read a bit about them, then set up our own wrecking ball experiment. We had to knock down the wall, without knocking the houses. This meant learning how far to swing the ball back and noticing the difference between pulling it a long way back or a short way back before letting go. We extended the activity a bit by talking about gravity and momentum as we have done some other force experiments from a library book. As always we have also spent a lot of time at the park! The weather is getting colder but Vin still loves to get outside a lot. We made a nice warming apple crumble to warm us up afterwards! One of Vinnie's birthday presents was a really cool programmable robot. We ...

Vin has really been working on his cutting skills and writing skills this week. Not to mention a lot of dressing up! We printed out a fun activity from the totschooling website. It had some lovely autumn leaves to cut out and match to their silhouettes on another sheet. Vin snipped out all of his leaves all by himself. He wanted to give up but persevered! Then he matched them all up and glued them on. He was pretending to be the stig from top gear so wrote his name on the sheet as "Stig". He also practiced writing the letter l in his spider-man writing book. We did some activities from a cbeebies numberblocks comic. We also played some more with the toy blocks that came with the comic. They are really great as Vin just naturally does adding and subtracting as part of the games he plays and things he copies from the TV show and comic. Vin dressed up as a pirate. Vin's Oma came round and we all baked amaretti biscuits together. Vin helped read the recipe, hel...

The weather this week has turned a bit colder but still been really nice so we've been making the most of it and getting outdoors. We've made lots of fun chalk trails with challenges to follow in the garden. We designed a spooky halloween pumpkin. Vin wanted it to have 4 eyes. I copied his design onto the pumpkin and then carved it. Vinnie did some more writing practice most days this week. He is pretty keen on it at the moment (for a few minutes at a time anyway!). We've been using the Spider-Man writing practice book and a teenage mutant ninja turtles wipe clean book that has writing and maths activities in. We went to a talk for home ed families at the local museum. This month it was about Archaeology. Afterwards we went to a new playground in town. Vin was very excited about it! He was proud of himself for managing to climb up a very tricky climbing frame to get to the big slide! The topics group on facebook has chosen "Artists" this month for ...