Christmas, New Year and ... good manners!
We had a lot of fun in the run up to Christmas and over the Christmas and New Year break.
As usual Vinnie has been using his imagination in more and more creative ways. Most of the things he comes up with are during time on his own and it is always fun to find out what he has been up to!
For example, one day he created a cool pirate secret hideout, complete with collapsible treasure chest hiding place:
Before Christmas, we did a bit more of our Mystery Science: weather theme. We learned a bit about the different seasons of the year.
We also did lots of Christmas themed activities
Another day, I found Vinnie had built a very elaborate structure out of duplo. It was for dumping coal into the train trucks.
We built a model dinosaur
We had a campfire with the other volunteers to celebrate the last volunteering day of the year. Vinnie worked so hard that day helping with the coppicing, carrying big branches onto the pile.
We put on our very own lego minifigure nativity. Vinnie did so well learning some of the songs and planning it out and building animals for the stable.
Vinnie wrote his very important letter to Father Christmas
It says
To Santa, I would like a heavy haul train & a hug
and he's drawn a heart with kisses around it!
One of Vinnie's christmas presents was a cool tool box with lots of bits in it such as beads, paper clips, pipe cleaners etc. He enjoys making chains of paper clips most at the moment and has also threaded some beads.
The lego heavy haul train looks right at home at the Lego store...I mean our home!
We held the inaugural pom pom olympics. Vinnie loved making a ticket office and lining up the pompoms to come in and then making a track for the racer pom poms to be blown around! Some of the smaller pom poms were quite shy to meet their racing heroes!
It has rained so much we have found some immense puddles to splash in! Vinnie worked really hard at the first volunteering morning back before wading into this particular lake!
Vinnie wanted to have a Bowser academy "Last day of Christmas party". We did Christmassy colouring and worksheets and had a feast for lunch!
Another christmas present is a puzzle game where you have to solve how to get the rabbits into their burrows. Vin has done really well figuring out some of the challenges.
This year's first official theme has been good manners, respect and how to treat other people.
We have read a book about how to behave in different situations at home.
We read the Dr Seuss book "The Sneetches" and talked about how people all look different to each other or wear different clothes but we are all people underneath so it's important to think how to treat one another. We drew and cut out stars so we could be star belly sneetches.
We made a list of all the polite things we could think of. Vinnie was really good at that and could think of loads of good manners and polite ways to behave!
We did a manners quiz to match up the situation with the right thing to say or do such as remembering to say "Please', or saying "Excuse me" if you would like to go past someone.
We also had a few reminders of good manners when playing board games and how to be a kind winner and a gracious loser! This is such a tricky thing even for grown ups sometimes and Vinnie has been working really hard on trying to remember to have fun and not be too stressed about winning! This should really help as we got a couple of new board games at Christmas. Vinnie asked to play his My Little Pony slides and ladders game one afternoon and he did really well remembering to just have fun and I could tell he was really trying not to get upset if it looked like he may not win. He did win in the end and was a very kind winner, saying he had a lot of fun and had even more fun seeing all the fun things I was doing too!
Vinnie also thought of a few questions he wanted to learn about.
He asked "How long does it take to get to space?". We clarified that he wanted to know how long it would take from the point that the rocket lifts off. So we looked up how high up space is, then we found a video of a spaceX rocket taking off. It was very helpful in that it had the rocket's altitude on screen so we could see it only took about 3 minutes between launch and being in space! Vinnie was very surprised, he thought it would take a year!
He also wanted to learn about "The World". So we had a play with his world map magnetic jigsaw, we counted the continents and learned their names and we tried to think of anything we could remember that we already knew about some of the countries and continents. Vinnie knew that Antarctica was very cold, Egypt had pyramids where kings were buried and the USA is where his auntie and uncle live.
Vin has been so keen to learn this year so far. I'm looking forward to finding out what he would like to learn next!
As usual Vinnie has been using his imagination in more and more creative ways. Most of the things he comes up with are during time on his own and it is always fun to find out what he has been up to!
For example, one day he created a cool pirate secret hideout, complete with collapsible treasure chest hiding place:
Before Christmas, we did a bit more of our Mystery Science: weather theme. We learned a bit about the different seasons of the year.
We also did lots of Christmas themed activities
Another day, I found Vinnie had built a very elaborate structure out of duplo. It was for dumping coal into the train trucks.
We built a model dinosaur
We had a campfire with the other volunteers to celebrate the last volunteering day of the year. Vinnie worked so hard that day helping with the coppicing, carrying big branches onto the pile.
We put on our very own lego minifigure nativity. Vinnie did so well learning some of the songs and planning it out and building animals for the stable.
Vinnie wrote his very important letter to Father Christmas
It says
To Santa, I would like a heavy haul train & a hug
and he's drawn a heart with kisses around it!
One of Vinnie's christmas presents was a cool tool box with lots of bits in it such as beads, paper clips, pipe cleaners etc. He enjoys making chains of paper clips most at the moment and has also threaded some beads.
The lego heavy haul train looks right at home at the Lego store...I mean our home!
We held the inaugural pom pom olympics. Vinnie loved making a ticket office and lining up the pompoms to come in and then making a track for the racer pom poms to be blown around! Some of the smaller pom poms were quite shy to meet their racing heroes!
It has rained so much we have found some immense puddles to splash in! Vinnie worked really hard at the first volunteering morning back before wading into this particular lake!
Vinnie wanted to have a Bowser academy "Last day of Christmas party". We did Christmassy colouring and worksheets and had a feast for lunch!
Another christmas present is a puzzle game where you have to solve how to get the rabbits into their burrows. Vin has done really well figuring out some of the challenges.
This year's first official theme has been good manners, respect and how to treat other people.
We have read a book about how to behave in different situations at home.
We read the Dr Seuss book "The Sneetches" and talked about how people all look different to each other or wear different clothes but we are all people underneath so it's important to think how to treat one another. We drew and cut out stars so we could be star belly sneetches.
We made a list of all the polite things we could think of. Vinnie was really good at that and could think of loads of good manners and polite ways to behave!
We did a manners quiz to match up the situation with the right thing to say or do such as remembering to say "Please', or saying "Excuse me" if you would like to go past someone.
We also had a few reminders of good manners when playing board games and how to be a kind winner and a gracious loser! This is such a tricky thing even for grown ups sometimes and Vinnie has been working really hard on trying to remember to have fun and not be too stressed about winning! This should really help as we got a couple of new board games at Christmas. Vinnie asked to play his My Little Pony slides and ladders game one afternoon and he did really well remembering to just have fun and I could tell he was really trying not to get upset if it looked like he may not win. He did win in the end and was a very kind winner, saying he had a lot of fun and had even more fun seeing all the fun things I was doing too!
Vinnie also thought of a few questions he wanted to learn about.
He asked "How long does it take to get to space?". We clarified that he wanted to know how long it would take from the point that the rocket lifts off. So we looked up how high up space is, then we found a video of a spaceX rocket taking off. It was very helpful in that it had the rocket's altitude on screen so we could see it only took about 3 minutes between launch and being in space! Vinnie was very surprised, he thought it would take a year!
He also wanted to learn about "The World". So we had a play with his world map magnetic jigsaw, we counted the continents and learned their names and we tried to think of anything we could remember that we already knew about some of the countries and continents. Vinnie knew that Antarctica was very cold, Egypt had pyramids where kings were buried and the USA is where his auntie and uncle live.
Vin has been so keen to learn this year so far. I'm looking forward to finding out what he would like to learn next!
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