3 - 20 September Start of a new "school year"

 During the Summer we had a bit of time off from recording much of our home education things. We still did stuff to keep busy, we made up games in the garden with chalk, we made our own bean bags with old socks and bird seed and played games with them. We did quite a few mystery science activities including learning about fossils and clouds, how to identify different types of frogs and also learned about birds, bird feeders and made a prototype bird feeder. We read books, went for walks and did puzzles and of course Vin built a ton of lego. We had a bit more of a laid back time.

Since we started back "properly" we have:

Read about seeds and eggs and pondered why they look different in some ways and the same in others. We've chatted about evolution and where all life on Earth could have begun. We thought about what features of different seeds and eggs could help their species to survive.

We went for a walk on the green near our house to find some seeds! We found a lot of different seeds and berries and took photos of them. Then we used the internet to identify some of the plants and made a poster by printing out some of our photos and labelling them.

We played with the play money and practiced adding it up. We played the "Pop to the Shops" board game and practiced working out change.

Vinnie drew some really cool pictures of the characters from Lego Ninjago.

We found some things around the house and measured them. We talked about the different units of measurement and how there is an imperial system and a metric system. We talked about what kinds of things would be measured with cm or metres or kilometres. We talked about what other things you can measure such as weight.

 We read some of the old Ladybird book "What to look for in Autumn" and did a page in Vin's birds sticker book and listened to the calls and read info on the RSPB website for barn owls, tawny owls and short eared owls. 

 

 

Vin made a cool sky pirate ship from lego. 

We made up a game with the Uno cards - we each picked 2 cards and had to add all 4 together. Vin was so quick! 

We looked at the "What to find in woods and forests" sticker book and made a nice sticker scene.

 We talked more about human evolution and drew pictures of ways that humans have evolved differently from animals. 

 

 

 

 

 

We made a clock out of card and rolled two dice then showed that time on the clock.

We practiced the 5 times table by taking it in turns to point the minutes hand at a number and say the 5 times table for that number.

 We read "Wriggle and Roar" by Julia Donaldson and had fun doing all the actions to the poems. We wrote our own poems inspired by some of the ones in the book.

 We talked about some of the differences between modern and stone age humans. We thought about how our day to day lives are different and what they would have done. We thought about what people may find from our time in 20,000 years and what they might think of it. Vin drew a picture of an archaelogical dig.

We went round the house to find pairs of things and practiced our 2 times tables.

We looked round the house at all the inventions that make our lives easier or more fun. Then we thought of something we had to do each day and drew an invention to make it easier! 

We played at being humans from thousands of years ago living in a cave. Vin made a den for us. We got a sounds app on the phone and played fire crackling sounds and storm sounds. We pretended there may be wild animals outside (cuddly ones thankfully!) and we had to forage for food.

 

We cut out the shapes for the popcorn syllables game. We took it in turns to pick a popcorn word and then put it in the correct popcorn cup for how many syllables the word had.

Vin made a front cover for his new notebook for this year's activities to be stuck into. 

Vin prepared a pasta bake and green beans for our dinner (with a little help) and we talked lots about how we cook different things in different ways (boiling vs frying for example).

We played with the pattern blocks and did some maths activity on a book on the ipad. We found that some of the activities we could use the ipad photos app to draw directly onto the book on the ipad which was a fun way to solve some of the questions without having to print pages.

We read about British reptiles and answered a quiz. 

We read about healthy and unhealthy choices in life and why some things are bad for our bodies even though our bodies seem to crave it (like fat and sugar and sitting still!).

Vin drew a picture of some things that are fun but unhealthy and some things that are healthy but fun! 

We watched some mini mystery videos on mystery science about how does hair grow and why do cats purr. 

We had some fun with the Optical Illusions activity book. We drew some funny faces that looked different viewed upside down.

We read stories together and did some puzzles.

We made an obstacle course in the garden and timed ourselves. 

We played with the ball and with wind up toys.

Vin invented a game where you have 3 characters and roll a dice and depending on which number is rolled, you move a different character forward 1 space. 

Vin also invented a game where you roll 2 dice and add them and if it is even you move forwards and if it's odd you move backwards. We found that the characters always seemed to end up back at the start!

We cut out some pictures of animals and sorted them into groups of whether they were birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, fish or insects.

We played the bus stop board game.

We made a jigsaw of Corsica (a souvenir from a friend's holiday back when people could actually go on holiday instead of staying home!) and we looked up where it was on the globe.

We have had a busy couple of weeks "back" and google have changed the way you add pictures to the blog so sorry that they are all over the place!