Vin's Learning Journey

 This week was Vin's "Free Choice" week. This meant he could decide what activities we did and when we did them.  There was a lot of lego building throughout the week! A lot of it inspired by the new lego mario sets or by Mario Odyssey video game. I didn't get pictures of everything but there was Bowser's airship, a Sherm possessed by Mario, vehicles for Bowser and his henchmen, the mecha-wiggler robot, a Mario party board game including dodge the hammer, bop the fuzzy and Bowser racing mini games, a mech-dinosaur, Bobomb mine, and a Thwomp ruins Lego Mario expansion. We also played Mario Party a few times and Vin played Mario Odyssey quite a bit too!  We played catch together, read a puzzle magazine, and lots of books and comics. Vin read quite a lot of his Thomas the Tank Engine books from his special box of them. We made springs with paper and spirally snakes. We made up funny stories using the story blocks. We played one of my "Unlock!" puzzle games ...

 This week we continued our 1 minute writing each day, carrying on with paying attention to making the letters a bit smaller and neater.  For maths, we played some more with the place value arrow cards on a couple of days. We practiced adding and subtracting with them, working on one number place at a time, and practiced writing in squares in a maths book.  We did some column adding puzzles from his Sherlock Bones activity book. We took it in turns writing them down but Vin wrote very neatly in the squares. We read a story book called "Fractions in disguise". It was a mystery story but throughout the story we learned about fractions and how they can be reduced to simpler forms. After we had read it we played with marbles to make our own fractions. Vin really liked the story and made up his own version with a valuable 12/25 that got stolen! We used our cute little sea creatures to have a refresher of adding and subtracting within 20, as a simpler practice of when more than...

 Over the weekend there was a really cold frost. Vin had a lot of fun smashing up ice and we tried to get some bubbles to freeze but it was already getting a little above 0 degrees so they didn't work. They sat for a long time on the icy table and seemed to be changing a little bit so we'll try again if there's another day below freezing. There were lots of icy spider webs too (which put Vin off going outside initially!)

It's the first full week of the New Year and we have done some fun activities to kick off!  For Christmas, Vinnie received a subscription to "Mysteries in Time". It's a monthly box with a book and activities about different time periods. The first one was Ancient Egypt themed. Over the course of this week we did lots of the activities. We read the story book where the 2 children go back in time to solve a mystery in Ancient Egypt. We looked at the map that came with the box and put the sticker on the timeline. Vin was inspired by the story to make up his own time travel story with his cuddly toys. There was a magazine with loads of facts to read and puzzles which we enjoyed doing.   Each day Vin has aimed for "1 minute of writing". Vin can pick anything he likes to write a sentence about or even just make up random words and he has to write for a full minute. We started last year for a week or so and he managed about 2 words in the minute at the start. He is...

 We had a bit of a laid back wind down to Christmas, it has been such a strange year, i think we were both ready to relax a bit! Here are some of the activities we have done: We learned about Timelines and wrote a timeline of some events that have happened in our own lives. We read a new "Lego Explorer" magazine. It was an under the sea theme. We learned about some creatures and submarines. We did all the activities from the magazine and it inspired us to make our own under the sea scenes. Vin's was interactive with a boat on the surface of the water that tipped to look at the creatures underneath!   We played the robot turtles game and learned about programming a computer. Vin is getting pretty good at thinking ahead and planning the moves for his robot turtle to make, even on quite an elaborate course. Vin made a lovely Christmas decoration from a kit. Vin is continuing practicing peeling potatoes. He found a huuuuuge potato to peel! Vin drew some terrifying sea creatur...