Week 2 of our 2021 Home Ed! 9 - 15 January

 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!)

Each day this week, Vin did his 1 minute writing again. We're working on trying to get the letters to be a little bit smaller at the moment, as well as remembering to make them all lower case unless it's a name or the start of the sentence.

We also played with the place value arrow cards every day this week. I printed out a couple of sheets to work from to practice partitioning numbers and putting them together to make numbers. We watched a Math Antics video about place value that we had seen before and i thought could use reminding of. We quizzed each other by making numbers with the arrow cards and asking things like "how many hundreds are there?". We picked 3 numbers and tried to make as many different numbers as we could with just those 3 digits in the different number places. We made numbers then moved them along the number places to show what they would be if multiplied by 10, 100, or 1000 and talked about how many places a number needs to move along for different multiples of 10. Then we started trying out asking what would 3 hundred more than this number be, or 20 less than etc to see how you change the number in that place to calculate it. 

On Friday evening we were talking about something and Vin wanted to work out what 3 x 77 was and managed to figure it out (with a little help!) by using his knowledge of 10 times tables from our place value work. He worked out 3x7 would be 21 and 70 is 10 times 7 so 10 times 21 would be 210. Then with a little nudge to remind him to add on the other 7x3 so it's 77 x 3 he added 21 to his 210 and got the answer 231!

  On a few of the days we continued our "Yoga Quest" from cosmic kids yoga. We are heading through the Rumbly Jungle now and met Stezzi the Parrot, Dodgson the Dodo and Tiny the T-rex and helped them all with their adventures.

We made our Egyptian amulets on Monday - the final activity in Vin's "Mystery in Time" for this month. There was lots of dough to use so we made quite a lot of lovely Egyptian artifacts! Vin made a Scarab, an eye, a bowl with some little decorative baubles and a smily face!

I made a Scarab and an Ankh.

 We also found a website where they had virtual tours of tombs and pyramids. We explored the tomb of Queen Meresankh III , a 3D exploration of Khafre pyramid at Giza and the temple of the Sphinx.

We received a "Perfect Planet" poster from the TV series and looked at that and read some of the information about what makes our planet ideal for life to thrive and what problems the environment is facing. 

Vin helped with a bit of cooking this week, peeling some potatoes as well as helping to measure ingredients for a cake.

We watched and joined in with the BBC bitesize super movers 3 times table song and Vinnie watched several of the Phoenix comic Skills Hub videos and drew some of the monsters.

We enjoyed a new issue of the Lego Explorer magazine. This one was all about castles and Medieval life. We read lots of interesting facts about the Middle Ages, castle attacks and defense, and what life would have been like as well as building the little lego castle and catapult that came with the magazine. We conducted some experiments with the catapult to find out what lego bricks flew furthest and did some of the other activities from the magazine.

We did three Explorify videos and activities. We looked at a close up picture of some frost crystals and had to figure out what they were. Each subsequent picture was slightly zoomed out so we could adjust our guesses. Our thoughts went from pine needles, to feathers, a peacock, a fir forest on a mountain until we could see they were frost marks on a window! We read a bit about how frost forms. Then we watched a video of some people doing gymnastics and talked about the kind of forces required. We read about the types of gymnastics we'd seen and talked a bit about muscles. The final one was a picture of 3 foods and we talked about which was the odd one out and why we thought that (there's no wrong answers! ) We read a bit about why different foods are good for you and give different amounts of energy.

We had a look at his new Sherlock Bones times table book he got at Christmas. We had a look at the 2s, 5s and 10s time table page. We quizzed each other a bit and then we used the blocks to see patterns in the times tables. The book told us that the only way to get an odd answer is if two odd numbers are multiplied. We tested that out with our blocks and saw why it was true. We noticed that the odd 5 times tables always end in 5 and the evens always end in 0 and used the blocks to see why that was too. 

 We are doing the Art History Kids Nutcracker activities - a bit late but it was a bit busy before Christmas! Today we heard a bit of the Nutcracker story and found a bit about Pablo Picasso and Cubism. We drew Cubist style Nutcrackers.

We have read some nice stories together this week including Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent by Lauren Child, the Diamond Chase by Tracey Corderoy and Steven Lenton , and Looga and Barooga by Robin Etherington and Zak Simmonds-Hurn (who draws a comic Vin likes in the Phoenix). Vin has been reading the Mr Penguin books by Alex Smith and the 52 Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. We've had all these from the library for quite a while now so read them quite a lot!

Vin also invented and drew a target for a Marbles game. The rules seemed to be rather skewed in his favour though!