Vin's Learning Journey

 This week was our free choice week where we do more laid back things and Vin chooses the activities that we do.  Vin had fun on a few days playing with a scientific calculator that we left lying around.  He was experimenting with the different things you could do on it and asking us sums and seeing if we could figure them out before he put them in the calculator.  He got the magnetic world map out (while we tried to pack it to move!) and had fun playing with that taking the bits off and putting them back on a few times.  We had fun making a 200 piece jigsaw of Animals of the World. Vinnie got this at Christmas and we hadn't tried it yet. Vin did such a good job helping to sort the pieces and actually looking at the pictures on the bits and finding where they would go from the picture on the box. This is something he usually doesn't do when doing jigsaws so I think it shows he is improving his concentration.  We completed the puzzle together and enjoyed loo...

 This week we had a bit of a theme of rainforests as we visited the Chester Zoo website every day. They put up rainforest activities, and secret messages to decipher.  There was a different rainforest each day. We watched a video about rainforests and thought about what we would need to pack to take with us. There was a secret cipher to use to work out secret messages that we found every day. We played with a rainforest sounds generator. We learned about poison dart frogs and coloured some in to make our own bright warning patterns and colours. We found out about the different layers of the rainforest and about palm oil production. We did a word search and read about each of the words in a glossary and chatted about them together. We learned about camera traps, chimpanzee facial expressions, evolution, the endemic species of Madagascar and deforestation. We also had a look around Chester Zoo on their virtual map and saw some of the animals they have there and how they take car...

 This week Vinnie continued his 2 minutes of writing each day. He wrote a couple of great sentences, and the alphabet and a list of some characters from Mario Odyssey.  We got our next "Time Machine" from Mysteries in Time. This month's theme is the Elizabethans. Throughout the week we read the mystery story, put the sticker on the timeline poster and found London on the World Map. We built the model of the Tower of London and Vinnie got some little lego studs to be people so he could play with it. We also started reading the facts magazine which led to a lot of chatting about what it might have been like all those years ago and a bit of mental maths calculating the lengths of the reign of each of the six Tudor Kings and Queens. We shall continue reading the magazine next week and learn a bit more. We played in the snow on a few days, Vin made a "Mount Crumpet" for the Grinch. The real Grinch was a bit big for it so he got a leaf and made a little model grinch. ...

During the free choice week, Vin suggested increasing his 1 minute writing to 2 minutes, so this week he did 2 minutes writing each day. It's great that he is regularly practicing like this and hopefully it is strengthening his hand muscles and getting a bit easier. The writing produced is still pretty hit and miss in size, neatness or quantity but I think overall it's improving! We looked at a fun book called "Maze Quest history" which is a book of mazes through different time periods with facts about each place. We did some more column subtraction puzzles from the Sherlock Bones books. We used the cubes to see how "regrouping" works when you need to borrow a ten from the tens column to be able to subtract a larger number from a smaller one in a column. We solved some more cat crimes logic puzzles!   We did the next mystery for our animals and habitats through history theme on Mystery Science. This time we learned about fossilised footprints and how you can...