2021 February 1 - 6 Week 5 Still not chosen a theme...

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 tell how fast an animal might have moved. We measured our legs and compared them to dinosaurs, then chose a similar sized dino to compare speed with. We measured out how far the dino could go in one step then measured our own running. The dino could get from the front to the back of our house in 8 steps! We couldn't get so far, lucky the dinos are extinct! 

Then we read some other dino facts and Vinnie played with his dinosaur models and made an exhibit for his lego minifigure family to explore.

We made up a game to practice our 5 times tables, first we rolled 2 dice and added their totals together. Then we had to multiply that number by 5 and colour the answer in on a sheet.

We watched a Cosmic Kids zen den and chatted about how it feels when you really want something you can't have.

We watched the next part of the Nutcracker story on art history kids, learned a bit about Beatrix Potter and how she studied nature and used the animals she saw as characters in her stories. Then we drew our own Mouse King characters. Vinnie also drew a mouse and tin soldier battle with some giant mouse mechs!

We put the Tchaikovsky nutcracker on while we did some tidying and making lunch. We also put the Duke Ellington version on.

We read about spies in the Find the Spy book by Zoe Armstrong. We played at some of our own spy missions , making secret messages and hiding them.

We read some more of the Ingreedies book and chatted about how early explorers travelling around the world affected the things we ate in different places. We read about lots of foods and learned some french words for shops and foods. We looked at our globe and found where the countries in the book were on the globe compared to our country. We looked up photos of some of the ingredients and learned some interesting things such as Brazil nuts are the seeds and grow inside a pod that looks a bit like a coconut.

We were going to draw a castle, Vin decided he wanted to draw Bowser's castle! He drew the entrance, the gate, a courtyard inside and a Battle Arena! He added so many cool details, enemies such as piranha plants and sherms and of course Mario facing off against Bowser! Mine was a bit of a rough sketch compared to his amazing drawings!

We also watched Mister Rogers on a couple of days as Vin really likes him at the moment and did some puzzles from Vin's Quizkids magazine.