Vin's Learning Journey

 This was our last laid back week of our "Winter Term" so we made the most of it to play lots of games, chat about things and just have a proper week off.  That said, we did still do a couple of notable things. Vin got his model of the solar system that we made ages ago and had fun playing with it and asking each other lots of quizzes about the planets. He had remembered quite a few things from the video we watched the other day! We made some delicious lemon fairy cakes on one day, and made jelly bean cookies on another day. It was not a healthy eating week!  We played on a little green near us on one day after posting a letter. There is a garden there and some people had planeted flowers. We had some races and had fun. another day we visited a different post box that often has a crocheted decoration on top. This time it had a world book day theme. We drew the moon again in our nature journal. Our prediction from the previous drawing was correct - the moon was larger than...

 Each day this week Vin did his 2.5 minutes writing. We had a look at some nice joined up handwriting by children his age (for "inspiration"). Vin declares his writing is even better. Good to have confidence! (Slightly misguided perhaps...). He is doing really well practicing every day and it definitely seems to be helping having the words to trace. This Saturday is the Spring Equinox. We read about what that means and looked at how the Earth orbits the Sun at an angle and how that changes which hemisphere is facing the Sun each season. We read some Spring poems and looked at a painting by Monet called "An Orchard in Spring". We talked about how it looks like the painting was done a bit later in Spring than at the start as the leaves are out and Vinnie thinks there may be bluebells which come out a bit later in the year. We finished reading the story book from this month's mystery in time. It is about Wartime Britain. We were inspired to write our own secret mes...

We found a new game online this week. It's called Dreamscape. You read stories and answer questions about them to earn different kinds of curency you can build a little town with and train creatures etc. It was OK but I think a little overcomplicated (the game side of things anyway - the reading stuff was very easy for Vin) so I think we probably won't play it much again. Vin did his 2.5 minutes writing every day, having a reminder of writing the alphabet neatly and some words in preparation for learning to start joining up the letters.  Vin played Prodigy maths on a few of the days this week - he answered questions about telling the time, 3d shapes, 2 and 5 times tables, addition and subtraction, comparing numbers and patterns. I have been setting the level at things he is fairly familiar with to start with so he can get used to how it asks the questions but I have started introducing some more challenging things now.  We read about the kinds of games Elizabethan children wou...

 This was week 9 of 2021 Home ed! We did a bit of an assortment of things and I totally forgot to take many photos. At the weekend we did an orienteering and geocache style challenge at the Nature reserve. Vin had to use the compass to find various landmarks and also use coordinates to find different places around the park. We also spotted some interesting boxes on some of the trees which we looked up when we got home and found out to be dormouse boxes. We watched an interesting video about marine biology - we learned a bit about bioluminescence, the different layers of the oceans, robot submarines, chemical reactions and underwater volcanoes.  This week we went up to 2 and a half minutes of writing a day. We decided to use the workbook so Vin had some things to copy and because we are going to start practicing how letters join together to make joined up writing! We did it each day but on one day Vin really wanted to carry on past the time so he could do the last 2 pages of th...