30 August - 5 September New "term" (week 35)

We had a nice start to the new term this week. We were both ready to have some new fun things to do after some weeks off.

Each day we started by updating the new calendar we made. When the month changed to September, we noticed the month colour no longer matched the season colour. We talked about the difference between meteorological seasons and astronomical seasons. We've mentioned that before a few times but they're tricky words to remember and Vin wasn't sure which was which.

We joined a site called "letter-join". Vin can choose letters or patterns that he'd like to print out to practice writing and tracing. We did some sheets from it every day. 

 

On a couple of days Vin also practiced a bit of writing by drawing a picture and writing something he'd enjoyed in his "fun things" notebook.

Vin has been helping a lot with preparing snacks and meals, peeling and chopping carrots and potatoes, cutting up ham, and dividing snacks fairly.

Vinnie found some interesting objects from around the house and wondered how they worked. We sat down together and came up with some theories.

We talked about good habits such as making sure you put things away nicely after you've used it, or clean up when you've made a mess.

We read some facts about ninja on kiddle, looked at photos of their equipment, looked at photos of the koka ninja house in shiga prefecture Japan - a building that used to be a ninja training school . We read about nightingale floors and tried to come up with some ways to move around our house without touching the floors.

Vin tried to be as sneaky as possible while walking to the park, and did some ninja training at the playground and on the monkey bars.

We drew pictures of ninjas and some of the equipment they may have used and labelled them. 

We watched a video on youtube to learn beginner's karate. We made a "training dummy" to practice some of our moves on.

We read about seeds and the ways they disperse and read an autumn poem from the "Exploring Nature with Children" book. We looked at some other interesting seeds in the book we have from the library about trees. Vin found the "coco de mer" seed interesting, it's one of the largest in the world. We looked up some information about the trees and looked up where they came from on google maps.

We read the Wild West fact magazine from Mysteries in Time and did some anagram puzzles. 

We went for a trip out to Cobtree Manor Park and went on a seed hunt. We found so many different types of seeds - nuts, berries, fluffy ones, seeds in cones and on leaves. We identified some of them as:

Rowan
Sycamore
Hawthorn
Cobtree
Beech
Oak
Sweet Chestnut
Elder
Thistle

The next day we looked back at our photographs and chose one type of seed to draw in the nature journal. We tried to figure out how we think it may get dispersed to grow a new plant.

Vinnie was sent some lovely postcards from Nick Ward who illustrated the book "Mechanimals". We used them as inspiration for our own drawings of mechanical creatures.

We played some board games this week - Keys to the Castle, Pop to the Shops, Times Table Heroes, and Dragonwood. 

We also sat and read some stories and magazines.

A busy first week back!