3 - 9 January 2022 (week 1)

A new year! 

It felt very chilly outside this week and so muddy still so some of our plans to spend a lot of time outside were a bit scuppered! We managed to get outside for one very rainy walk with a friend though and Vin enjoyed playing in the playground with the children even if it was very soggy! And we had a little walk around Ightham Mote. So we've been less active than we hoped to be this week but we still did some fun things at home.

For Christmas, Vinnie got the Lego Boost set. He has built the Vernie the robot model and done lots of fun activities with him, then dismantled him and built the "Autobuilder" model and tried out some of the activities with that. The programming is a little like Scratch Jr , dragging blocks that do things in the right order so he is a bit familiar with it already from his Scratch Jr animations last year. 

We had a look at some 3D shapes Vin got for Christmas too, checked out their names and...made a big ol' tower of them of course! They have gaps in so you can fill them with water and compare their volumes which will be an interesting thing to do another time.

We made a loaf in the bread maker and Vin helped while we talked about what the yeast does and how something called gluten makes the dough stretchy and holds all the air bubbles in so it rises.

We did letterjoin practice each day. We are going back to single letters for a bit because we are practicing writing fast! Vin did well finishing the sheets a bit quicker than usual but still neat and legible letters.

Vin started work on an Apache helicopter model with his Grandpa.

We found a maths challenge which has different quizzes and you try to do as many as you can in a minute. It's to help check how quickly you can remember useful maths facts such as what pairs of numbers add to 10. Vin did really well at the adding and subtracting to 10 quizzes and managed to do most of each set in the minute so we will keep practicing those and try some different maths facts each week.

Vin got some of his Lego Super Mario characters down for a drawing class! We chose 3 of the characters to draw.

We played the 3 times table memory game. Vin found the most pairs!

We found a couple of fun sounding lessons on the Into Film website about the new film called Encanto. We listened to a piece of music from the film and drew in time to the music what we thought it looked like. We learned about beat and tempo. We used some bits destined for the recycling bin to make some different sounds and played along to the song keeping time. We thought about what skills and talents the family Madrigal have and read about who the characters are and what skills we have and how we've worked hard at them. We drew a "house of skills" with the different rooms having skills people in our family have and what would be useful to have in their room to expand their talents. 

In the next lesson we learned about texture and dynamics of a piece of music. We composed an ostinato (a repeating section of 8 beats) using our recycled musical instruments. We wrote it down using the notation sheet and performed it. We talked about listening, how we show others we're listening to them when they perform and how we can encourage others. We drew an album cover for our new band! After we'd done all the activities we watched the movie of Encanto and really liked it.

We did a cosmic kids yoga adventure - it's been ages since we've done one!

We opened Vin's new Mysteries in Time box. It's all about ancient Rome. We read the fact magazine over a couple of days and did the quiz and started some of the puzzles about roman numerals and the usual spot the difference and anagrams. Vin told me that he had read about some of the people in Corpse talk books and some of the facts from his Fact books he has. We looked up some more info in his encyclopedia too.

We looked at photos on the internet of the roman buildings in Bath and at the Circus Maximus in Rome which is now a big park. Vin got his cuddly toys to have some chariot races!

We spent a quiet minute looking at the winter sky and noticing the colours. Then we listened to a poem about the winter and looked at a nice painting of a winter sky by George Inness. We talked about what we could see in the painting, what signs made it look cold and wintery.

We read a couple more pages of the Maths camping adventure book together. Vin drew a net for a 3d shape and we solved some problems of measuring distance and weight.

We picked a character to draw from the Phoenix magazine skills hub website. Vin chose Looshkin and added lots of awesome details to his drawing. We sent Vin's picture to the artist who draws Looshkin, Jamie Smart, and he said it was amazing! That was really nice!

Books from the library same as last week (ones we got during holiday). We've also been reading a lot of Vinnie's books especially some of his fact books.