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...

 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. ...