Iona the Explorer

  As we are now up to the letter E in our Letter of the Week (more like Letter of the Fortnight, due to other activities taking up time!) I suggested yesterday to Iona that we pretend to be explorers today. She liked the idea, so when we got up I reminded her of different places people had explored (desert, jungle, arctic/antarctic, ocean, space) and asked where she wanted to pretend to go. She chose the jungle, then said she wanted to go to the real woods with me. As we were due to go to craft group at church in the morning, which is on the way to the woods, I agreed we could, then asked how we would go on our adventure. Iona was feeling a bit literal and insisted we would walk. I tried to stay in character and tell her that the jungle was a bit far to walk to, and eventually she joined in and agreed to go by plane. I told her about her uncles' jungle adventure in Malaysia for a couple of weeks in the 1970's, but I don't think she really took me seriously about that (I don't blame her - even I find it hard now to believe they actually did it!). I also looked through World History and Explorers with her over breakfast and later in the day and we learned a little about Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Da Gama and others. We had borrowed the colouring book Women Explorers from Fun Club on Tuesday, so I copied some pages from that, although she didn't colour any in. She also never got around to colouring this Columbus printable from The Holiday Zone, although I am keeping all the printables in her Letter of the Week folder, so if she changes her mind at some point she will still be able to do them.

When it was time for Iona to get dressed she herself chose to wear her khaki and olive pinafore dress, as she said that "Andy in Andy's Wild Adventures wears green". We discussed other clothes to wear, and agreed that she needed thick trousers to protect her legs, a hat to protect her head from the sun, a waterproof coat, strong boots, and thick gloves "to protect my hands from snakes"! We also packed her explorer's rucksack with a telescope and binoculars, although we couldn't find her camera, so we agreed that Mummy's would have to do.

At craft group Iona has begun to work on her own scrapbook while I do my own crafts, so for today's activity I decided to follow an activity which I found on The Holiday Zone's Columbus Day activities. We talked about the furthest she'd ever been, which was our holiday last year. With a bit of prompting she remembered this was Dorset, and I found our holiday photos and invited her to choose some to print out for her scrapbook. She enjoyed doing this, and at craft I cut them out for her and she stuck several into her book, decorating the pages with stickers. This provided a good way to reinforce the idea of herself as explorer.

After 45 minutes at craft we left (Iona was in a bit of a "silly" mood today and as most of the attendees are older ladies I didn't want us to outstay our welcome!). Iona heard some other children going to the park and said she wanted to go there, so we made that our jungle:

The intrepid explorer spies out the land

Now for a spot of mountain climbing

 When we had been there for about 45 minutes I said it was time to go, but Iona was still keen to go into the wood. She said she was not too tired, so I agreed to go home the very long way (about another 45 minutes), through part of the wood. Again, she tended to be very literal about what we were seeing (e.g. a dog), but began to get more into it, so that when a van came past just after we crossed a small road she told me that there was a crocodile in the river!

When we finally reached home Iona seemed quite tired, but managed to eat a little lunch. Afterwards she curled up on the settee next to me watching TV (2 programmes I found on Madagascar and the jungle) while I showed her how to magnetise a needle and make it into a compass, as in The Science Activity Book. It wasn't easy to magnetise it, and took a lot more strokes with the magnet than the 50 recommended in the book, but it worked slightly in the end, pointing vaguely north when floated in water, and was a good way to introduce the idea of compasses. Iona, however, was more interested in a spot of water play, and proceeded to fill the bowl with as many of her craft supplies as she could!

Back at home she makes a compass

Close-up of the home-made compass

 To close the Explorers' Day we looked at Iona's children's atlas and I showed and told her all the places her Dragon ancestors had explored: from France to Reunion Isle to Southampton to London to Swanage to Bristol then Woking and finally to where we live today, each generation since 1818 being born in a different place.

Dinosaur hunting

Late last month we had our first family holiday since Iona was born. We packed up our tent, bags and dog and headed off to the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, where my Dad came from. It was lovely for his remaining family to finally meet Iona, and I took the opportunity to do a study with her on dinosaurs.

We started out by talking about fossils and how they were made. Homeschool Share suggested making your own fossils using small objects and modelling clay, then following up with plaster of Paris to demonstrate the relief fossils. This was our first activity, therefore, using some airdrying clay we had been given from the leftovers when we attended a council-run education day. Iona really got the hang of making impressions in the clay from her little people, and we left them to dry while we were on holiday. When we got home, after a couple of days to recover, I made up some plaster of Paris and poured it over the impressions. It dried really quickly, and Iona was very impressed!

As we were particularly going to an area where ammonites could be found I made sure to teach her a bit about those fossils. Daddy drew one, which Iona traced over really well and then attempted to copy. I used the opportunity to introduce the word spiral (I think I've used it with her before, but this was her formal introduction).

 When we got to Dorset we spent an hour or so on Kimmeridge beach checking for fossils

and found several partial ammonites. Iona was thrilled to have this one of her own, with 2 partial impressions (1 too tiny to see on camera):

Moving on to dinosaurs, we talked about different types of dinosaurs: those who ate meat and those who didn't. Iona's main criterion seemed to be "Would it eat me?", so we used that as our title for a mini book, and I got her to help me sort some small pictures (printed from Enchanted Learning)

From Enchanted Learning I got a sheet showing dinosaur defences, which I cut up and put into a zig-zag mini-book for Iona.

The idea for the art activity came ultimately from Meet the Dubiens, although I discovered it at 2 Teaching Mommies. We cannibalized some previous paintings, for me to cut into the shapes, then Iona stuck them on using my directions and also the guide picture on the computer. It was a good way of reinforcing the letter D as the initial letter of dinosaur, and Iona really enjoyed some fairly independent craft (as well as a spot of drawing on the dino's face after!):

It was also good practice at naming different shapes.

From Homeschool Share I printed out a graph for Iona to compare the sizes of different dinosaurs. I adapted it slightly, as we hadn't looked at Utahraptor at all, but had done quite a bit about Apatosaurus, and I also added a column for Iona's own height. Unfortunately, when I came to try to find out dinosaur sizes I realized I needed to decide whether to look at their heights or their lengths. I decided on heights, but that ended up not really demonstrating how huge some of the long dinosaurs really were. Anyway, it was a good way of demonstrating the use of charts to compare measurements, although Iona just wanted to colour in all the squares!

I printed out a lot of dinosaur colouring and writing pages (possibly from First-School.ws, although the pages I've now found don't include the writing) to take on holiday. Iona enjoyed using them as a base for further drawing, but wasn't so keen to colour them. However, I was very impressed with the last page she did, of the oviraptor, at how well she is now able to "write" over the top of letters, so we are now doing more of that activity when possible.

From Homeschool Share we also printed out a set of dinosaur shapes, on which I wrote down the words Iona told me to describe dinosaurs. It's really our first look at descriptive writing, and a bit beyond her yet, but I felt it was a good start.

I can't find now where I printed the dinosaur snap cards from, but I laminated them and took them on holiday to try to have a game to play in the tent. We turned out not to have much time for it, and Iona still finds it hard to concentrate on a whole game, but she has some idea of how to play it.

The counting and addition worksheets came from the same, now unknown, source. Iona is now able to count up to 10 objects with only a small amount of help (depending on her mood), but the addition was harder - I found I had to draw the required number of additional objects to enable her to count them. Subtraction was a bit easier, as I only had to cross the objects out.

The final component of our lapbook was a suggestion in "Infant Projects: Dinosaurs", which I borrowed from our local Christian Home Educators' group resource library. This was the "Dinosaur Tooth Trail" Game, which I copied from the magazine by hand.

Iona and I discussed the shape of carnivore teeth compared to those of herbivores, then talked about how you could know what a dinosaur ate by the shape of its teeth. We then chose a dinosaur each (left over from the dinosaur size chart), rolled a die, and if we landed on the right sort of tooth for our dinosaur got to throw again. This game, besides reinforcing an educational point, was just the right length for Iona, who wanted to play again but then began to get bored during the second game.

To tie in with the theme of prehistory, Iona's Bible studies during this unit dealt with Creation (although that only took a couple of days, so we then moved on to other subjects).

Boats lapbook

Having seen Preschool Post's boats lesson plan I decided that it would make a good next unit for Iona over the summer, so we began our next lapbook on 15th August. 

The theme of boats fitted well with lots of Bible stories, so over the fortnight we covered Noah, Jonah, Jesus calls the fishermen, the big catch, the storm on the lake, Jesus walks on the water, the parable of the dragnet, and Paul's travels.

The lapbook itself began with a dot-to-dot picture of a yacht . Iona still needs hand-over-hand help with dot-to-dots, but enjoyed both doing it and colouring the result.

Iona is now starting to try to draw over lines a lot more, so I liked the "B" worksheet that I got from First-School:

She's getting a lot better at "writing" as opposed to just colouring over the lines, but there's still a lot of work to be done. However, she's at that stage where she doesn't want me to help her a lot of the time, especially with "writing", so she'll just have to get the hang of it herself. She's also getting better at recognising initial letter sounds, which this worksheet helped with.

Underneath the worksheet I put an accordion mini-book that I made containing photos of meals that I had made on the theme of boats:

Jacket potato boats

Courgette boats

"Jesus walking on the water jelly"

"Jesus walking on the water from boat" jelly

The jellies, in particular, were very popular. Unfortunately, I've lost the reference to where I found the idea, so apologies if the idea was yours (please send me a reference to add in here if so). The jelly should have been blue raspberry, but I couldn't find any anywhere, so I used lemon and lime with copious amounts of blue food colouring, which worked very well. The peach boat was my idea, as we had some sitting around.

Rather than concentrate on initial sounds with this lapbook I decided to work more with Iona on rimes (see Oxford Reading Tree "Rhyme and Analogy"). I therefore worked collaboratively with her to make up a poem using the "-oat" rime:

At this stage she can correctly identify rhymes about 50-70% of the time, maybe more, so I think she's getting the idea, but sometimes she gets a bit overenthusiastic and comes up with entirely wrong rhymes. I liked the way she was keen to illustrate the poem, with just a bit of prompting (and drawing of the moat) by me.

We talked a little about the history of boats, and I found some colouring pictures of boats from different eras (from DLTK). I cut them out and asked Iona to put them in order of age. However, she found this very difficult, and didn't seem to have much idea. She enjoyed adding a little colouring to them, though.

To begin to develop some awareness of geography we visited a local river that runs through our town and I have reinforced its name several times since. I drew a map of our county and put the river on it, then stuck it in a small book with a map of all of England's major rivers on the front.

A further aspect of history that we covered was the sinking of the Titanic. We found a little about it in one of the general boat books that we looked through, so I then got Survivors: The Night the Titanic Sank from the library. It was a good way of talking about the history through a fictionalised story (with a happy ending!). I found this colouring page on Free Kids Coloring, and just added a few facts to remind Iona of the story in the future. She took in the story quite well, and played shipwrecks with her toys for quite a few days afterwards. We also added the sinking of the Titanic to the time line that we have going up the stairs.

For the science component of the unit we used this file folder game from File Folder Fun. As it was sunny, warm weather we were able to turn it into a water play session outdoors, which Iona loved. To try to duplicate the scientific method I asked her to predict before we played which items would sink and which would float, then we compared her predictions with the actual results. As it turned out, she predicted most items correctly.

Iona's predictions

Actual results

Testing what floats

Water play after the hard work

We also read through Fourways Farm: Floating and Sinking, which reinforced the ideas in a light-hearted way.

Further science teaching was provided by this idea from Camo and Bows, showing how water runs downhill. It was good fun to try, using a long strip of foil to recreate a river, but without a hosepipe it was a bit of a damp squib. Daddy helped for a while, by tipping the watering can while I took photos, but it would definitely have been better with a continuous stream of water. Iona seemed to enjoy it, anyway.

We also read through the section of The Earth: The Geography of Our World relating to rivers; most of it probably went over Iona's head but it was a good introduction to the idea.

The idea below came from DLTK, where it was suggested as a way to introduce the concept of halves. Iona concentrated well on it, and it was a useful way to revise shapes, as we haven't done much on them lately and she seems to have forgotten them a bit.

While doing this unit we went to an unrelated event at our local museum, where we happened to see a Bronze Age boat, carved out of a tree.

They provided a colouring station, with an artist's impression of the boat in use, so that made a useful addition to the lapbook.

There were loads of suitable story books relevant to this unit. One thing I did was re-read Iona the tale of the Jumblies, which we have in an anthology, and she began to remember the chorus. We also read, for the first time, Where the Wild Things Are, which she really enjoyed. Other books we read were Mr. Gumpy's Outing, Captain Small Pig, and We're Sailing Down the Nile (good for a bit more world geography).

Plants and flowers lapbook

We've finally just about finished our latest, major lapbook, at last. As it was begun in early Spring I decided it would be a good idea to look at flowers, generalising it out a bit more to plants as that was the subject of 2 science clubs while we worked on it.

We've planted a few seeds this year, which Iona helped with a little. Mostly she just liked messing around with the pots and compost, but she did help me plant the potatoes.

She has since got very "into" planting seeds, and came to me the other day with a little pot she'd found in the garden, filled with compost she'd taken from one of the spare tubs, saying she'd planted a seed! I don't know what she'd put in it, but whatever it was has started to grow (it looks a bit like a bean).

We did this rather nice activity to practise her colours (which she already knows pretty well), and her colouring, which is getting much better - I was really pleased with how she followed instructions for this activity.

Making Learning Fun also had this easy dot-to-dot which I decided to try with Iona. She can count from 1 to 10, knows the written number, and is beginning to get much better pen control, so I decided it was worth a try. However, she needed a lot of hand-over-hand help at this stage, and preferred to do her own thing.
Over the course of this unit we have looked close-up at lots of flowers, with me explaining the correct names for the parts to Iona. Although I liked the diagrams of flower parts I found online, I decided in the end that our diagram would be more meaningful to Iona if we labelled a photo of her favourite flower to dissect at the moment - the yellow poppy in our back garden, so I took a photo of one she'd brought me before she tore it apart! Unfortunately our colour printer cartridge was giving up the ghost at the time, but this enabled me to turn it into more of a line diagram with pen and ink to make it clearer.

We also made some egg box daffodils (can't remember where I got the idea from but it works really well) for Grandma for Mother's Day, and some for our next-door neighbour who was ill, so I photographed them and put the photo in the lapbook.The final piece of work on this page was a write-up of one of our dog walks to a wood where we picked a few flowers and leaves. To preserve these flowers we made our own flower press.
A really interesting book we borrowed from the library during this unit was "The World Came to My Place Today" by Dr Jo Readman and Ley Honor Roberts. It was about the different ways in which we use plants and where they're from, thus bringing in some geography. As an experiment we talked about how plants are used as dyes and decided to see how well different plants and their products dyed. I had prepared some fresh beetroot so had the water left from that, and used turmeric in water, too, as I'd read that that gave a strong colour. Iona said about the yellow petals from the poppies in our garden, which she was very interested in at the time, so we soaked some of them in some water too, to see if that would stain the material. For dyeing we used some natural-coloured cotton, and left it in the 3 solutions with either vinegar or lemon juice as a mordant overnight. As a pattern for how to write up an experiment we followed the procedure of "Guess with Jess", which is a BBC CBeebies programme that Iona loves, as I felt that it was a good demonstration of the scientific process with which Iona could identify.
We were lucky enough that, while I was on one of my dog walks next to farmland, I found some stalks of wheat that someone had pulled from the field. I had brought them home to show to Iona, so for this unit I stuck one, along with a grain of wheat, into a minibook for her.

This diagram of a tree was found on Enchanted Learning. I asked Iona the names of the parts of the tree, which she mostly knew, just calling the trunk the stem instead!
This picture that Iona coloured according to shape (with not a little prompting!) came from Making Learning Fun. I found it useful as it reinforced the shapes which Iona has been good at for some time. The only problem with it was her determination to do things her own way (which can be an advantage, of course but can still be irritating at times!).
The front of the lapbook contained various activities found on Homeschool Share and Homeschool Helper. "Will it Come Up?" was just a fun activity based around carrots growing, which was appropriate for us as Iona's been involved in growing carrots last year and this. "Parts of Plants we Eat" was a useful and interesting activity, as Iona loves her vegetables and fruit, so she was quite good at suggesting plants to me. I planned to find some photos of plants to put in here, but that never quite happened!

The pollination mini-book was surprisingly successful, as Iona and I have talked a lot about pollination, so I was able to ask her what pollination was and basically just wrote down her answer with a little embellishment.


The carrot seed rhyme was rather cute. I'd hoped to persuade Iona to do a bit of movement to it, curling up small like a seed then growing up tall, but she only watched me do it and wouldn't do it herself. She seemed to like it, though.Finally, we made a "Life Cycle of a Flower" craft from 2 paper plates and a split pin. I drew the pictures on and Iona "coloured" them in. It was inspired by this activity from Homeschool Helper.
A good book, that Iona liked, looking at plant life cycles was "Amazing Life Cycles: Plants" by Honor Head

As part of this unit we looked at the work of some of the impressionists, particularly Monet's waterlilies. A book that I was really impressed by (pardon the pun!) to introduce this subject was "Katie and the Waterlily Pond" by James Mayhew, which we borrowed from our local library. We also tried "At the Time of Renoir" by Antony Mason,which was too detailed to read to her but was good to show a variety of styles and artists within impressionism. After reading through these and describing the idea of impressionism to Iona as best I could, I worked with her to try to produce our own impressionist paintings of flowers. I chose dandelions and bluebells, as they happened to be out at the time, and showed her one flower of each to paint. The results were probably nothing special, but at least this time, having only given her one colour paint at a time, they were a colour other than muddy brown! After I'd tried to teach her to look at the flowers to paint them, I wondered what the results would be if we used a flower to print with, so I gave her the dandelion and the resulting picture was interesting:
This was Mummy's attempt, using printing and splatter painting:
Finally, 2 other books that Iona and I really enjoyed on the subject of plants, again from out local library, were "First-Hand Plants and Flowers" by Lynn Huggins-Cooper, which had a nice story aspect to it, and "All Kinds of Plants" by Carrie Branigan and Richard Dunne, which had good clear diagrams, just at the right level, and covered a wide range of topics.