Adventures in Bible Study

So far, I've managed to achieve my aim of discussing her Bible reading with Iona each day, using resources I've found online, 'though I'm guessing it may be more difficult with more obscure ones. Iona's been really receptive to doing colouring and crafts based around the stories of creation, Adam and Eve (both of which she already knows quite well) and Cain and Abel. For creation we talked about how God made everything, and I printed out a colouring page of the world with Genesis 1:1 on it (can't find a reference to it now). For Adam and Eve we talked about disobedience (though not using that word) and I printed out a nice picture of Eve in front of the tree, with a snake to cut out and put through a slit in it (again, I can't find it online now). Cain and Abel was interesting, as it's a hard story for children and Iona didn't really know it before. I used it to emphasize how we should look after each other, especially family and friends. DLTK's site was very useful in this - I was able to print out a picture of 2 children playing together, saying "Share and be a friend. I am my brother's keeper" (http://www.coloring.ws/cain-and-abel.htm). We also made toilet roll tube models of Cain and Abel (http://www.dltk-bible.com/mcain.htm and http://www.dltk-bible.com/mabel.htm), which we used to act out the story and Iona played with a bit. Lastly, as suggested in the DLTK site, I used the story as a jumping-off point to introduce our family tree. I made a large copy of the family tree (http://www.dltk-bible.com/genesis/families/my_family_tree.htm) with sugar paper as a poster for Iona's room, labelling 3 generations of family members, as well as putting on a photo of each. While doing so I talked a lot about how Mummy's mummy and daddy were Nanny and Grandpa and Daddy's mummy and daddy are Grandma and Grandad. The poster will go up in her room. In addition I printed out the details sheets for each member of the family and began filling them in, stapling them into a book for her all about her family.

Concerning reading, I have now laminated the "Mummy" and "Daddy" flashcards I made, and used them with Iona for 2 days. On every occasion she has been able to tell me what they said and distinguish between them, although she could not at first read the word "Mummy" when I wrote it in smaller writing later today. I am therefore going to try making the next flashcard in the series very soon (if I can remember the next ones, as I can't find my "Teach Your Baby to Read Kit".

Happy New Year

Well, it's a new year, and I'm back. For those who don't know, I've had heart valve replacement surgery 4 weeks ago, so education has had to take rather a back seat, both now and in the weeks leading up to it. However, I did use the chance to teach Iona something about the heart and about jobs of people in hospitals. I'd planned to do it as a lapbook, but that never quite happened. She was very keen on the hospitals books, though, and also the book which I used to introduce the idea of Mummy as a little girl (as I was explaining to her that I had my first heart surgery then) - "Before I Was Your Mother" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Before-I-Was-Your-Mother/dp/0152058427/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3AS4HUZ1CTVE7&colid=11ACYI4B09FFG). I was disappointed, though, that it was almost impossible to find any books about a parent going into hospital for an operation, as I could have done with that to help prepare her. The only one I could find was from America, "Let's Talk About When Someone You Love is in Hospital" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lets-about-Someone-Hospital-Library/dp/0823950379), which wasn't specific to a parent, and didn't talk at all about after-effects, but which was some help.

Unfortunately, due to my operation, I wasn't able to do much work with Iona on the meaning or customs of Christmas, as even when I got home the breathing tube had bruised my voice box so I couldn't talk much. However, I did find this printable nativity set to make - http://mama-jenn.blogspot.com/2009/12/printable-nativity-sets.html. We made the characters on half toilet roll tubes, and managed to make a stable from a cereal box. The original idea had been to assemble it in the window and leave it there, but that was reckoning without Iona! She adored playing with the characters, and did so for days. One day she placed both the angel and shepherd in the stable and I heard her saying "Hello, angel, what are you doing today?" "I'm in the stable"! We don't now have a usable stable scene, but I feel it's worth it, as she knows all the characters and their role in the nativity story well.

Now we have entered a new year, and I have made some new goals for me to achieve with Iona during the year. Firstly, I plan to have her toilet trained, which I will be able to begin working towards as soon as I am able to lift again, after the wound has completely healed. Second, I intend for her to start attending the youngest group of Sunday School on her own some time around her 3rd birthday. I started taking her into it a few months ago, but as the minimum age is supposed to be 3 I have been staying with her to ensure that she doesn't cause problems for the teachers. She enjoys the craft in it, and has been learning some of the names from the lessons, although she still misses being able to play with the toys in creche.

When I can drive again (probably February) I will be able to re-start attending home education groups with her, but I also intend to start going to some new groups. Our local home education group runs a weekly gym session for children from the age of about 3, so I will try her out at that around then. She is also very keen on ballet, so I plan to try a local class that takes children at a similar age and allows you to pay by the week.

At church we have several native speakers of other languages which I don't speak myself. I want Iona to become proficient in a variety of languages, so I'm planning to ask them to help her learn at least basic greetings in them and see what happens from there, to complement my teaching her Spanish and French. If she can just chat to them in their own languages whenever they meet, I think she'll be part-way to becoming fluent, in a way that I never have been in anything other than English.

When I was 4 my Mum started teaching me to read using Glen Doman's "Teach Your Baby to Read" Kit (the nearest I can find now is http://www.gentlerevolution.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=G&Product_Code=0402&Category_Code=K2). I tried this with Iona when she was still a baby, but it didn't really work out, as she wasn't really interested. I thought maybe now would be a better time, so I asked her today if she would like to learn to read this year. She said yes, so I wrote the word "Mummy" in red on an A4 piece of paper and told her what it said, as per the programme. However, she became more interested in the fact of the writing, and wanted to write on it, too, so I'll just try again tomorrow. My hope is that by the end of the year she will have completed the programme and be a competent basic reader. However, she may have other ideas, so I'll just have to accept it if this doesn't happen!

Iona really enjoys craft these days, but still can be obstinate about doing it her way, so I wasn't able to let her help make any Christmas cards this year. I also ran out of time due to my operation. Next Christmas I hope to be able to make all our own cards, and involve Iona, so I plan to start this with her in October to give us enough time.

Lastly, to ensure that I get into good habits with Iona's education before the local authority wants to get involved, I plan to do at least one educational activity (or something that can be considered educational somehow) with her per day. I also intend to contribute to this blog at least once a week, to keep a permanent record of her progress.

Pirates lapbook

Our project for September was pirates, as Iona has been very interested in them. I researched them in several library books, as well as checking various lapbooking sites, but mainly this time the ideas were my own.

We read several fiction books on pirates, including "Pirate Patch and the Abominable Pirates" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pirate-Patch-Abominable-Pirates-Impey/dp/1843629895/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288980209&sr=1-7) and "Class 3 All at Sea" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Class-Three-All-at-Sea/dp/0340944668/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288980415&sr=1-1-fkmr0), as well as a children's fictional version of Captain William Kidd's story.

I particularly enjoyed finding out the history of pirates, using an Usborne book, and the lives of famous pirates. Iona was also quite interested in the different pirates, and we made a concertina book listing some of them:

We watched the Disney "Peter Pan", which Iona really enjoyed, and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", which she was less interested in. We made another concertina book of things beginning with the letter P, which Iona is getting quite good at identifying:

We talked about pirate treasure, and counted a pirate chest filled with 8 pieces of 8 (Iona now can count objects with some help).

We identified the colours silver (which she knew) and gold (which she didn't), and I made a pirate treasure map. This fitted in well with activities at our local children's centre, which had a table set up for tea bag painting (even suggesting it could be used to make a pirate treasure map!). I painted a sheet of paper with the tea bag, then drew a detailed plan of our living room. I placed an X over a compartment of her table, then placed 5 copper coins in the real one when she was out of the room. When she came into the room I showed her the map and helped her to use it to find the "treasure". This was a great find for her, as she loves putting coins into her piggy bank, and she talked about finding the "treasure" for several days.

As a way to include some spiritual and religious / teaching, I made a very small book with Iona about "Crime and Punishment". We talked about what it felt like if people took your things, and said that this was called stealing, although I glossed over the exact punishments used for it in the 18th century! Since then, I have periodically reminded her what stealing is.

The pirates theme allowed for quite a few craft activities. Iona now has a bag of Mega Bloks, which we received free from the Made for Mums site (http://www.madeformums.com/) in exchange for writing on their community what we thought of them. We used this to make a pirate ship between us:

I also showed her how to make a pirate sword by cutting out some cardboard and wrapping it in foil. After making 2 of these I showed her how to play sword fighting:

Uno, dos, tres

Iona surprised me some more this morning - she insisted on having "Diego and the Baby Sea Turtles" read to her over breakfast, and part of it involved counting flags in Spanish. I've always done such counting in Diego and Dora books in Spanish, and Iona is good at counting to 10 in English, but she's never shown any interest in the Spanish equivalents. However, this morning, after saying "uno" I was a bit slow in saying the next number, and suddenly Iona said "dos", followed by "tres" for the next one. She couldn't count any higher, but I was very impressed that at last my Spanish teaching has been having some sort of effect. It's good motivation to keep on with it.

More about owls

We've slowly been working our way through Iona's owl lapbook over the summer, although she's becoming a little less keen to do just what Mummy wants when she wants it! I printed out quite a few minibooks from Lapbook Lessons (http://www.lapbooklessons.com/OwlLapbook.html) and Homeschool Share (http://www.homeschoolshare.com/owl_babies.php) and made up the book of songs and poems, some of which I've read to Iona a couple of times. I helped Iona to make the jumbled owl puzzle (she still does need help for that) and we made an owl from a couple of paper plates.

Something I've been surprised by the success of is the memory cards from the Lapbook Lessons. I printed them out and tried to teach Iona how to play Snap, although I thought she'd be too young to understand. However, she really enjoyed it, and I had another go with her again today, having laminated the cards. She is well able by now to identify whether the cards are the same or not, although she does insist on shouting "Snap" regardless! I think I vaguely remember my nephews doing the same when they were little, but it certainly seems to be a good start.

Our next lapbook

On finishing our World Cup lapbook I started wondering what to do next with Iona. To begin with, I thought of Bastille Day coming up and planned to do a bit about France. However, nearly everything I found would have been a bit above her level. Then I found 15th July was St. Swithin's Day, so thought of a unit on weather. This was a bit more promising, and I started working on teaching her different types of weather. However, we still weren't inspired. A few days later, though, Iona seemed suddenly very interested in owls, so I asked her if she wanted to do a project on them. She agreed, so I checked up online, and there was much more on owl lapbooks than on either France or weather.

The first thing we did was make a collage out of dried peas, lentils, etc. This tied in with a craft activity at our local children's centre - they were doing the collage on plain paper, so I drew an owl on it and encouraged Iona to fill that in with the pea and lentil mix:

Another thing we did was to make 3 little pine cone owls, using the method we found here: http://thecraftyclassroom.com/CraftBirdOwlPinecone.html. This was very successful, although Iona still enjoys trying to tear them apart!

We made 3 in a nest to tie in with the book "Owl Babies", by Martin Waddell. We've read it before, a year or more ago, and I thought it would be ideal for this unit. We got hold of a copy, as well as a book about nocturnal animals (a hedgehog visited our garden for a couple of nights last week, so we could tie that in). I was quite impressed, on reading "Owl Babies", that Iona knew what an owl's house was called, and she had some idea, when we made the pine cone owls, what the nest was made from. She has also been saying, over the last few days, that owls and hedgehogs come out at night, so she's certainly learning something.

Today we tried playing the Counting Owls game that I found at Homeschool Share: http://www.homeschoolshare.com/owl_babies.php. I thought that, at 27 months, Iona might be a bit young for it, still, but that it was worth a try. However, it went really well. Iona didn't really have the idea of playing a board game, but accepted, without too much complaint, that we had to take turns and that she couldn't have all the owl counters but only as many as were shown on the die. It's a great way of reinforcing the idea of 1:1 correspondence when counting, and with only 9 squares to fill with a die labelled 1-3 (twice) it lasted just long enough to maintain her interest. I look forward to playing it again, if I'm able to round up all the miniature owls (Iona's been enjoying giving them swings on her rocking horse's stirrups!).

World Cup lapbook

At last, we've finished our World Cup lapbook. I'm not at all interested in football, like the rest of my family, but my husband enjoys it, and it seems that Iona is taking after him. She's always been interested when football comes on the TV, so I decided that a project on it was a good way to introduce her to the idea of other countries. Firstly I got her a World Cup sticker album, and she's really enjoyed helping to put stickers in it, although not as much, unfortunately, as pulling them back out. By now, though, she's much more interested in what the photos represent, and which ones she's got and hasn't got. She's also fascinated with the flags of the countries, often asking for her "football book" and asking whose all the flags on the front are. She particularly likes the England flag, and the way she's been seeing it around the streets and in our neighbour's garden.

Next we made a big map to show where all the countries playing in the World Cup are. I printed off a map from a website (which I've forgotten and can't now find) and when each team played their first game (in theory; in practice it was often later!) I showed Iona where their country was on the map and labelled it:

Unfortunately, she's a bit too keen to add some lines herself, as can be seen, so it can't be kept anywhere she can get hold of it (also because of a regrettable tendency to tear things into shreds if she has them in her room at night).

For the bulk of the lapbook we made minibooks which we found at Teacher's Planet: http://www.worksheets4teachers.com/world_cup_worksheets.php. Iona began to lose interest in them after a while, so Mummy coloured the last few.

We also used Teacher Planet to make a cardboard footballer: http://www.teacherplanet.com/links/redirect.php?url=http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/themes/worldcup/. Iona enjoyed playing with that, so I don't have a copy of it. I printed the design on card, Iona coloured it, then I cut it out and secured it with split pins.

On the back of the lapbook we put a sort of strip book, but instead of being fastened along one side it is only fastened at the corner by a split pin. It introduces Iona to football vocabulary, as well as reading: http://www.teacherplanet.com/links/redirect.php?url=http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/themes/worldcup/.

We also found via Teacher Planet a Spanish worksheet for counting footballing objects, and finished it off with a couple of photos of Iona's mock vuvuzela and England hat, with a note about the vuvuzela (which will hopefully be forgotten after this World Cup!).

Seaside lapbook

At long last (or so it seems) we finished the seaside lapbook this week. Here it is:

We've sung a few of the ocean songs, as well as buying a children's CD of seaside songs, which Iona likes but has already scratched. "Thank you God" was a book of the 6 days of creation, with emphasis on the seas and sea creatures. "My Day at Skegness" was my own invention, designed to encourage Iona's use of the present continuous tense and also to introduce the idea of stories from the (in this case, her very near) past, as a prelude to talking about first her immediate family's history, then going into history further back.

I made a drawing for Iona to colour of the seaside, with plenty of seaside-related words beginning with "s" labelled:

She's getting very good at knowing most of these words now to say, although not to read, and enjoyed colouring the picture in. We also made a seaside painting, using handprints to make a fish and jellyfish, and cut out shapes in yellow card which Iona stuck on the painting to make a "sandcastle". The latter was good practice for her shape recognition, which has taken a bit of a back seat lately to colours, and while doing it she was able to remember her triangles, squares and rectangles.

This picture is now on her wall, while I put a photo of it in her lapbook. Lastly, on the back page I put a starfish picture I had printed for Iona to paint, then sprinkled with sand to make it feel a lot like a real starfish. I also printed out some Disney princesses pictures from a free website (http://www.4kraftykidz.com/arielcoloring.html) and found that Iona coloured one of the Ariel ones in such "oceany" colours that it looked perfect in this lapbook.

This has been the first lapbook that I've properly finished with Iona, and that she's really got interested in doing with me. We've also got lots of library books out about the ocean and the seaside, and Iona's still keen on reading more, so I feel it's been a real success. My only disappointment is that I can't leave the lapbook where Iona can read it on her own, as she's in a real "tearing things up" phase, so we'll have to wait 'til she's more grown-up before we can get the full benefit of re-reading it regularly.

Rhyme time

How old are children when they start to make up rhymes? For the last couple of weeks Iona has started coming out with silly little rhymes, such as "belly, jelly, delly", "sorry Lori" (which we do actually say), and ""Andy, mandy, bandy". They're definitely phrases she's inventing herself, but we've always tended to say silly rhymes to her, such as "smelly nelly", so I guess that's set up the right environment for her to get the idea of rhyming. I'll be interested to see whether it leads to her starting writing poetry earlier than usual, especially as her dad's a keen writer.

Summer days

Iona is loving these warm, summery days, when she can go and play outside. One of her favourite phrases now is "Play in gardy", and she gets really upset if she can't. Yesterday and today were unusual, at least this week, in that we didn't have any groups or events to go to, so she was able to spend some time in the garden with Mummy. I slathered her in sun cream and gave her a chance to wear her new Disney Princess pants with no nappy (although she still won't do anything on the toilet or potty and that part of both days wasn't very successful).

We started off yesterday with painting, as she still prefers to paint herself and her surroundings rather than the paper so it's a lot less destructive in the garden! She did a little painting with the brush, then figured out a way round the lids on her new paint pots that stop her dipping her fingers in - she painted her fingers and hands with the brush then made partial finger- and hand-prints that way. She then moved on to painting her legs, and on noticing later that the dog had obviously been sniffing the picture and got a yellow nose, she painted her nose blue, too! Luckily, it all came off in the wash!

Next, Iona decided to investigate the local fauna. She loves ladybirds, and I managed to find 2 yellow ones on our raspberry bush. Unfortunately, they were on top of each other at the time, so I told her they were playing piggy back and we ought to leave them alone. Undaunted, she insisted on picking them up, which I don't think amused them too much. She also had a good look at a couple of snails I found and gave her. They were both very brave and didn't pull into their shells very much, so she was able to really see their heads well, as well as the large foot. She enjoyed touching their feelers, and I also offered to put them on her hand. Although she agreed to this, when the slime started touching her she did pull back.

The other main thing we did in the garden was gardening. Several months ago Iona helped me plant some Brussels sprouts seeds as part of a study on Brussels (sprouts and the place), and she's been really proud of them ever since, despite trying to pull them up a lot at the start. They now needed more space again, so David prepared a bed for them earlier and I planted 4 of them out yesterday, as well as planting out some other veg. Iona is fascinated by gardening and was quite keen to "help" by pulling more seedlings out for me, but I managed to rein in her enthusiasm and protect our plants. She also kept grabbing the watering can and trying to water the potatoes, but her favourite "gardening" activity is playing with the "Slug Stop" pellets, which aren't poisonous but just provide a physical barrier to slugs. She loves playing with pebbles generally, but these little white pebbles fascinate her and she will insist on taking them one at a time from around the plants and putting them elsewhere.

Going back to our seaside lapbook, we're getting on with it slowly but surely. I have added a booklet of my own design, with photos from our seaside trip labelled in the present continuous tense, to reinforce her mastery of that. I also found some Disney Princess colouring pages online and printed several out for her, including a couple of Ariel, who is one she's very keen on. She coloured the one of Ariel with a couple of fishy friends in blue and green, so well (for her!) that I trimmed it and added it to the back of the lapbook.