A is for ...

Well, we've begun our first week proper of the Letter of the Week curriculum. I began by reminding Iona of some words that begin with A, e.g. apple, alligator, astronaut, animal, ambulance and alphabet. For our first Bible reading this week we finished the story of Adam and Eve, and asked her what Adam began with. She immediately replied "a". I then presented her with a worksheet from Christian Preschool Printables which combined a colouring picture of them with writing practice of "Aa" and their names. However, for now it still remains untouched, as she currently seems very keen not to do anything suggested by Mummy!

On Tuesday we attended our local Christian home educators' group, Fun Club. This month we were doing about powered flight, and there were lots of related things to make. However, Iona decided to spend the morning playing with the toy kitchen and food, and later the Lego - once again, perish the thought of doing what Mummy suggested!! In the afternoon she had a really good time playing with the other children, of a variety of ages. The Lego provided me with a good opportunity to reinforce the concepts of sharing and negotiation, as both Iona and some of the boys wanted to play with the same parts. Happily, everyone seemed fairly satisfied, and hopefully Iona has learned valuable lessons about how to play together. We were virtually the last to leave the hall, as Iona was having so much fun running around with a slightly older girl, and having her first game of "Tag". From the Fun Club library I was able to borrow some very useful resources for this week and the rest of the month.

The first resource I used was from the Letterland series: An Alphabet of Rhymes. I read Iona about half the poems from it, and she really enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to reading her the main Letterland books, 3 of which I got from the resource library. I also read her the A poem from Nonsense ABC Rhymes, which was quite funny. As Iona enjoys poetry and rhymes (she keeps saying she's making one up), this seems quite a good activity for her.

Yesterday I took Iona to the supermarket, so I deemed it "Asda Day". This is a word that Iona has known for a couple of years now, I think, so it was a nice way of reinforcing her knowledge. We found a couple of foods that began with a, although as I was on a tight schedule to catch the only free bus home again we didn't have much time for education while there. When we got home I drew the Asda logo on a cardboard shelf unit that I'd built for her a few days ago, and encouraged her to colour it in, which she mostly did. In the afternoon I had intended to play shopping with Iona, using the till set that she bought last week with her Christmas money, but once again she didn't want to do what Mummy suggested!!!

Today I'd suggested to Iona that we have an "Astronaut Day", especially as lately she's been very keen on the idea of going in a rocket, and that idea appealed to her. I've run out of time now to feed back from that, but hopefully I'll manage a full report, plus photos, tomorrow.

Seeking Baby Jesus: a Lesson Learned

Over Christmas I've discussed the Christmas story a lot with Iona. She played an angel (or, as she was determined to view it, a fairy!) in our church Nativity, and we also used Truth in the Tinsel as our advent Bible study. It certainly seems to have sunk in: this morning we were both upstairs when she came rushing in to my bedroom saying "Come quickly to Bethlehem. There's a baby there!". She was holding a small, round, glittery scrunchie above her head, and told me "This is a halo". When I said "Are you an angel, then?" she replied "Yes", and led me in to "Bethlehem"!

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).

Jobs lapbook

2 or 3 weeks ago I reached the story of Moses' call with Iona in her morning Bible stories. This led to me telling her about God having a good plan for her life, so I made her a colouring sheet about jobs (the pictures came from DLTK).

Unfortunately, Iona is currently at the stage where she doesn't tend to want to do what I suggest, so not much colouring got done! However, it gave me inspiration for her next lapbook - a 2-week unit on jobs, which she's quite enjoyed.

When we put the lapbook together Iona was the most interested she's been in the process, and insisted on helping to decorate the covers, front and back!

We borrowed various books about jobs from the library, and used them to make mini books about what different professions did:

Where possible, I asked Iona to come up with ideas, after reading each book, of what the person did. As you can see from the first page of the police book, I must admit to using the police as a bit of a threat to her when we're getting in the car! I put that in the book, though, as it was her own words, which is the most involved she's been in any lapbooking.

I was very impressed by how carefully she coloured some of the police book, and even added a lollipop lady to my lollipop sign, as well as adding an RSPCA inspector to the front of that book.

Over the 2 weeks of the unit I tried to theme Iona's Bible readings around jobs, so at the end I made her a quiz of matching the character with their job. She didn't really answer any of them correctly, but I think that was because she wasn't really interested in the activity at the time. This is quite a problem at the moment, when I'm trying to encourage Iona to learn more around specific topics, and particularly when I try to use the "Teach Your Baby to Read" flashcards with her; she appears uninterested and gives silly answers which I think she knows are wrong.

The last page of the lapbook was an attempt to encourage Iona to write. When she gets magazines these days she seems to enjoy "colouring in" large letters which are outlined to encourage children to write over them, so I attempted to reproduce this. I asked her what Daddy did, and what she wanted to do when she grew up (the answer to the latter varies from day to day), then asked her to write over the words, but apart from the "i" in "fairy" she point-blank refused.

One of the Bible stories we read was the wise and the foolish man (builders), so I suggested we make a collage from torn pieces of tissue paper and egg box on a picture I drew. Again, I ended up doing most of the work, although Iona was interested; she preferred to draw her own pictures of things she was interested in at that moment. However, she enjoyed tearing the egg box, and did stick some down. She also agreed to me putting it up on her wall afterwards (sometimes she gets very worked up about me not doing that because she wants to keep working on it, i.e. destroying what's already been done).

Interestingly, although Iona seemed to enjoy and learn from this unit, it had most of an effect on me. For one thing, I am now learning to plan our work more. I recently read a very interesting post on Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett on planning your year with unit studies, and decided to timetable at least some projects at times of the year when I know we are likely to want to do them. This has had the very useful effect of focusing what I do with Iona into a discrete period. In this case, for example, I restricted us to 2 weeks on jobs, so when I reached the end of the second week I forced myself to tie up the lapbook with Iona, despite not having covered all the jobs or books that I'd planned to. What we did seems to have been enough for her, and we didn't end up this time with the unit dragging on and on, so I will try to continue working like this.

Secondly, and most importantly, I realised, after doing Bible studies with Iona stressing that God has a plan for her life, and discussing with her what she could do when she grows up, that it really doesn't matter to me what she does. Previously I've given lip service to the idea that the most important thing is to serve God, whatever he asks of her, but privately I felt I would be deeply disappointed if she didn't go to university. However, since doing this unit I really do feel now that, although I'd still like her to go to university, it really doesn't matter if she doesn't, as God's plan for her is a good one.

Solomon's Temple is completed

At last, after a long hiatus in our efforts (partly caused by the weather getting a bit cooler and wetter - I really don't like painting in the house), Solomon's Temple has been completed!

It's not particularly impressive, but the best we could do with the materials I could find, and we talked a lot about what the different bits were. The description of the temple being covered in gold came from the children's Bible we've been reading, but we got a better description from this site. Wish I'd found it before I began making the model with Iona, as I'd probably have done it differently, but she really enjoyed making it:

This is the first time Iona's managed to paint something like this herself so well without much help from me. She finished it yesterday by painting the pillars, which fitted in well with her Bible story, about King Joash, who redecorated Solomon's temple.

King of Kings

We haven't been doing as many activities based around Iona's Bible readings lately, as other things seem to have filled our time. However, this week we began stories about Samuel choosing Saul to be King of Israel, then stories of Saul and David, so I thought a lapbook about kings might be a good idea. It's been easier said than done, though, as I can't find much online directly about that.

I started by discussing with Iona what God said in our children's Bible about how Israel shouldn't have a King as he was their King. From that we made a picture of a crown labelled "God is our King":

I drew a crown shape on sugar paper, then Iona helped me stick bits of kitchen foil onto it, followed by a "fur" edging of cotton wool. I'd wanted to decorate the crown but didn't really have anything suitable so the picture had sat around all week waiting for inspiration. Then yesterday we visited my husband's family (now I can finally drive again after my heart operation) and Iona got her Christmas present from one of her aunts. It was a Grafix Glitter Art Chest , which turned out to be absolutely perfect for finishing the crown. We were able to put some fake gems on, along with some glitter, although we had to use our own PVA as the glue stick included in the set wasn't up to the job. Iona and I were both pleased with the result, though, and it's now decorating the wall above our computer.

Reading was a lot harder than I expected, too, with not many books at Iona's level available in the local libraries about kings or royalty. I extended the theme a little, though, and borrowed a book about leadership, Being a Leader. It didn't really explain what a leader was, but gave good examples of how a good leader should behave. I expanded on some of the examples in that book by reading Iona Taking Turns, which we also enjoyed. I did manage to find a lovely Usborne book about royalty, Kings and Queens (History of Britain), which we flicked through. It was too grown-up to read to her, but we looked at the pictures and I explained who people were. I hadn't really intended to start teaching Iona history until we'd introduced the concept by talking about her history, Mummy and Daddy's history, and back through her grandparents' experiences, to try to make the concept more real. However, I've been doing that informally, and I made sure to look through the Usborne book backwards, so we could begin by looking at the present Queen, her son who will be King, and his son, an even more future King who we've been talking about getting married in 2 months. My plan in borrowing this book is to use it to draw up a time chart with Iona, showing Kings and Queens throughout Britain's history, with other key events added as we look at them (including such important events as Iona being born!). What I'm not sure is where I'll put it. I've heard that other home educating families put them up in the hallway, but we don't really have enough bare wall anywhere in this house.

Online, I found a few useful printables. Sunday School Fun Zone had a good colouring page of Samuel anointing Saul, while DLTK had a K for King to assemble; Iona liked sticking the pieces on which I cut out for her.

She was able to name this letter when I asked her what it was, and we talked about how the word "king" begins with a K.

We have looked through her Spanish picture dictionary, and found the Spanish words for "king", "queen", "prince", and "princess", so I'm planning on making a mini book of some sort to illustrate this. I'm also thinking of doing something with Iona about "The Lion King", and probably "Old King Cole" to finish this study, and I will hopefully be able to put photos here of the finished lapbook.

Love is in the Air

For Valentine's Day this year I decided to do a little project with Iona about love. We began by making this wreath from a paper plate, sugar paper and tissue paper:

I found the idea and templates at http://www.examiner.com/family-holidays-in-denver/easy-valentines-day-crafts, and it really was very easy to make. I cut the hearts out from the paper, and allowed Iona to stick them onto the plate, although, as I didn't cut the centre of the plate out, I had to prevent her sticking them in the middle. She's definitely improving in her ability to stay on task when doing crafts, although I have to choose ones that allow her to do her own thing to a large extent, which is quite restrictive.

Another craft I then went on to do with Iona was making these Valentine cards:

This idea came from the blog Artful Adventures. It required a little more effort than the wreath, to prevent Iona doing her own thing and sabotaging the painting, but I helped her do 3 fingerprint hearts on one sheet of paper, then removed that to dry while she fingerpainted to her heart's content on another spare sheet. I explained to her that on Valentine's Day we give cards to people we love, and asked who she wanted to make her cards for, expecting her to say Mummy, Daddy, and 1 or more of her friends. She replied "I love Mummy, and I love me, and I love Daddy", and insisted on making her cards for Mummy, Daddy and herself! I love the way she is so un-self-conscious in her self-regard, and wish that she could stay that way, although I recognise that she will have to change, and probably sooner rather than later. Still, I hope that she will learn to accept and love herself as God loves her, rather than accept any negative judgements that the world will try to impose on her.

For Valentine's Day reading I borrowed The Love Bugs from the library and read it to her. She was keen to read it, but the story was a bit complicated for such a young child, and I don't think she really understood, even with me trying to explain the intricacies as I went along.

On the day itself I tried to make heart-shaped jellies, but failed in that attempt, due to being unable to find the raspberry jelly. However, I used a heart-shaped cookie cutter to cut out bread hearts, which I then used to make Iona Valentine's pizza:

Iona enjoyed these, and was easily able to name the heart shape.

Funnily enough, although the lesson at church the day before Valentine's Day was about Paul's letter to Timothy, it fitted in well with our Valentine's theme, as it emphasised that God loves us. In fact, the leader actually arranged for each child there to receive a letter addressed to them, telling them so, so that aspect of my theme was well-covered.

Finally, I found this channel on YouTube with various Valentine's Day activities on it. Iona loved this song, and I had to sing it to her repeatedly for several days!

Of birthdays and other things

Most of Iona's learning has gone on well this week, with the exception of her reading. That seems to have taken a step back, with her initially becoming confused between "head" and "hand", and then sometimes seeming confused with the other words, too. However, she has still been messing around, in a way that suggested she was getting bored at it being too easy, so this week I introduced the 5th body word - nose. She always remembers that one, but always calls it "no", as she'd noticed that the words sounded alike and I think she prefers to say "No"! When she does so I cover the "se" and explain that "no" is "no" but the whole word says "nose".

When we read the story of Moses in the bullrushes I helped her (well, she was content to mainly watch) make a woven thin card basket:

(I can't find the site where I found this idea, but Suite 101 features an identical one here:http://www.suite101.com/content/moses-as-a-baby-a22524). The lesson I drew out of this story, as from several others lately, is that God looks after us.

After this we looked at the story of the 10 plagues. This concerned Iona a little, as she's been a bit paranoid lately about bugs in her bed (there haven't been any, although there was a wasp on her floor a couple of weeks ago), so I had to keep reminding her that the frogs, lice, etc were in Egypt, and not in her bed! This time I emphasised how the Egyptian king was naughty and didn't obey God (explaining what the word meant, increasing her vocabulary), and that God had to punish him, which she seemed to accept, although I also talked about how he had looked after the Israelites. Interestingly, this was at the time there were riots in Egypt, so when the news was on I was able to point out what Egypt looked like now.

We did a couple of craft activities about the plagues. One was a colouring sheet athttp://www.coloring.ws/t_template.asp?t=http://www.coloring.ws/bible/nw-exodus8to10.gif. She coloured this really well, with suitable colours without any prompting (red and yellow for the desert, which may have been a coincidence), and the sun coloured quite well inside the line (for her). However, she then decided to start tearing it up, so I had to quickly rescue it and repair it. The other craft we did was making mock unleavened bread, an idea from the Squidoo page on Old Testament Bible Lessons (http://www.squidoo.com/BibleLessons). Unfortunately I took a chance on the conversion from Fahrenheit to Gas Mark, and guessed wrong, so it burned a little, but Iona still enjoyed it. The other activity we did was to sing a song (well, I sang, Iona listened!) about the plagues to the tune of "This Old Man" (http://www.kidssundayschool.com/Gradeschool/Songs/1song01.php). Iona's too young to really learn it at the moment, but I can see it being very useful in a few years to memorise the order of the plagues should she want to.

We've managed to do other activities a bit this week. It was my birthday, so I tried to do a mini-theme with her on birthdays, although I've not managed to do much with her about that. We borrowed a book from the library called "Celebrating a Birthday" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Celebrating-Birthday-My-Family-Me/dp/0749696087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296328255&sr=1-1). This was just the right level for her, and she quite enjoyed it. As she loves glueing, I also cut out the shape of a cake, 3 candles in the colour of her choice, and 3 flames, all from sugar paper and got her to glue them onto a large piece of sugar paper, again in her choice of colour. I wrote "Happy" and "birthday" on 2 more pieces of paper and glued them on the top, suggesting she "copy" them underneath. She loved doing the glueing, and although she tore quite a few of the pieces off after, she re-stuck them on later, which is a first.

What I have learned from doing crafts with Iona lately is to take a photo as soon as we have finished doing them, then I can be less concerned if she decides to disassemble them straight away. This has seemed to make her more relaxed, and, as I said above, she has even begun to mend them again after. Hopefully this will continue and one day she won't even try to destroy her work (roll on that day!).