Paper and truffles

Today has been quite a productive day. Yesterday, when Iona was getting up and I was talking with her about what we could do during the day and the week, she said "I want to know how paper is made", quickly followed by "I want to know how pens are made, I want to know how mirrors are made", as if she was just trying to come up with as many silly things as possible. However, I treated it as though she was genuine and suggested we start by making our own paper. I got out some of the credit card slips, prescription request slips and other confidential things waiting to be shredded and began tearing them up fairly small into an old bucket. Iona occasionally helped me with this, then I added water and left it to soak overnight. I planned to colour it with food colouring, but Iona added a little colour to it by stirring it with one of her green pens. Using the historical outline in funsci.com I discussed with Iona what was used in which cultures before paper and when and where paper was invented, then put a couple of dates on our timeline.

This morning I made the soaked paper into a pulp in my liquidiser, which Iona couldn't help with as she is noise-phobic. Initially I tried scooping out all the soaked paper and pulping it with just a little of the soaking water, but I had to add more and more of it to make the liquidiser work, until I had added it all. Following that, I laid a spare splatter guard, which had been too big for me to use for cooking, over the soaking pail, in the garden, and carefully spread the pulp over it, squashing it down to squeeze the bulk of the water out as I went. Iona helped a little with this, then became very enthusiastic when I described how Mulberry paper had flowers dried into it. She really enjoyed picking flowers and leaves, scented and unscented, and placing them into the paper:

I've yet to find out how good the final product will be, as the paper has not yet dried.

In the afternoon I suggested Iona make Rainbow Truffles from her Moshi Monster magazine. She had brought it down a couple of weeks ago to show me, and the next day asked if we had any condensed milk, as she'd read that was in the recipe! I'd bought the ingredients the other day, so suggested she might like to make them to share with her new friends up the road. She initially agreed, then after I'd weighed the coconut and mixed it with the condensed milk she decided she couldn't be bothered! I left it for an hour or so, no pressure, then told her I was adding the cocoa (I'd hoped to get her to do that herself). She raced in, wanting to do it herself, so I let her stir it. I then showed her how to break up the digestives in a bag, using a rolling pin, and she did almost all of that herself, too, as well as mixing the 2 together. She helped put the hundreds and thousands and other sugar decorations on a plate, then I showed her how to roll the mixture into a ball then roll it in the decorations. After doing it alongside each other for a while (I initially wanted to do the messy bit myself but she said "They're mine, so I want to do it!"), I decided to trust her and let her do it all herself:

Surprisingly, I don't think much of the mixture ended up in her mouth, and they taste delicious!!!

Evacuation and rationing continues

Yesterday I began by showing Iona a BBC video I had borrowed from our Christian home education group: Children in the Second World War. I found it quite a good introduction to World War 2, but Iona, as ever, wanted to watch her CBeebies programmes instead. However, she became more interested as it played. It explained evacuation, which concept Iona appeared to grasp without worrying that it was going to happen to her (I kept reminding her that this happened a long time ago). It also talked more about rationing, and about air raids and the Blitz. Although Iona seemed to understand that it was all in the past, she didn't like seeing the bombs and burning buildings, so I fast-forwarded through that. I then suggested that we could make a pretend gas mask, using instructions I'd found online (sorry, can't remember where). However, she remained quite adamant that she really didn't want to do it, and I backed off as she seemed to be a bit worried by the idea of bombs.

To complement the learning about rationing I had bought a tin of Spam last week, so I suggested we grill slices of that for our sandwiches, as well as showing her a picture of one in "Food and Rations". Despite saying that she wouldn't like it, Iona found she really did! For a teatime pudding I found a parsnip pudding recipe in "Wartime Cookbook" which, despite sounding a bit weird, was actually a rather nice, chocolately blancmange-type pudding, although it didn't set well until it was cold. I also made a "crumb fudge" from Mum's old wartime recipe cuttings. It's not really like fudge, more like a chocolate refrigerator cake made with breadcrumbs, but Iona and I like it, and it certainly satisfies a chocolate craving.

Today our wartime learning was confined to attending a memorial service at our local park and war memorial, which was held today due to the local British Legion having commitments elsewhere tomorrow. Iona was adamant that she didn't want to wear (or colour in earlier) a poppy, but was interested in the old soldiers and enjoyed hearing the Last Post - she referred to it several times later.

I think our World War 2 project is now nearing its close, as Iona seems to have had enough, but I will try to encourage her to colour one of the poppy colouring pages I have printed out for her first.

India mini-book and rationing begins

Yesterday I went with Iona up to her bedroom to get her dressed, and while we were there she decided she wanted to look at her Disney's "Wonderful World of Knowledge" series that I keep out of her reach in her bedroom. She wanted to look at several of the books, but I tried to relate them all back to what we'd seen the day before about India. One of the volumes she looked at was about famous places, and I managed to find the Taj Mahal in it, so I told her about it and how it was made to show how much the Emperor Shah Jahan loved his wife. We then talked about how we show we love people.

To make a mini-book about India I drew an approximate diamond (about the shape of India) on a sheet of thin card folded into 4, and cut it out. On the cover I wrote India in dotted lines, which Iona was only too happy to write over. Inside I wrote pages about how Grandpa was in India during the 2nd World War, "It is hot", Indian food, saris, their flag and the Taj Mahal, with key words dotted for Iona to write over. She drew and coloured the sun, the Taj Mahal (with a bit of prompting to look at what there was, and not really recognisable), a sari-wearing lady, triangular (or not!) samosas and jalebi (with a suggestion of how to do it by scribbling). In addition, I suggested that she copy the Indian flag from "Celebrate! India". I asked her to draw a rectangle (which wasn't very rectangular!) then asked her to draw 2 lines across it. She started drawing it outside the rectangle, so I drew them. Then I asked her to draw a circle in the middle, which she did. After that I asked her to draw lots of little lines in the circle. I thought she would struggle with this, but she drew a tiny circle in the middle of the circle, and drew several spokes radiating from it, just like in the flag. I was so impressed!

Unfortunately I have had to give this complex, and probably not very good, description as I managed to drop our digital camera on Sunday night and it immediately stopped working, apparently for good. As I have mislaid my mobile phone, with built-in camera, my husband's won't download to a computer without the purchase of an expensive driver, and our scanner mysteriously stopped working a couple of years ago, it looks as if I'm going to have to do this blog photo-free for now!

Having completed our India mini-book yesterday, I moved on to the home front with Iona today, and explained about rationing. I began by pointing out that Britain is an island, surrounded by water. However, she wasn't very interested, preferring to use the blow-up globe for a game of catch! I decided to join in with that but gradually brought in what we previously read in "The World Came to My Place Today" about where our food comes from, and asked her to say where something came from each time she caught the ball. This worked to get her interest a bit, so I went on from that to say how the Germans stopped boats coming to Britain with foods like those we'd named. I looked with Iona through the book "Food and Rations", explaining some of the pictures as we came to them, particularly the posters of Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot, which she liked. I also showed her my Mum's old recipe book, featuring wartime recipes and several cuttings from newspapers of the Ministry of Food's wartime food tips. By now it was nearly lunch time, so I asked Iona to help me make a wartime recipe: cheese pudding (found in "Wartime Cookbook"), which she liked the sound of. She helped to break the eggs, grate the cheese and breadcrumbs, and mix it, and after cooking it we ate it with a small salad. All agreed that it was lovely and cheesy ('though it would have used the family's weekly cheese ration!).

While working and playing this morning, I played the CDs "Hits of the War Years" and "A V.E. Day Party", so that Iona got a feel for wartime music. She wasn't keen, but this was mainly because she wanted to put one of her children's DVDs on instead. I was able to get the CDs through our Central Library, who are selling off all their CDs, DVDs and videos cheap. This was very useful to me in the short-term, but I will be very sorry to see the service go, as it's so useful for projects like this, when I don't necessarily want to keep a particular album, but just want to expose Iona to different music.

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).

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!).

What's cooking?

I've managed to get Iona to do a bit of cooking this week, mainly by bringing it to her in the living room, rather than moving her into the kitchen where there are too many distractions such as the vegetable cupboard. Earlier in the week we reached the story of Jacob and Esau in our Bible studies, so I decided Iona could help me make a stew like Rebecca made for Jacob to give to Isaac. I explained to Iona what we'd be doing, and after washing the vegetables I sat with her and helped her (hand over hand) use a potato peeler to peel a parsnip and a swede. She agreed to help, on condition that she was able to eat small pieces of them as we went along (yes, believe it or not, she eats raw swede and parsnip!). She also watched me peel the carrots and chop all the veg. I then peeled an onion and showed her how I chopped it. Afterwards I cooked the veg with chicken stock, herbs, yellow lentils, and pearl barley in a slow cooker, adding dumplings towards the end. Iona really enjoyed eating it, and I kept reminding her of the Bible story as we cooked and ate it, reinforcing that we should be nice to other people, especially our family.

The next day we read the story of Jacob's ladder, and I got Iona to help me make biscuits (Iona stirred the mix several times for me). Again, I explained as I went along what I was doing. I then formed the biscuits into ladder shapes before baking them, so every time we had a biscuit we could talk again about Jacob's dream and how God promises to look after us. This seems to have made an impression, as yesterday Iona had been talking about dying then said "We're not going to die - I'm only joking! We can't die because Jesus is here."!

The idea for both these activities came from Denise Oliveri on Suite 101: http://www.suite101.com/content/jacob-and-esau-bible-lesson-ideas-a34454 .

Today I made hash for Iona and her daddy for lunch, and I asked if she'd like to help me prepare it again, to which she replied yes. Again, I brought everything into the living room, to stop her running wild around the kitchen. I got her to sit next to me on the settee, helped her hand over hand to hold the potato peeler, and helped her peel the potatoes. She was a bit nervous about hurting herself or me, especially later when I got her to help me slice the washed, topped and tailed leek, but accepted that if I helped her she wouldn't, and she again enjoyed eating the result.

May update.

So much has changed since the last entry I wrote. Iona has now turned 2, and had a lovely day, with a cake and presents at Mummy and Daddy's, then more cake, more presents, and her slightly younger cousin at Grandma and Grandad's. We started to prepare her for her birthday about a week before it, and she was soon able to say that her birthday was "Saturday" and that she'd be "2". She'd been singing "Happy birthday" already for a couple of weeks, and even now she keeps singing it to herself, which is OK apart from when it was one of her friend's birthdays this week!

Anyway, I tried doing some more baking with Iona this morning. I haven't tried for a while, as she always gets upset when she can't eat it rather than stir it! Well, we watched "I Can Cook" this morning, where Katie made honey tea loaf, so I promised Iona she could help me make a banana cake if she wanted. She was quite happy with this, and seemed to be looking forward to it, but lo and behold, by the time I'd got things sorted out to do it she was bored with it! Still, I managed to get her to stir it once, and she was very happy with the result, calling it "honey tea loaf"!

After our abortive attempt at cooking I gave in to Iona's requests to go into the garden. Nowadays when I tell her she needs to put her shoes on before she goes in the garden she goes straight to where her shoes are kept, which was quite a shock the first time she did it. I still haven't really got over how much she understands now. We put our shoes on and went into the garden. While I tidied it up a bit she disappeared back into the house and shortly after reappeared with one of her paints and a receipt she'd found - she was trying to get together the things she needed to do painting! I grabbed a paintbrush and a newspaper (figuring a receipt was a bit small for a toddler's painting!) and took them to her, and we had a really fun session with Iona painting the newspaper (and herself, of course!). I even managed to persuade her back inside without too many complaints by telling her the cake would be nearly ready and she'd be able to eat it. All in all, a very productive morning.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

The snow this year has been as thick as I've ever known it (I think it was this deep down south in '81). Consequently, I decided to concentrate less for the moment on the "Where do I live?" unit and improvise one on "Snow" (although I've not really planned it).

To begin with, I helped Iona make snowflakes out of pipe cleaners and wool, as we did last year at Sunshine Club. I twisted 3 pipe cleaners into a 6-pointed star, tied some white wool at the centre, then got Iona to help me wind it round and round them, tying it off at the top. After that, I squeezed PVA glue over it, and Iona shook blue glitter over it (while it was inside a box to reduce mess). She loved the shaking, and got upset when it was time to stop! The end result now hangs up in her bedroom, helping to make up for having to take the Christmas decorations down.

We have walked in the snow, with me explaining how the snow sounds and feels crunchy, and Iona has played a little in it, although at its thickest she didn't like falling on her hands and knees in the cold!

One of our most successful activities was making meringue snowflakes. I got the idea from the Disney FamilyFun website (http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/meringue-snowflakes-684262/), and while the mix was a bit too liquid to do more than simple 6-pointed star shapes, they were fairly easy to make, and very nice for us all to eat. Iona helped me to beat the egg whites (we don't possess a mixer, so it all had to be done by hand), and loved saying she was "mix"ing and also learning the word "whisk".

While doing this unit, I've taken the opportunity to expand Iona's counting from "one, two" to up to 6. She can't go beyond 3 yet, but it's been a good numeracy opportunity.

The unit has also gone well with the book I've started reading Iona at bedtime, which is a much simplified version of one of my all-time favourite books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The start of it features a lot of snow, so I'm able to refer her back to what we've seen and played in during the day.