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!!!

Back to the Blog

Well, here I am again after another long break. However, the home education has not been on a break (hence not really enough time to keep up with the blog). Iona is getting on well with her reading and writing, although she claims not to be able to read. She has learned a lot of phonics from Alphablocks, especially the later episodes featuring graphemes such as "ai", "ph" and "ea", although sadly this is not so easily transferred to her writing, which uses a large amount of creative spelling!! She has also learned a lot of sight words, as she demonstrates when I ask her to read chapter headings in books that are new to her. Mostly she refuses to read herself, preferring me to do it for her, but occasionally she can be surprised into reading a few words or even short sentences, very often correctly.

We haven't been doing a great deal of maths lately, just talking about it as it comes up. Iona loves using our retracting metal tape measure whenever she can to measure things, especially the heights of ceilings. She also occasionally asks me to help her to count up beyond 20 - she is still getting stuck on the multiples of tens. I am hoping this will improve now that we have bought an abacus from a charity shop. We also sometimes discuss addition and subtraction (and more rarely, multiplication and division) as story problems, which I then translate into more standard arithmetical statements, mostly verbally but sometimes on paper with the appropriate symbols, and she is definitely starting to get the hang of this. Until recently I would have said that she didn't understand the concepts of odd and even, but this changed a couple of weeks ago. When possible, I had been pointing out how house numbers on one side of a road jumped up in 2's, and explaining about odd and even numbers. Then, one day, she was playing with her set of number skittles (1 to 10) and I found she had arranged them perfectly in 2 rows, odd and even! She has also been learning coin value, from being allowed to keep any coins we find on the ground, providing she can identify them, and saving up money to make small purchases. Occasionally I find myself worrying a bit that she isn't learning as much maths as her schooled peers, but on the positive side, she is getting a feel for why maths is as it is, rather than just having to learn seemingly random facts, and she hasn't learned to fear maths, as I did at primary school.

I think Iona's greatest learning has occurred in her area of greatest interest: art. I'm sure I wasn't as good at drawing and colouring at her age as she is. She is a great fan of the Studio Ghibli animations of Hayao Miyazake, and was thrilled to get 2 of his DVDs and 2 of the story books from her uncles for her 6th birthday last week. She has borrowed a how-to book on drawing Manga from the library, and occasionally works at copying it, although is handicapped by wanting to do her own thing rather than following instructions. She has also become very keen on Spongebob Squarepants, and has been drawing very good, detailed pictures of the characters and settings on this. Her biggest problem in this whole area is a lack of concentration; otherwise she could easily win colouring competitions. I am currently considering, having recently bought a couple of historical era craft books, how I can teach her history using as many crafts as possible, as I think this may fire an interest in her. (I currently record Horrible Histories onto our TiVo box but she rarely wants to watch them.)

Viking and lichens

Last week and this we have been learning about the letter V. Iona has been aware of the Vikings for a while now, since seeing them on Mike the Knight on CBeebies, and we already had them on our hallway timeline, so I suggested we learn more about them now. We looked through some books from the library: Vikings (Read It Yourself), Vikings (Children in History), and DK's Eyewitness Vikings, although Iona sometimes found the pictures a bit scary. Consequently, I emphasised the more peaceful aspects, such as clothes and children's games. I also decided yesterday to help her make her equivalent of a Viking warship, decorated with various craft items to look as scary as she could to any enemies (in Iona's case, the Moshi Monster baddies, C.L.O.N.C.). In this way I thought I could emphasise why the ships might have looked so scary, i.e. to try to scare off enemies without having to fight. This approach seemed to work, as she threw herself into the task with enthusiasm, even creating quite a scary figurehead:

Iona doing her "scary Viking" face for the camera!

Then in the afternoon we went off to our local library for storytime. Iona has taken an interest in lichens on the path and walls for about a year now, so when I saw that Handbook of Nature Study was doing a Lichen and Moss study this month I decided to focus some of our walking time on that. We found a couple of different mosses on walls, and Iona enjoyed stroking them:

We also talked about the differences between moss (cushiony and make spores) and lichen (flat and no spores).

Letterland and arty pursuits

It's been a long while again since my last post, partly because I've been too busy with Iona to put anything on here, and partly because of work I've been putting into the small charity I founded and run with my brothers (Chreda). Iona has been busily working through her letter of the week curriculum, and is now keen to suggest things we can study beginning with certain letters, e.g. sweets when we were doing "s"! I've found the Letterland series of books particularly useful to "introduce" her to each letter (although she's very confident with the main letter sounds now), and I've been able to both borrow them from our home education group's resource library and buy some from charity shops, as well as getting some (like this) from Amazon. Iona has the sort of brain that loves to work in stories, so this system is ideal, giving her a story behind why, for example, s and h together make a sh sound. She is slowly getting more confident at sounding out words, and recognising more words, although she does not do much writing and when she does prefers to do it her own, artistic, way!

We hadn't put in much work until recently on her wish to make an animated film. However, I had downloaded the Android app Clayframes Lite onto my Samsung Galaxy phone a couple of weeks ago, so I told her about it on Monday and asked if she'd like to try it. As she was very keen,  I made some playdough, using the recipe here, She wanted to make an animated cartoon hippo like Harry on Abadas, so I gave her some help to do so. The biggest problem was that the dough, though a very nice texture, doesn't stick to itself very well, and was also a bit soft to support a large, fairly heavy model. I think next time we do claymation we'll have to use one of the other recipes on the site. Unfortunately the lite version of clayframes only gives you 50 frames, so it had to be a very short animation, but it was sufficient to give Iona a feel of how we create the illusion of motion, and she managed to get in her favourite "bottom dance", as well as a bit of a story, with the crocodile attacking the hippo then apologising and making friends. Apologies for the fumbling around at the start of the film: the lite version of the app doesn't allow for sharing (and my account won't let me buy the full version), so I had to film my phone.

The message on the hearts at the end was Iona's idea: Love is great!

Once we had finished making our little film Iona decided to turn the rest of the playdough into a very tasty-looking white chocolate chip cake, using chips that I'd got left from an experimental soap carving session the other week:

A little later the same day Iona spontaneously decided, while I was cooking, that she wanted to make a scene like she had seen on Mr Maker earlier in the day. She found an old receipt which she scrunched up to make a mountain, asked me for a piece of blue paper, collected some greenery from the garden, and ... hey presto! ... a landscape!

It may not look much, but I was impressed as it's the first time I can remember Iona trying on her own to copy any craft activities from the TV.

Welcome 2013

Happy New Year, as Iona insisted on saying to everyone she passed in Asda yesterday! We had some discussion just before the New Year about New Year's Resolutions (or goals, as I prefer). I decided Iona was now old enough to have some input into her own goals, so I asked her what she wanted to do this year. She came up with the following list:

1. Make magazines every day! (She got very "into" doing that last year.)
2. Make a film.
3. Learn to read and write. (She wasn't sure about this one at first, but I pointed out that she's already started, and it would be easier for her if she could play on Moshi Monsters without me having to read everything out to her.)

The second goal was prompted by a suggestion from me, as she has invented a character to tell stories about and has already made a set of "puppets" by drawing on lolly sticks. I figured a film would make a nice project for her, although it'll be a learning process for me too, as I know next to nothing about film-making. It will cover a range of skills and knowledge, so is an ideal home education activity.

Step one began today, with showing Iona how to make a simple animation by drawing on consecutive pages of a notepad. It wasn't too successful from my point of view, as it was hard work both knowing what to draw (my idea of her character waving, winking and walking from one side of the pad to the other), and having the patience to do lots of small steps. However, Iona was really taken with the result and although she couldn't really flick the pad correctly herself, insisted on me keeping on doing so. I did take a photo of the first page, which she coloured in very carefully and colourfully, but am unable to post it here, as she informed me that then people would know about her character and it wouldn't be a surprise when the film is made, so you'll all just have to wait for the finished product!

I explained that the video we had watched at her request earlier today, "Classic Christmas Cartoons" (featuring 1940's cartoons such as this), was made using a similar technique, with individual cells photographed then playing very quickly one after another to look like movement. I told her that several of her other favourite works, "Frankenweenie" and Wallace and Gromit, were made using a different technique, called claymation, and tried to explain how that worked, while other films are now animated using computers. We then had a lucky coincidence that Blue Peter today was a special about animation, so I watched that with her, which explained claymation far better than I had been able to. By this time she was busy playing on the computer and didn't pay the TV too much attention, but did look at particular bits when I pointed them out to her.

Overall, today seemed a fairly successful start to her film project. As I'm not allowed to show today's picture, here, instead, is a photo from over Christmas to show how much Iona has grown up over the 6 or so months since I last posted:

WebRep

Overall rating

This site has no rating

(not enough votes)

WebRep

Overall rating

This site has no rating

(not enough votes)

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).