School Time

Yesterday Iona decided that she wanted to play schools with her toys. It always amuses me how even home educated children who have never seen the inside of a school want to play it, but I guess it's just the number of TV programmes and books which feature it. Anyway, she told me I had to be the teacher, and told me exactly what to say to her toys, while she observed and moved them around. After a while of her toys being told off for being late for school I saw the perfect opportunity for a bit of impromptu learning, so brought down her cuddly toy clock with the hands set to 9:00 and asked her what time this was for the start of school. She insisted on changing the time, so after telling her the new time I drew this for her:

(the name of the village was Iona's idea). I then suggested we write a register of the toys' names to mark if they were there or not. She didn't quite get the idea, and insisted on writing a separate page for each toy, but it was all good practice in writing.

After a couple of hours of "school" I was tiring, so when Iona mentioned that she'd watched "The Mr Men Show" with Daddy in the morning (while I nipped to town to buy my brother's birthday present) I had another brainwave. I asked what Mr Man or Little Miss Iona might invent. She suggested Mr Food, so I explained that almost all the Mr Men have names which describe them, i.e. are adjectives. I drew my own invention:

(red cheeks courtesy of Iona) then Iona came up with her own, Mr Hungry:

I was pleased because, off the top of her head, Iona decided he would have an open mouth and crumbs on his chin, and then drew a tongue in too. She also quickly drew Miss Sun:

She copied "Miss" from my picture, but figured out "Sun" for herself (she still reverses z and s fairly often). She then drew another figure and told me it was Miss Bossy:

I think this comes from having read "How to Be a Friend" over lunchtime; we got it the other day from a charity shop and I've left it lying around, as Iona is currently struggling with whether she wants friends as she has to share with them! This "strewing" worked: I think Iona would have rebelled if I'd suggested she read it but she picked it up herself and let me read it all through to her, leading to some good, if short, discussions.

Finally, Iona decided to again write me a few notes in the evening. The first said this:

It took me a lot of time and miming from a silent Iona to finally figure out that it said "I've lost my voice"! OK, so there's room for work on spelling and separating words, but I love that she sees writing has a point and she's keen to try it all the time.

A is for ... part 2

As I said earlier, on Thursday we had an Astronaut Day, inspired by the fact that lately Iona has been very keen to go in a rocket. I told her she had to be fit to do that, so at least once a day now she runs around or does other "exercises" and says she's getting fit "so they let me in the rocket!". I didn't do as much preparation as I might have, but she seemed to enjoy the day. I encouraged her to dress in a pair of grey jogging trousers and a blue fleece, to look a little like an astronaut's casual wear. She had a croissant for breakfast, and I reminded her that she wouldn't be able to have that in a rocket, as the crumbs would float around due to the lack of gravity, and might break the rocket. After breakfast I went on the computer and found some NASA and European Space Agency logos, then made Iona some badges (using our printer, a laminator and some safety pins) and an ID badge:

While on the ESA site I let Iona have a look around, and there was a fun animation about a day in the life of an astronaut. We strapped ourselves into our imaginary rocket, ran through the safety checks, then counted down. I asked Iona where she'd like to go, and she chose Mars. When we "landed" I described how it was cold, and that the ground was red, then asked her what she could see. We practised a floaty, low gravity way of walking, and talked a bit more about space. She then said she wanted to go to the planet Crayon, which was what she had called the planet she'd decorated in her Charlie and Lola magazine earlier in the week, so we got back in our "rocket" and took off once more, to go there. Once there, she wanted me to be an alien, so I decided to talk only in alien bleeps and bloops and see if she was able to communicate with me. Surprisingly, with only a bit of sign language, she worked out that I was telling her to eat the imaginary biscuit she had asked me for, and was making significant attempts to understand my alien language. This was such a popular activity that several times yesterday and today I was also asked to be an alien, but I found it surprisingly hard work to keep up the bleeping!

In addition to our play-acting, Iona drew a picture of an astronaut, or "space lady", complete with helmet (and big hair!):

I also found a colouring picture of a female astronaut which I printed out for Iona, but she didn't show any inclination to colour it. I found some information about Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space), Christa McAuliffe (the first teacher in space, well nearly), and Helen Sharman (the first Briton in space) told Iona about them, printed out their photos and added them to her timeline. We read through "I'm Going to Be the Best Astronaut Ever", "Extreme Jobs: Astronauts" (well, selected highlights of it, as it's far too old for her), and Letterland's "Annie Apple's Adventure", which coincidentally includes an astronaut and a trip into space. The latter book was very popular, and she has asked for it to be read a couple of times since. It features lots of "a" words and has a good story line, rather than being driven solely by phonics.

By the end of the day we were both glad to come back down to Earth, although Iona still shows no sign of diminished enthusiasm for being an astronaut!

Letter of the Week: Alphabet Intro Week

One of my plans for this year is to help Iona develop her reading, using look-say (which is how I was taught when I was a year older than she is). As "Teach Your Baby to Read" (how I learned) seems a bit too structured for her I thought I might try Brightly Beaming Resources' Letter of the Week Preschool Curriculum. I liked the way this reinforces the letter being learned by introducing lots of different subjects beginning with that letter (e.g. apple, ambulance and Africa for "a"). Hopefully this will give enough variety over each week that she won't rebel and refuse to do anything I ask, like she did with lapbooking by the end of last year! The other thing that I particularly like about it is that it's free!!

In preparation, therefore, this week I decided to work through the Alphabet Intro Week. However, I've found that (possibly owing to my aversion to phonics!) we don't have many A,B,C books (I've just remembered a Dora one in her bedroom, so maybe we'll look at that tomorrow), and owing to the holidays I've not managed to get to the library this week. Consequently, I didn't really manage to start on the curriculum with Iona 'til today, when I decided we would try the activity Fishing for Letters. While Iona played with My First Starting to Read (that Father Christmas had found for her at a fayre last autumn) I cut 26 small fish shapes out of card, stuck a split pin in each (as we had no paperclips, but actually the pin makes a good eye) and wrote a letter on each in small case. I also tied a horseshoe magnet that Iona likes to play with onto a piece of string, and tied the other end onto a large bubble-blowing wand that we've had sitting around for a while. Voila - one magnetic letter fishing set.

Iona was quite interested, and happily came over to play. I fished a couple of letters off the floor and asked Iona what they were; she was easily able to say. She then had a go, although used her left hand to guide the magnet onto the letters. Once she started, she wanted to take all the turns herself, which was fine by me, so all I had to do then was listen to her read the letter. She confuses "p", "b", "d", and "q", and read "z" on its side as "N", but overall she did very well, both with letter names and sounds, and has some idea of what words might start with some letters, e.g. "snake" for "s". As time went on she changed the game to one where she picked up a fish with her hands, brought it to me upside down, and I had to guess what the letter might be. As she was still being exposed to letter names and sounds I went with the changes, and we carried on for maybe 10 minutes.

Tomorrow, if we get time around going to the Salvation Army and eating, I will hopefully read an alphabet book with Iona and play her on You Tube the Alphabet Song, which she loves. She also loves E Eats Everything, by They Might Be Giants, so I might show her that again, as well as trying out Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, of which I've heard great things.

Next week we move on to the curriculum proper, beginning with short "a". The Bible stories are supposed to be Adam and Eve, but I ended up doing them this week, so I might have to think of something else to do if she complains. Other subjects I'll hopefully do something about with her are apples, alligators, astronauts, animals, alphabet, ambulances, acrobats, Africa, addition, amphibians, America, and the Atlantic (I may also remind her about the Arctic, that we talked about when we looked at polar bears in November). I don't plan to be as structured as the curriculum is, with different subjects on different days, but rather try to nudge her to read some interesting books with me and maybe do a bit of colouring or craft (which she's really into). Wish me luck!!!

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).

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.