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.

Spring is in the Air

Work has continued on Iona's "Kings" project. We've been watching the BBC Schools video on "Tudors and Stuarts" (this is the corresponding book), although Iona's not been too interested in it. We've also continued to read in her children's Bible about the kings of Israel, and as part of that I decided to make a model of King Solomon's temple with her. I'll post a photo of it on here when it's finished, but so far we've been painting a couple of boxes. It's been hard to find some good, thick, but cheap, gold paint, so we've currently given it a coat of brown, yellow and very thin gold mixed together.

These past few days spring really appears to have sprung, with sunny, almost warm days. That being so, I decided Iona and I should get outside to do some painting this afternoon. I'd tried getting her to start painting the "temple" a few days ago sat at her table in the house, but I can never really relax then, as after a few minutes of painting properly ahe invariably decides to enlarge her efforts to include decorating her surroundings! Sure enough, after Iona had been painting the "temple" and I had hung out the washing, I returned to her to find her hands were lovely and brown. However, with her in her oldest, paintiest clothes, and sat out on the lawn, I didn't need to worry, and could enjoy watching her experiment, firstly with her model, and then with 4 sheets of sugar paper. She used 4 different colours and 4 different brushes, and of course all of the brushes went into all of the paint pots. I expected the paint to end up a muddy brown, but, surprisingly, it made all sorts of rainbow patterns within the paint splodges. Iona is becoming more sophisticated when painting, trying, for example, the effect of stamping the sponge sideways onto the paper. She's been noticing the red noses around recently for Comic Relief (probably the subject of our next unit study), and having painted some red marks on one sheet declared they were red noses!

My last discovery this afternoon was that a bucket of very hot, soapy water outside the door is a godsend for washing brushes, paint pots, and little girls' hands before they go into the house and grab everything in sight.

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!

Mother's little helper

In recent weeks my little girl has undergone another huge change and, turning around, we suddenly notice she is different! Previously, she liked to investigate everything, such as the full shopping bags after a shopping trip, but mainly to play with them and generally cause chaos. However, she now loves to think she's helping us (even when she's not!), and is keen to find ways to do so. Yesterday, after I had been shopping and was beginning to unpack the shopping trolley she appeared in the kitchen and before I knew it was behind me, holding a sweet potato out to me. Rather than asking her to leave things alone, as we've often had to do, I asked her to put it in the vegetable cupboard. Wonder of wonders, she did!! (She knows where the veggies live, as she's always going into the cupboard when I'm in the kitchen, trying to get vegetables out, so I wondered if she'd be distracted and start playing with them again, but she didn't.) We were able to continue in this way to the bottom of the trolley, with me telling Iona where to put each item she got out, and her doing so (although I had to open the fridge door for her, as it's heavy). I was really impressed both with her focus on helping and her memory of where things went.

The same has been true of Iona helping us in other ways lately. Once, a few weeks ago, she found our feather duster and started running it along surfaces, saying she was dusting, and she often picks up the tool that we use for getting dog hair off the carpet and wipes it along the carpet, saying she's hoovering. She also went in the garden yesterday, picked up an old broom head, and rubbed it over the wet path, saying she was cleaning because her friend was coming! My question now is, how do I capitalise on this desire to help? Invariably, if I ask her to help with anything, she doesn't want to! I'd like to do like so many other families seem to and have set chores (simple, of course) for her to do, such as helping with the washing up (which she did with me once), both to improve her skills and to get her into good habits of looking after herself, but she seems to just be at that age of non-cooperation. Of course, it probably doesn't help matters that both David and I tend to do housework whenever we feel like it (or when it's desperate!), rather than at set times, so maybe it's hoping for a bit much that Iona would be any different!!

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.

Teach Your Baby to Read

My attempts to teach Iona reading have been derailed somewhat this week, since she learned 5 words. On Thursday I had to travel a considerable distance by bus for my heart check-up, so I was gone from 10 in the morning to 8.15 at night (thankfully the doctors are very happy with my progress). It gave me a chance to do a lot of reading and writing up of notes from a book I'd borrowed from our home educators' group library ("The Little Book of Fun on a Shoestring" http://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Book-Fun-Shoestring-Activities/dp/1905019475/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295128624&sr=1-13), but no time at all to do anything with Iona. Yesterday my husband was having minor surgery as a day patient, so I had plenty of time to do things with her, but when I tried to read through the word flash cards with her she decided to be silly and mess around with them. The same had happened on Wednesday, so we ended up doing no real reading for 3 days. The joys of trying to teach 2-year-olds to read, I suppose!

I tried asking her today if she wanted to do some reading. The first time she wouldn't really concentrate on it, again, so I just asked her to recognise, rather than remember, words. In other words, I presented her with the 3 body part words and asked which said "hand", which "foot" and which "knee", followed by doing the same for "Mummy" and "Daddy". This is easier to achieve, so provides less evidence of learning, but it tends to be more successful when she is struggling to concentrate (she was quite tired today having stayed up worrying about bad dreams til 10 last night). Anyway, she correctly identified all 5 words in that way. Then, this afternoon, I tried again to get her to read them. This time she did so, 'though saying silly things like "Mummyknee" for knee and "Mummyfoot" for foot. She's obviously still enjoying it, though, as she wanted me to go through them again with her immediately afterwards.

Bible study has also been a little less successful this week. We have continued to read the Bible with her every day, but on 2 occasions it has been my husband who has done so, making it a little harder for me to work with her from that. We looked at hospitality when we read about the angels visiting Abraham to tell him about Sodom, and I asked her to help me make biscuits as Sarah made dinner for the angels. When we read about Isaac's birth being promised, I emphasised that God told Abraham his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, and that God keeps his promises. As a craft activity I used an idea from Toddler Activities at Home (http://www.toddler-activities-at-home.com/abraham-and-sarah-crafts.html) and made a star mobile with Iona to hang in her bedroom. I made 10 stars from card and covered them with foil (Iona was supposed to help with this but was more interested in unwrapping them and the glue turned out to be quite hard to use). I then tied string to them and hung them from a strip of corrugated card which I covered with paper on which I wrote "God promised Abraham as many descendants as there are stars" on one side and "God keeps his promises" on the other. Iona was able to learn the latter and repeat it after me, so I know she's taken in at least one thing!

Father Abraham

Work with Iona on her morning Bible studies continues. We have now begun studying the story of Abraham. We spent a couple of days looking at God's call to him, which was quite hard to find online resources about. I emphasized how Abraham trusted God, who looked after him, as well as telling her the simplified story of how we moved to our current house before she was born. In addition, we played a little bit at travelling. Yesterday and today we read and talked about Abraham giving Lot the choice of where to move to. That was a little easier to find resources for, but there still wasn't much about, especially as she seems to be a lot less careful about colouring in the last week, possibly because I've given her too many sheets lately. We talked about sharing, and I demonstrated fair sharing with some sweets she was eating. I also followed the suggestion of http://www.theheights.org/preschool_lessons/b/B2-Abe-3.pdf and did an activity with Iona sorting coloured bricks, as Abraham and Lot had to sort their flocks and herds. This gave her a bit of practice in an important maths skill, and I found she could do it quite easily - so much so, in fact, that she got distracted partway through and insisted on building with the bricks instead!

Moving on from Bible study, we have also continued to practise with the reading flashcards. Introducing "knee" threw her at first, but by today she seemed to have some idea of which was which out of that and "hand" so I asked her if she wanted to learn another word. She said yes, so I showed her the flashcard for "foot". I don't know if that's too soon, as I wanted her to overlearn each word, to give them the best chance of "sticking". However, it's a fine balance between that and her getting bored of doing the same old words, so I took the chance, and she was very happy to be taught another word. We'll have to see how she does with recognising it tomorrow.

Mr Noah built an ark

Work with Iona on her morning Bible reading is going really well. Yesterday and the day before we read the story of Noah and the flood, and I decided to make a lapbook with her. I was amazed how much we got done in a short time. She enjoyed colouring pictures of Noah:

(page from Lilliput Station http://www.hslaunch.com/mypage/downloader.php?file=userfiles/100/87127475612.pdf&id=704).

The colouring picture of Noah came from Christian Preschool Printables (http://www.christianpreschoolprintables.com/Pages/Noah/NoahArkColoring.html).

The minibook telling the story of Noah came from Lapbook Lessons (http://lapbooklessons.com/files/LapbookingFIles/BibleABC/Noah/NA4.pdf). They also had a layer book for practice measuring animals, but the link to this appeared to be broken, so I drew it myself. Iona received a ruler for Christmas as part of a present from someone at church, and had appeared somewhat interested in what it was, so I used this activity to demonstrate to her how to use a ruler to measure. I first asked her which animal was tallest; she said the elephant, but I showed her how the giraffe was taller. I then asked which was next tallest, and she said the elephant. Next I asked which was smallest, which she answered correctly, and likewise for the next smallest. Having put the animals in order, I put the ruler alongside the line next to each animal and helped her to read the nearest number. To begin with she seemed a little rusty on reading numbers, but soon got back into the swing of it.

The other minibook on this double page also came from Lilliput Station. I used it to document how we made rainbow shaped animals (Iona coloured them while I cut them out and assembled them) and Noah for Iona to play out the story. The animals were printed from MakingLearningFun.com (http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/RainbowShapeAnimals.htm).

On the next page I used some of the leftover printed animal heads from the rainbow animals to put inside a folded ark shape. I got the idea from Bible Kids Fun Zone (http://biblekidsfunzone.com/onlinestore/adnoahsark.html) but was not able to print it out as I am not a member. I liked this craft as it was reinforcing the message I was trying to teach Iona from the first half of the story.

The song on the next page was one I was taught when my Mum taught me in Sunday School:

Mr Noah built an ark.

The people thought it such a lark!

Mr Noah pleaded so,

But into the ark they would not go.

And the rain came down in torrents x3

And only 8 were saved.

Iona enjoyed me singing that to her, and demanded I sing it many times.

On the next page we completed a sequencing activity I found at Bible Story Printables (http://www.biblestoryprintables.com/BiblePrintablesNoah.html). Iona wasn't really concentrating, so needed some prompting from me, but she managed to put some of the pictures in the right order. On the opposite page is a water cycle wheel which I found with great difficulty using people's posts on Lapbook Lessons. The address is http://www.epa.state.il.us/kids/fun-stuff/water-cycle/wheel-part-1.html. Iona coloured it in a little and I explained to her about water falling as rain, running along rivers, and into the sea, although I rather glossed over the last step. She was quite interested, although as we had watched on "Come Outside" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/comeoutside/) that morning about the sewer system she thought that water from rivers flowed into the sewer!

Finally we talked a little about rainbows, although not too much as Iona already knows the colours from one of her other favourite programmes, "Show Me, Show Me" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/showmeshowme/). I drew a rainbow and coloured it in, then drew another for Iona to colour. I labelled it with the 2nd day's lesson - God keeps his promises - and Iona kept saying "God promises me" as she "coloured in" the writing (translation: coloured over it so it became illegible!).

I also taught her another song my Mum had taught me in Sunday School:

When you see a rainbow, remember God is love x2

Yes, God is love x2

When you see a rainbow, remember God is love.

This was even more popular than the other song, and I had great difficulty persuading Iona to let me stop singing it!