In your image...

This week we've started our mystery of history curriculum again. Lychee is now old enough to join in and get something from it, which makes it a whole lot easier than it was last time around!

To be honest, we stopped because we moved house and taking our timeline off the wall meant we would have to reconstruct everything we'd done and I couldn't face doing it at the time. Starting again means rebuilding slowly, which is a lot more manageable. 

Today the children are using play doh to create men in their own image... Which quickly descended into creating their own "beasts of the field" and "birds of the air".  Cosmo is enjoying it so much more having a sibling to encourage creativity. First time around he wanted to make everything look perfect, exactly like a real person. 

Second time around, with a little encouragement from his sister, he's created a six legged, long necked, mammal that swims and has a number on its back which changes each year to tell you how old it is. 

I love how they inspire each other and learn from each other in ways that I couldn't teach. 

Family learning is the best! 

Simple things

We've been super busy the last few weeks, with surf school, ice skating, swimming lessons, parties and more; sometimes it's really nice just to slow down. 

A friend brought us a box of wooden counters that a school she works at were throwing out. The children love them. We are spending a morning making pictures whilst we listen to an audiobook. 

Cosmo is making a suspension bridge. Lychee is making people. 

They are so happy and chilled out. 

This is the side of home ed that I love most. Just quiet playing together. It's always the simplest toys that bring out the most inventive games and inspire the most creativity. 

South Africa!

We've had an amazing Easter holiday in South Africa visiting family, but it's also been a crazy fun learning experience.

dissecting fruits and seeds

It turns out that Little Lychee had no idea lions and elephants were real animals (she had imagined them to be like dragons and fairies) so that was a big surprise; and it was the first trip that both children can remember flying on an aeroplane.

Some of my favourite home ed experiences though have to the children collecting and dissecting seed pods, just to see what was inside, and then googling to find out what they were (admittedly because they wanted to know if they were edible). They loved trying out all the new fruits that we hadn't really seen in England - even though several of them were the same, they just look different because of the climate they grow in. A green grapefruit that's three times the size of any grapefruit you've seen before is essentially a new fruit to a four year old and a seven year old.


Another favourite was recreating a game park with sticks and leaves, and then building a house for little animals like geckos, complete with a braii and benches outside of it.

Gecko shelter

Mini game park with watering hole

Excitingly Cosmo took it on himself to write a travel diary, journalling what we did each day, so that he could share it with his cousins when he got home. This is a great achievement for someone who generally dislikes written work. 

It was also really interesting to watch the children at a bird park we went to in Montecasino. Obviously Little Lychee loved all the pretty birds and wanted to collect their feathers for her collection. Cosmo on the other hand, barely gave them a glance. He wanted to read the signs at each enclosure carefully, more than once, to learn the facts about each bird, then he was ready to go. Personally I feel that he could have got that information from a book, so it seems an odd thing to do at the park, but he was happy and thought it was a great trip. Just goes to show, you never can tell what your child is going to find interesting until you let them decide for themselves!

You can click on the video below to see more photos of our adventures.

Making Chocolates

 We had a great time making raw chocolates this morning and can't wait to taste them a little later on when they've set. We even made our own instructional video to share for Lychee to earn a DIY skill for her 'Chef' badge.  You can watch the video below:

Valentines Activity

 Looking for a fun activity for valentines day? How about learning to make genuinely healthy, organic and fairly traded chocolate? That's what we are going to be doing. I'm told it's easy enough for the kids to join in with too.

You could also do a study on fair trade, it's a little early (fair trade fortnight starts on the 23rd of February) but personally I think they've missed a trick because everyone will be marketed nasty commercial not fairly traded chocolate for valentines day without giving it a second though just nine days earlier.

The fair trade website has tonnes of free resources aimed at all age groups which look great and I will definitely be looking at these both with the teenagers I work with and my own two.

And if you are looking for links to buy the ingredients you need, you can find them at the bottom of yesterday's post on my other blog. :-)

Making Candy

We made our own 'pulled taffy' the other week using pure honey and just adding a few essential oils for flavour and it was so fun! I'll be honest, my kids did not particularly like how it felt on their hands, but I had a lot of fun and they were so proud of their finished products.

If you want to have a go it is super easy. Just boil some honey with a candy thermometer until it reaches 140c for at least five minutes. Then tip it out on a non-stick sheet and use spatulas to move it around until it's cool enough to touch.

At this stage you need to grease your hands with butter and then you just pull and fold, incorporating as much air as you can. When it's only barely warm add a few drops of your favourite essential oils (we used, peppermint in one batch, lemon in another, orange in a third and left one plain). Essential oils are volatile, so it's best to add them as cool as you can get away with if you want the flavour to last.

When you've twisted and pulled as much as you can and the candy is pretty hard, you can cut it into shapes, wrap it in waxed paper and store in the fridge.

Even though they didn't like getting messy (there were tears over butter on hands) the kids enjoyed watching the process and learning how candy was made.

The second time we made some honeycomb. I adapted this recipe I found, but boiling the honey again, but I added a mix of 50:50 bicarbonate of soda and ascorbic acid (vitamin C powder). The acid in the vitamin C ensured we got a good reaction from the baking soda and we had a slightly chewier than I'd have liked honeycomb. I think next time I need to boil the honey a little longer.

Still, the kids really liked this one. 

Community Tree Trust

Lychee went for a play date with a friend today, and Cosmo went to an activity day with the community tree trust organised by our home ed co-op.

He's had so much fun, taking plant cuttings, building scarecrows, identifying nuts, pressing apple juice and so much more. He particularly enjoyed learning how the storm kettles work (like a chimnea with a water jacket).

Here's the video:

Our musical garden

Behind the scales I built last week there's a secret passage that led to a massive compost heap. 

We dug all the compost out and used it to build our raised beds, but it left us with a massive crater that was just begging to become a play space. 

A few xylophones and some tambourines later and we have what the kids are calling their 'musical den'. 

All that was needed was a little fishing wire for hanging some cheap plastic instruments.

And a screw driver to remove some of the fun parts from said plastic instruments.

And the best part is that now all the noisy play can happen in the garden making our home a much more peaceful place ;-)

Art and maths

Yesterday was sunny and my kids got excited about having an 'art' lesson outside.

The only problem is, I had planned to do maths. 

Problem was easily solved though, because it turns out, if you think about it carefully enough, art and maths overlap quite a lot. 

First lesson was pattern recognition. Cosmo loves patterns, but lychee has struggled with being able to repeat a pattern in the past. 

With a bit of help though, we coloured in a huge area of paving slabs using chalks in a repeated rainbow pattern and talked a bit about colour theory (primary colours blending through secondary colours... etc...)

Cosmo helpfully brought up colour temperature too, so we discussed that briefly, because this term our co op is focussing on light, so I figure wavelengths will be worth knowing a little about. 

Then we made a giant number line, by writing one number on each paving slab of our path. I used our 'mathematical reasoning' book and had the kids work out exercises by running along the line instead of drawing arcs on a page. 

It all went pretty well, and there was also some fun naughty and crosses, pictures of hearts and people's names scribbled around. 

Who knew you could fill an entire day, just playing with chalk? 

Drawing Lessons For Kids

I recently picked up a book called 'Drawing with Children: A Creative Teaching and Learning Method That Works for Adults Too' by Mona Brookes and it is fantastic! 

She gives examples of the differences in children's drawings with 20 minutes of tuition, an hour of tuition etc... and it's really hard to believe. In all honesty I thought the pictures might be a little exaggerated.

I was wrong. 

But let me take you back a little. Initially, despite my concerns that the pictures were probably 'enhanced' by adults, I really liked reading the first chapter on how to conduct a drawing lesson. Simple things like pointing out symptoms of visual fatigue helped me realise why cosmo can do twenty math sheets with 40 questions on, but struggles to complete one with 100 (the font is too small). 

This week I asked Lychee if she wanted to do her own lesson with mummy. We spent all of approximately three minutes with her completing a drawing exercise from the book. I was actually quite impressed with her ability to copy. I've never asked her to before, so she usually just scribbles. 

Here is what she produced (mine in black, hers in yellow).

Not bad for a two year old, right?

She then went on to do her first ever recognisable drawing. It's a picture of her cousin.

I'm not going to pretend I knew who it was, but it is definitely a face! 

More interesting, is that since then, with no prompting, she has started colouring inside the lines. So when we made Daddy this card for Father's day, she would usually just scribble over my writing and picture. She took great pains this time to keep inside the heart.

Not only that, but she was able to draw X marks for kisses under her name. 

Both my kids, after a few minutes of 'teaching' went on to spend hours and hours the next day drawing hundreds of pictures using the symbols from the exercises we had done the day before. Their enthusiasm for drawing this week has been incredible. 

If anyone is wondering whether or not to buy this book, I highly recommend it. 

Illustrating a Book

I have a hard time getting Cosmo to enjoy art work, but this project grabbed his attention immediately.

We had picked up an exercise book that has blank space at the top of the page and lines for writing underneath. I'd hoped he might like to write a story book or something, but he had an even better idea. 

'Let's make a book to teach my cousins about Shavuot and we can give it to them!'

Awesome. 

He wasn't keen on the idea of doing the writing himself, he didn't think they'd be able to read it, so I agreed to do that part if he helped me remember how the story went. We ended up using a video to remind us from YouTube - how did people homeschool before google? 

His illustrations are brilliant and I'm so pleased he had the confidence to do it. 

We are going to take the book around to his cousins this afternoon so they can enjoy it this evening. 

Happy holidays! 

Weapons training

It's not as bad as it sounds, honest!!!

It's half term, and whilst the school we live in is closed for two weeks, my husband has some family commitments and a school trip to morocco which mean we only have a couple of days together :0(

Still, there's enough time to do a few fun things, including some planting and building a bow and arrows to play with.

Cosmo has been so proud of the bow and arrow he and daddy built and they've had great fun shooting it.

Cosmo general update

Since we've been doing the GAPS diet we've seen massive improvements in Cosmo's behavior, temperament and ability to express emotion. It's sometimes a little heartbreaking, 'I will feel very lonely and sad if I play by myself', but not manipulative - he is just getting genuinely better at expressing what he is feeling, labelling emotions and telling us about them before they explode into rage. 

Last week we were on holiday up in Cumbria, and some friends had some lego that they got out for him to play with. Lego a few months back was a massive source of frustration for him. He just could not get the parts to click together and very quickly ended up in tears. 

However, thanks to improvements in his fine motor skill he was happily making all kinds of models, including police cars carrying flags - for the Olympic parade apparently (he went with his daddy to watch a few events and loved it. In fact we ended up hosting our own re-enactment of the medals ceremony several times back home).

I was super impressed with the development in his fine motor, but I hadn't realised the extent of it until we got home. My husband decided to work on an Octonauts magazine with him, and although he was mostly using stickers, he coloured in a picture of a 'crafty cuttlefish' so neatly that I nearly accused his daddy of doing it for him! Six months ago he couldn't hold a pen properly, now he writes, colours in the lines and colour specific details (like each leg a different colour - because he knows that cuttelfish can change colours to camouflage).

This may not sound like much to those of you with children who have been scribbling on everything since before they could talk, but for us it's a huge breakthrough; I'm just so excited for him. 

Free Resources

We have been plodding along with various things this term, and whilst I enjoy following whatever subject Cosmo is interested in at the time, I feel like we could probably start introducing a small amount more structure next term.

Although he thrives on being able to follow his own ideas of what he wants to study, poor Lychee rarely gets a say in what we are doing and I feel like until she is verbal enough to ask questions or make it clear what she wants, it would be nice to follow something that progresses - rather than changing topic on a whim.

I found this amazing FREE resource today called Lesson Pathways and I think it is going to be so useful to us.

Okay, so the video is a little annoying, but I genuinely love the resources they've put together. It's great to be able to jump in when you have some free time with the children and not be worrying about what to do next - just click on the next lesson and you are good to go. 

I especially like the language arts section for Cosmo. Although he is very good at reading fluently, his comprehension could use some work, and I'm not sure he understands grammar. Having the groundwork done for me makes a huge difference. 

Speaking of having the groundwork done for  you, I've also been using Homeschoolshare.com a lot recently. It turns out Cosmo LOVES lapbooking, especially as you can choose just about any topic and there is a unit study for it. Volcanoes and Tsunami's are his topic of choice right now, and whilst the resources are in an easy to use format and even a four year old can understand them, his vocabulary and knowledge in that subject area now rivals his daddy's GCSE classes.  

The best part about lapbooking for me is that there is a LOT of cutting and gluing, and laying out on the page, involved. Although I do the vast majority of the cutting, he does practice with his plastic scissors, he uses the hole punch, and (although he often finds it frustrating) he is getting better at using the pritt stick. Art is something I've struggled to get him excited about, but combining some of these skills with topics he's interested in (rather than just art for arts sake) has led to much more successful mastery of these skills.  

Our Top 10 Things to do in the Snow

Okay, so yesterday I told you we took the day off to play in the snow.

We are doing pretty much the same thing today, but it's still pretty educational, so here is our list of fun, but productive, things to do on a snow day.

1. Talk about precipitation - obvious, but I thought I'd get it out of the way first. We talked about different types of precipitation and a little on the water cycle.
2. Talk about the structure of ice and how it behaves under pressure - this was a recap for us as we looked at it only a short time ago during our rock candy experiments. Skating on ice is a fantastic visual example of ice under pressure.
3. Talk about freezing points/melting points - and temperature in general. Cosmo is very excited to be able to tell people it must be warmer than 0c because he can see that the ice is melting into puddles.
4. Sledge - but use lots of different things to sledge on. Discuss which are best and what materials/properties make them good for sledging. If your kids are a little older you could do some physics experiments, timing them, measuring the distance, working out velocity etc... but mine are still a little young for that.
5. Run around and throw snow at each other - it's good exercise and improves hand eye co-ordination as well as helping with judging distances.
6. Build an igloo and/or snow cave - We didn't have enough snow to do it this time, but next time we definitely will. It's the perfect opportunity to talk about another culture and about the insulating properties of the snow.
7. Make Snow Ice-Cream - there's some great recipes here. I'm pretty sure following a recipe counts as educational.
8. Make Snow Candy - Get yourself some maple syrup (approximately one cup) add some sugar (half a cup-ish) and boil it. Pour it over some (clean) snow and you have made little snow candies. Kids love them, but be careful, super hot, super sticky, syrup and kids is not a great combo. The candies however, YUMMY! I'm not entirely sure about the educational value aside from minor measuring, but it's still fun to do.
9. Look at snow flakes close up - preferably with a microscope. Talk about their individuality and design.
10. Track Animals - this was by far and away Cosmo's favourite activity for the snow. We looked at animal footprints and tried to guess what animals could have made them. We found; rabbits, dogs, birds, people, deer and cats.

So what did you get up to in the snow?

This post is linked up at No Ordinary Blog Hop

The enchanted sculpture trail

We love stanwick lakes, it's one of our favourite places to go, and I'm so glad we were introduced to it early on when we moved here.

As members, they send us emails when they are doing something fun, and this weekend they were making a new installation for the enchanted sculpture walk called 'mosaic trees'.

It involved cutting and gluing little tiles all over the thinner parts of the tree, which were going to be grouted later.

It also had some sections where you took a hammer and chisel

Cut out a small square

Glued

And pressed in a tile

To make a cute little window-type thing

Cosmo was nervous at first, and just watched for a long time, but then he was keen to get on and have a go whilst I finished off tiling a bit further up.

And we couldn't have a trip to stanwick lakes without a quick loop of the adventure trail

Will loves climbing to the top of this rock and then leaping off into his daddy's arms.

That's faith!

Talking and double dice: general update

There have been leap and bounds in the Gracie household this last month, and with it being a new year, it seemed like a good time to do a general update.

Over Christmas Lychee learned to walk and has become more and more steady on her feet over the last few weeks, but more importantly her speech is massively improving.

Our silent little girl, who never uttered a sound unless she was crying, has been happily babbling away recently. Her new words include Cosmo's real name, 'Bubble', 'yummy', 'oh no', 'tiger', 'teddy', 'fish' and 'uh-oh'.

But most excitedly, yesterday she said her first complete sentence, in context, using all words that she has never said before!!

Whilst sitting with my sister she started stroking the velour appliqué on her top and saying 'look! It's so soft'. In fact, she said it a few times, and this morning she said 'look at that!' whilst pointing to a piece of kiwi she'd dropped on the floor.

I'm so excited. I can't wait until she is able to communicate with us more freely (as cute as her hand gestures are)!

Cosmo has been working hard too, and really enjoying a fact book we picked up for his bedtime reading. He's been telling me how earthquakes happen and rules of roman society.

As we're also loving board games, we've been playing loads and he's even come up with his own rules to give the game some more variety. He calls it 'Ludo double dice'.

The rules go like this:

* to leave home the numbers on both dice must add up to six (exactly) or one of the dice should have a six showing (increases the chances of being able to leave home)
* if you roll 'double dice' (two numbers that match) you get to have another turn.
* you must move if you can.
* if you land on someone they get sent back home. If they have two counters on one space it acts as a block and you can't send them home. If they have three counters on that space, you are sent home.
* if you are less than six spaces away from home, and you roll a double six, you can go straight home without needing an exact roll (necessary if you need a one)!

It so much fun, and I'm surprised at his creativity. Maybe I'm naive, but I think it's pretty good going for a four year old.

Cosmo's first song

Cosmo made up his first song today (well, the first one that wasn't just random syllables thrown together!)

I was really excited, but he was really embarrassed that I'd overheard him singing :o(

It went like this:

King of Glory

King of Glory

Have some Glory

King of Glory

You died for me

Tell the story

about the glory

King of Glory