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:

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. 

Learning by Colouring

I write a lot about what I'm doing with Cosmo, and sometimes is can seem like Lychee is just along for the ride. That's only about 50% true. Half the time she really is just watching what her older brother is doing, but I'm okay with that - in fact she learns really well by watching him!

Other days I am intentional about what I'm doing with her, but the reality is I've already done it and blogged it once before with her brother, so it doesn't often make a post.

Today I decided to write about her though. Yesterday her brother was entertaining himself nicely with Reader Rabbit, and she asked me if we could do some colouring together.

Yes, together.

I didn't watch her and tell her she was doing a good job, I joined in and we coloured each page together, because she likes it better when we do a project together like that. 

I wanted to work on reading and following instructions, so we chose a book that tells you what to do. She's not free reading yet, but she is capable of having a guess at a word if she's given some clues, for example seeing the "L" at the beginning of the word threw her because she wanted it to say "truck" and she'd never heard "lorry". 

I read the instructions to her, deliberately pausing and asking her key words, for example "colour my body... What colour does this say?" running my fingers under the words. She only knows one colour that begins with "R" so she answers "red".

This method is great because you are setting her up to win and reinforcing the sight words. Where just showing a flash card with the word "red" on could have been any word, limiting her options to 'it must be a colour' encourages critical thinking, as well as reading.

Lysh is also into numbers right now, in a big way, so we counted things on the pages and practised writing their numbers next to them.

It was fun, and she loved showing them to Cosmo and telling him how hard we had worked on it. I love her team spirit. My son just wants to do everything by himself with, no help, so that he can say "i did it!" when he achieves something. My daughter really wants to work together on everything, and the doing is so much more important to her than the outcome. Every child really does have a totally different nature in built! 

Pirate Day!

 

Today was Pirate day for our Homeschool Group which involved everyone meeting up at the Priory Marina for a day packed full of activities.

The first challenge was a team work challenge, that involved moving treasure chests. The puzzle goes something like this:

There are five 'treasure chests' labelled 1 - 5 and three 'boats'. You have to get all of the chests from one boat to either of the others, but you can only move one at a time and cannot put a chest with a larger number on top of one with a smaller number.

Ironically, Cosmo actually knows how to do this puzzle, having completed it before at our church 'olympics challenge' day (although the puzzle was worded differently, because pirate themed olympics would be weird), however once the other children started having idea he ended up in tears and having to be taken to one side to calm down. He was overwhelmed with the number of people talking and the other children not giving him clear enough instructions (eg. 'put that there' with a pointed finger doesn't work. He needs you to say 'put box one in the yellow hoop').

The other children completed the challenge in a fairly good time though, and he was happy to watch from a distance.

The second challenge was like a giant team game of snakes and ladders. The children had to roll the dice, then choose who was the most appropriate person to move, with the end goal of getting everyone to finish. Along the way there were sharks (move back 3 spaces), the black pearl (go back to the start) and Jack Sparrow (your whole team goes back to the start); as well as ropes (climb up a level) and a desert island (the whole team can move to the finish). It took the children quite a long time to understand that this was a team game and that just because they rolled the dice didn't necessarily make them the best person to move forward. 

After that it was finally time to get into some sailing, and the kids had a great time learning how to turn the boat and using just the wind to get all the way around the lake, including zig-zagging back to get to shore when the wind is against you.

 

After lunch it was time for some orienteering around the park and then into the katakanu's for a paddle around the lake.



The final activity of the day was to tie a couple of katakanu's together and let the children have a tug of war. Exhausting, but so much fun!

Free Copy Work Practice

Cosmo is about ready for copy work now, so we started out yesterday. The first line took nearly thirty minutes (he's quite the perfectionist) but as he got into the swing of things, he managed to complete the next three lines in seven minutes.

He's so proud of himself for being able to write a full sentence.

If you want to start copy work, you don't need to spend a lot of money on handwriting practice books. We are using a website called Handwriting Worksheets Maker (which is free) where you can choose the style of worksheet (Print, D'Nealian or Cursive), dots, dashes, hollow letter styles and whether you want them to trace the letters or just have the starting dots.

You then type in your words or sentences that you'd like, we're using his memory verses so that it's familiar, and it's done. Super easy, totally customisable and free; what more could you want?

For best results, remember to set your printer to landscape mode.

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

Musicianship

We have joined up with a homeschool co-op where we live and now attend a 'musicianship' class on tuesdays. The teacher is brilliant, totally sensitive to our special educational needs, and the children are learning pitch, rhythm, conducting and having a great time.

The games they play often involve using their whole bodies to show variance in pitch or volume, and listening carefully, as well as having a chance to try out different instruments.

Afterwards there is a choir with some older children, but sadly we've not managed to stay for that so far. The first week we went Cosmo was overwhelmed with so many people and got very distressed so we left. This week some of the older children weren't being very nice to him. He didn't seem aware, but I couldn't stand by and let them bully him even if he didn't know it. I called him over and he suddenly realised something must be wrong. Incredibly embarrassed he demanded that we leave right away, so we did.

I'm really hoping we'll manage to stay for choir at some point before christmas (only one session left).

It breaks my heart to see him being picked on, but then I remember that this would have been ten times worse in school, and that I wouldn't have been there to intervene.

I'm so grateful that we still have the option to home educate in this country. If we didn't, I think I'd emigrate.

The Joy of Duplo

We've always loved duplo, and Cosmo got a ton of it for his birthday. Any toy that can be enjoyed by a 15 month old and four year old at the same time is always good, but one that can be used in so many different ways is an absolute God send.



Here are some of the uses we have found for it:

1. Building towers (obviously)


2. Sorting (by size and or colour)


3. Following instructions to build a specific item


4. Social stories (using the characters to act out situations we might encounter)


5. Counting/multiplication/subtraction/division


6. Pattern recognition


7. Building words (use dry wipe marker to write letters on blocks)


8. Building sentences (use dry wipe marker to write words on the blocks)

And I'm sure there are many more too. Please comment if you think of any I've missed.