Colours

If you have any tulips near you, do look inside them.

I do like to see colour in the garden. Alhamdulillah.

For a while I've been mildly concerned about not doing enough for ICT work with the boys. I say mildly because they do use the computer a lot, and they use it for various purposes, not just games. I suppose it is because I went to school before there was ICT, so I'm less sure about what is appropriate for their age. Today they did some work from a book I bought a while ago, "Letts Use ICT Year 4". It is quite a good book, in that the instructions are clear and easy for the boys to follow. However, in common with other ICT resources I've come across, it contains many pages on using expensive programmes I don't have. So, they'll just be using the practice work for Word, possibly a quarter of the book.

What else did the boys do today? They looked up, made notes on and made a lapbook fold on storks ("Wheel on the School" tie in), revised place value to thousands in maths, wrote unbiased reports from biased sources in English, listened to me read the tafsir of Surah Humazah (from Ibn Kathir), and then made a poster display of the translation.

Actually, I was pleased to find that they already knew most of the translation of the surah, from reading along with the computer recitation, alhamdulillah, they were preempting me as I read it through. The surah is a warning to those who slander, by tongue and by action, and to those who pile up wealth and count it. There is a part of the Hellfire for people guilty of these sins to be punished. That is why we have flames on the poster, and the glittery part is to represent piles of wealth.

I borrowed the idea of presenting study of tafsir in this way from another sister. I display this kind of work on the wall, so it can continue to be reminder for all of us. Keeping awareness of the meaning of the Quran at the fore front of the mind is a challenging task. The more repitition and reminders the better as far as I'm concerned.

For Ia today I finally got round to hanging up my hundred square chart. It's the type with little, clear pockets to display the numbers, so you can take them out, jumble them up and put them back in again. I don't know why it stayed in the drawer so long. So we did counting forward, backward, pointing out random numbers. Lots to do with a hundred square!

We also did a little subtraction game, using 6 rods, then hiding some, guessing how many were gone.

Meanwhile, I bought another history book last week, it is so interesting, I'm having to be very restrained, or I'll spend too much time on it per day...more of that another time.