Work and a play day

Yesterday we enjoyed another "play day" having friends over and just enjoying each other's company, alhamdulillah. This was a very welcome break for us, as the long break from out of the house activities combined with the wintery weather means that the effects of being home too long are beginning to show!!!
We've been working away too meanwhile, boys on maths revision and some literature study on Oliver Twist, and we've all been watching the Royal Institution lecture series on Channel Four catch up. Ia has been doing some maths revision too, working on her mental maths skills.
Next week activities start again, inshAllah, and I think we are all looking forward to it!

Using a few educational games

So, we are just plodding along here at the moment. Not much else going on. The children have been seeing some of their friends, and getting on with our daily routines.
I've been using the "Silly Snail Game", which I downloaded in a Currclick give away some time ago. It is a game for teaching parts of speech. Players have to identify the part of speech of a word highlighted on a sentence card. The playing board is marked out with the names of the parts of speech, and you don't use dice to move on. The boys enjoy playing this game and it is finally getting them to bother to remember the names of the parts of speech, alhamdulillah!
Yesterday I found a shop selling the Hadith Challenge game, and we had a go at playing this today too. Although many of the questions are on topics and hadith that the boys have come across in their studies remembering all thoses details is another matter, and this may be a way of getting some revision and some retention done, inshAllah.
I also played an educational game with U today, using the CVC matching cards we have. These are very cheap and cheerful cards I bought years ago, but which have seen good use, alhamdulillah. When these come out I know a milestone has been reached and the child is starting to sound out simple words successfully. The cards consist of pairs of cards, the first with a picture and the initial letter, and the second with the last two letters, so you pair up b with ox to make box and so on.

Evaluation

Sometimes I think I sit so close up to our home education that I can't see the whole of it properly. It gets distorted and I have to remind myself of where we were, where we are now and basically understand the bigger picture.
At the beginning of autumn I was thinking of ways to get U learning the alphabet. I was gathering different approaches and trying to keep things interesting. U was not in a habit of organised learning at that time, and I knew I had to work on establishing new habits and routines with her. (Only very mild and light all the same!)
Now, about three months later, I can see that she has learnt a lot, alhamdulillah, and is now comfortable working on identifying the initial, medial and final sounds in CVC words, and can choose correct initial and final letters in longer words too. During these three months there have been times when she hasn't wanted to bother, and times when she insisted on doing things her own way. On a daily snapshot basis there have been times when I could have got quite stressed, but looking at an overview now, alhamdulillah, things have progressed just fine. I think it is important to keep that in mind, whenever new challenges emerge.
Seems like I've been doing a lot of thinking and evaluating this week! I think it must be because of the break in activities and the snow keeping us home more!

Ia's reading choices

These are some of the books Ia is choosing to borrow from the library at the moment. As you can see she goes for the "cute" covers!

Skills through subjects

Sometimes the skills learnt through studying a subject are just as important as the subject matter. The subject is like a vehicle. Take, for example, the geography study the boys are doing. I do think it is important to have a general knowledge of geography, to understand where countries are in relation to each other, their climates and so on, but this is not the only reason to do this topic. It is also a good opportunity for the boys to develop research skills and the ability to use the internet to gather information. They also need to learn to skim and scan text, to pick out relevant information, to recognise reliable and unreliable sources, to answer questions accurately etc.
The Trail Guide to World Geography study guide we are following this year has a list of drill questions at the front of very week's section. (We are absolutely not following the shedule in terms of numbers of weeks, just doing it in the prescribed sequence). Rather than doing a few questions per day I tend to pick out about 10 questions for them to do in one session. Most of the questions they will not know the answer to, and they have to look up the answers in the atlas or online. Sometimes even the online maps are more suitable than the printed atlas. It depends what you are looking for. This is helping them to learn about using search terms, what to put in the box to help get the answer fastest.
Oftentimes they'll get directed to sites which are not written specifically for kids, and the whole text will be too difficult for them to understand, but they are learning to find their way to the answer they need, because the questions themselves do not require tricky answers, so the answer is usually plainly sitting there if you can cut through the technical details.
So I'm not really concerned about whether or not they remember the elevation of Mt McKinley, but think that it is important that they know how to find this out.
Of course, they do a lot of finding out about their own interests in this way too, but doing this also through a subject means that they experience a wider variety of sources, rather than just game review sites and sports journalism!

More Snow!

More snow, subhanAllah! So, more of the same in our days too, alhamdulillah. The children go out to play in the garden, then they come in, do some educational stuff, go back into the garden again, and so on!
The school holidays have begun, so no activities for a couple of weeks. Many of them would have been cancelled due to snow anyway. We are taking a slow approach to the days. There is no need to rush, as we are home, and can carry on into the evening with learning stuff, if taking advantage of daylight to go outside.

Weather Lapbooks

Yesterday the girls finished off their weather lapbooks.

This is inside Ia's lapbook. The printouts came from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ . There were many more than those available, but I didn't want to use them all. She also made cloud pictures, to show different types of clouds, wrote a description of the type of weather we are having this month (written before the snow came) and she wrote a little about some of the weather experiments we did during the course of this project. On the back of the lapbook there is a weather words worksheet printout as well.

Other resources to go with this project include:

MET office

This homeschool lapbook blog, which is really FULL of ideas!
We have a good weather encyclopedia at home too, alhamdulillah, so I took some information out of that for them.

Snow Pics

And after that back in to have hot chocolate, listen to Oliver Twist, investigate prime numbers and review surahs before getting ready to go to Friday prayers.

Making notebook pages

There are many ready made notebooking pages available to print off online. Most of them have a box or space for an illustration. But what if your kids don't like to do illustrations?
As part of our geography studies I thought I could use occasional notebook pages with the boys. Yesterday I wanted them to find out a little about Niagara Falls. I know they won't be interested in doing a sketch of the Falls, so instead I asked them to search for an image online, paste it into a word document and then make a title before printing off. Under the image they wrote some of the information they had found out.
The boys don't need to have lined paper to write on, but if I were doing this with Ia I would put a piece of lined paper underneath and trace a few lines for her to write on. I know you can use the computer to add lines, but to me a bit of tracing would be quicker and more ink efficient when making a one off page for one child.

Socks

Has this got anything to do with home education? No, not really, but if you have boys I ask you this.....How fast do your boys' socks disintegrate into holes?
In this house it happens very fast, subhanAllah. How often do I hear the complaint,"All my socks have holes in!"? Often.
How do boys do this?
Today H shopped for yet more socks. Temporary relief, inshAllah.

Weekend maths

I like this activity! Today I did this with U.
Take a handful of cubes in each of three colours and put them in a bag. Then get the child to draw out 5 cubes and record the colour combinations that come out. Each time remembering to total the number of cubes to 5. This will show different ways of making 5 from three numbers.
Of course you can choose a different total number, or a different number of colours to suit your purpose.
I didn't try making a point out of saying "See, we are making 5 in different ways", instead I just let her experience it in her own way.

Story Writing

U chose this library book last week. I read it aloud a couple of times, and Ia has read it to herself too. The cat in the story reminds us of our own cat! Especially the bit where it says that Mog saw that it was raining in the garden so she went to the street as she thougt it would not be raining there.
As I read it again last night I had the idea that this would be a good story for Ia to base her own story on. So, this morning Ia wrote a little story about our forgetful cat. Ia needs a little help with coming up with ideas for writing, so using storybooks she enjoys as a base seems to help.

Can TV be useful?

Today the boys wrote a description of an elephant. The assigment in their English textbook asked them to write a detailed description, as if they were describing an elephant to someone who had never seen one themselves. They were asked to consider sights, sounds, the way the animals move and even smell!
Well, they have seen live elephants once at a zoo, when they were two and a half. I remember the occasion well. At the time of seeing the elephants it was near the end of the day and R was more concerned about getting H to carry him than with looking at elephants. If R, aged 2.5 was fussing to be carried, you can be sure that J was too.
Since then we have visited a different zoo, but they don't have elephants there. So how could the boys describe an elephant in detail? A photo wouldn't be enough, as you can't get a sense of movement or sound from that. So for their piece of descriptive writing they must have relied on what they have seen on TV. J in particular wrote a very descriptive piece, maashAllah.
Without seeing elephants on TV I don't see how he could have written it.
So, when it comes to TV I think it can have its uses, in opening our eyes to sights and sounds of the creation we couldn't otherwise experience. It is all about using it sensibly I think. Of course we can just as well watch this stuff on the internet as well these days, so when i say TV I'm including that too!

Learning about people around the world

I've always been fascinated by learning about people around the world.
This morning I came across some great links on Imaan's blog, Making Memories. The links are to videos showing Muslims from diffeent parts of the world preparing for Hajj. The boys and I watched the first part of the China video, which was very interesting, maashAllah. Hoping to get to look through the rest later this week, inshAllah.
Finding that also reminds me to post about some great little Islamic books from Goodword.
The Islamic Village series
These are lovely books full of interesting details about life in different parts of the Muslim world. You can read them aloud to younger children and older ones (from about 8) can read them themselves, inshAllah. What a simple way to include some geography in your family learning, maashAllah.
Best of all in the bookshop I bought my copies from they are sold for 75p!!! Almost nothing is ever sold for as little as 75p!!!!

Copy Cats!

We tried out the salty painting I saw on UmmTafari's blog!

Weather activities

Today we did some of the weather experiements from the MET office kids page.
I'm not too impressed with their suggestions, anyway....
Above we tried the cloud in a glass experiment. It did work, but the flash ruined the photo!

We made our own puddles of water and drew round them. Then we gathered evidence to suggest that puddles diminish in size because cats drink them.
It goes into the air through evaporation I say,
No, no Mummy, Nala is drinking it.....


Finally, the windmill. Put a small bead on the paper fastener between the paper and the card they suggest. What kind of bead is big enough to have a fastener threaded through it , but small enough not to take up most of the length of the fastener? No wonder we are not shown a finished example on the website. Still it looks nice, even if it doesn't turn that well.

As for the weather fronts idea. Sounds great, but as I don't have an empty large aquarium tank lying around somewhere I guess I'll have to put that on hold.

Any alternative suggestions, anyone?

Little one maths

Yes, we are "on holiday", but I thought I'd give U a little attention by herself today and do some of the practical maths she doesn't feel like doing on our busy days.
This is what we did:
arranging in order and matching number cards
identifying plastic shapes by handling them whilst blindfolded
identifying the colour of a rod by handling it whilst blindfolded
arranging rods in size order
counting forward and back
finding a number less or greater than a given number, or between two given numbers

Limitless toys

Oh no! Not more toys! Well, I'm just being silly with the title, but if children make their own toys they can have lots more!
This afternoon the girls set up an art workshop for their soft toys. The toys gathered around tables made of books and and made calendars out of papers.
Later on the girls made doctors' bags filled with equipment. The bags were old cardboard boxes, with coloured paper handles, and the equipment was just cut out drawings. Still lots of fun though, maashAllah.