Little Bits of Bite Size Learning

Jam tarts with letters on. Can you just about make them out?
I like this bite sized learning approach. Lots of short, concentrated activities, but returning to a topic very regularly.
Ia benefits from this type of style. I like to do lots of what I think is called "pre-adding" activities. Yesterday Ia and I laid out several sheets of different coloured paper, assembled some toy animals and arranged them in the "field", the "sandy place" and the "muddy place". Then the animals went around visiting each other. Ia counted how many animals there were already in one place, decided how many would be visiting, and worked out how many there would be once the visitors arrived. There are lots of variations to this. Today we played shopping, with 1p coins only, buying two items at a time. This is adding, without mentioning adding.
Something else the bigger three have been doing is looking up animals on the Arkive site. Ia loves the pictures and the boys wrote out all the creatures they could find beginning with the letters J, R and I. Later they were "being" those creatures. Ia complained that her cubs kept being eaten. Boys wanted to be top predators, Ia wanted to be something cute and furry.

Continuing habitats study

English Nature has a useful habitats unit, (scroll down on link page) which we have been working on.
We actually began with an article from a gardening magazine which told us about hedgehogs, blue tits and bumble bees, and how to build nesting boxes for them. It would be nice to build something, but it looks far too complicated.
Then we moved onto the English Nature unit, "Habitats- Are Our School Grounds Hedgehog Friendly?". Well, first we have to change that to garden, but its easy to adapt. I have not used all the lessons, things like sketching parts of the garden would be met with groans, and as I imagine the main purpose of that activity is to get children observing the environment I think that it is less necessary in such a familiar place as the garden, which we have already examined in the course of this study. The boys probably know its less accessible areas much better than me anyway, as they are the ones who go crawling under bushes to retrieve balls they've hit there.
The lesson on food chains was good though. We made the cards for different living things, but as we didn't have 30 children to hold one each, we just laid them out on the floor, and removed the ones which got eaten/killed. We found out any information we didn't already know about what each creature eats and is eaten by, using Arkive and Wikipedia.
Today it is the hedgehog fact file activity, finding out more details about the hedgehog. InshAllah I'll use the rest of the lesson suggestions over the rest of this week and next.
Considering the large number of cats which hang around this garden I don't think we should try to encourage any hedgehogs here. Its a stressful place for wildlife, we see very few small birds. Obviously hedgehogs have their defences, but still...?

What is the meaning of "Wibbly Pig's Silly Big Bear"?

My under 5s enjoy lots of picture books from the library. Usually these books are very simple, funny or moral. Sometimes there is something different, even surprising. Take for example the much used with early years, "Farmer Duck". It looks like the usual fare but when you read it you find its practically revolutionary propoganda. Fat, lazy farmer makes inarticulate, oppressed duck do all the farm jobs while he lies in bed, shouting down to duck "How goes the work?" (note odd word order). Oppressed duck arranges uprising with other animals during which farmer is thrown off the premises. Duck then presides over joyful peasant/worker rural idyll scene where all the animals co-operate together, under apparant leadership of duck.
That was a surprise.
Then take "Wibbly Pig's Silly Big Bear", by Mick Inkpen. On the back the blurb says, "Being clever is not all that counts. Mick Inkpen's funny and poignant story explores this simple theme." However on reading it it is striking how this story is nothing to do with cleverness.
The Silly Big Bear displays all the qualities of a 18 month old child. He cannot use a spoon to eat peas, cannot use a potty, hides by covering his eyes, scribbles on walls, loves bubbles and bouncing and crashing about. Then it says "And he will disappear your trouble inside a hug", then it goes on to say that when all the bubbles have blown away, when the bear is gone "...we will miss him more than anyone."
WHAT!
Who is the bear? Why does he go? Why do we miss him so? A book for little ones with an apparantly sad ending?
These are my suggestions.
Is the Silly Big Bear the sweetness of little ones, and a warning to us adult readers to enjoy their babyhood before they grow up? The hug from a little one is sweet enough to disappear a trouble. The story suggests that the bear will not be coming back.
Is the Silly Big Bear the innocence of toddlerhood, the joyfulness of laughing at funny things, and the enthusiasm of small children, which we all go through, and then we leave behind forever as we take on the cares of growing up? Silly Big Bear is full of this type of carefree joy.
So why is he so big (he can hardly fit on the page)? Is it because when you have a tiny person in your home they seem to take up the whole place with their things and their mess and their noises and their demands? Does the Silly Big Bear remind us to savour that, for its specialness? Is he so big because for a small person, their feelings and experiences fill up the whole of the world, as they see it?
Well I can't ask Mick Inkpen, so I'll have to just wonder.
And this is why I don't read fiction, except to my children, so that my thoughts will not be overrun by distractions from the rememberence of Allah.
And although this story has reminded me to notice as much as I can before it passes, it also reminds me that whenever you give a work of fiction to a child to read it is like having a stranger sit down with them to explain their take on life. That's a thought, isn't it?

Mountains and maps

More puzzle maps here. Good for mountains topic.

One of those days

when we all got caught up in something or other. The lid of this "vehicle" lifts up and two boys can squeeze in. Later there was an elaborate game involving the pop up tent and a lot of blankets in the front room, which added to the fact that to make the vehicle the box had to be first emptied out onto the floor, means that that room is now fairly trashed. U was looking for something in the filing cabinet toy drawer, and then decided to get all the puzzles out, so this room is pretty much gone too. On the up side, the above mentioned projects left me free to wash a window upstairs.

Any work? Snippets. Page of maths, comprehension, reading seerah, Quran recitation, French DVD followed by French reading, wordsearch and picture labelling, revising mountain ranges on a map, recording the names of mountain ranges on a Powerpoint slide.

Yesterday evening U organised the other three into lessons. She sat before them and told them to write letters, then numbers and draw pictures. Then they had to draw lines, then a map. She praised them for finishing their "work" too!

So why does it seem that the day has run away?

Maybe because I have to start potty training U - and have made no progress at all.

Photos

Some by me.

And some by boys, while I'm not looking.

Groups and keys links

As part of the science habitats topic this week we have been looking at groups and keys.
At crickweb there is this very useful activity for sorting. Go to keystage two, science, habitats.
At sciencenetlinks there is a fun game for grouping creatures by various criteria. The boys also did the second follow on activity from there today. I'm having trouble with a direct link, but go to the home page, then lessons, scroll down to the 3-5 section, click on Classification2 A Touch of Class, again scroll down to click on touch of class again. It takes a while but is worth it!
J and R also told me about a game called Buzz which uses the format of an identification key.
To finish off we devised a key for identifying a bee, (based on the one in the textbook).