Couple of things

SubhanAllah it has been a busy at home day! A couple of things to mention:
Phonic workbooks are good, but it can get a bit dull writing it all down. Today I cut out cards to do the exercise a different way with U. The task was to make CVC words from sets of letters, where the vowel was always the same. I'm sure you could make nice looking cards on the computer, print them out and laminate, but if doesn't improve the learning objective, then hand scribbled does the same job.
Today Ia moved onto the topic of mass in maths. The topic really called for a balance scale, but I don't have one of these. When I did this topic with the boys I was using a shared balance scale.
The lesson was about getting the feel of 1kg, so I got a packet of pasta from the kitchen and got her to hold it. Then she had to go to the kitchen and try to judge how many potatoes she needed to put in a bag so that it felt the same weight as the pasta pack. When she'd made her estimate we checked with our kitchen scale. She was a bit over, so she had another couple of goes with bananas and apples and got much more accurate, maashAllah.

Just ticking along....

Our home ed is just moving on gently at the moment, alhamdulillah. There doesn't seem to be much new or exciting to report. U keeps asking me how long it is until spring! But winter is a good time to get lots of indoor book work out of the way. I'm gradually edging U towards doing a little more each day, I'm still only talking about a few more minutes here and there, but just a few more minutes makes a difference.
We've also been having a bit of illness gradually working its way around the family, meaning several days have been affected by someone being out of action. This is the way it goes, alhamdulillah. Today was R's turn and he spent most of the day in bed listening to Famous Five CDs.
The girls spent loads of time on iboard again, and persuaded me to print out some postcards they made on there!

Free iboard

U works best in short, 10 minute activities. Today we spent a short time on these puzzle sums. She used her fingers to help her when necessary. Before that I had drawn up a page of work for her to do. I drew dominoes and got her to fill in the numbers in addition calculations based on them.
Later on she did a few minutes phonic work, choosing the vowel to go in the word. She is also getting on well with her reading books, maashAllah, and can manage both books in the first level of Peter and Jane. I'll let her go ahead while she is still finding it easy, maashAllah.
The other evening I received some good news in my inbox! iboard is now free to use (no longer subscription only). U had been asking me to get iboard back as both girls really enjoy it! They've been using it loads for the last two days!

Quick Link

Today we watched an episode of the BBC series Chemistry, A Volatile History
Very visual and interesting, and very pleased to see that experiment making hydrogen from zinc in acid we did last week! Gives it a whole new dimension for us!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00q2mk5/Chemistry_A_Volatile_History_Discovering_the_Elements/

Birds

Today we have had the opportunity to examine the skulls of birds and look at their differently shaped beaks to see how these are adapted to obtaining the foods they eat.
Alhamdulillah. The intricacy and detail of Allah's creation is truly amazing.

Friday at home

Today has felt quite relaxed, alhamdulillah.
The Conquer Maths is allowing the boys to just get on with their maths by themselves, and so far this is working well. The topics they have been covering are still revision, so the real test will come with a completely new topic.
The boys have also done some French again today. This has been neglected a bit recently, but I need to make the effort to get the resources out and use them. We are still keeping things light with cartoony activity books and the Jump Ahead CD. I'd like to get the Rosetta Stone programme for them, but this isn't possible just yet.
They are still working away with their other Rosetta Stone language programme. H is sitting with them to help them through it now they are getting on to more complex sentences. Seeing how they benefit from having someone just occasionally repeat the sentence more slowly, and seperate out the words a little makes me feel that the programme is most beneficial when used alongside someone who speaks the language being studied. H does not change the programme, or add to it in any way, so the language learning method is still the same. He spent a whole hour on it with them this evening! Wow! That was long!
U has been doing a mixture of things today, including playing board games, playing colouring games on Sheppard, doing a few addition pages, writing a few words, reading Peter and Jane book 1a, listening to stories, using Jump Ahead French and watching a Big Cat Week dvd. Ia hasn't been well today, so she has just relaxed, but joined in the the board games, dvd, French and stories.

Geography bits

Oh, dear, I'm not doing very well with the post titles at the moment!
I blogged recently about using geography study to aquire and develop skills. More of this has been going on. We are currently learning about the Central American region. On Monday I asked the boys to find out a little about the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza and to put together a powerpoint presentation of what they found out. They have done several PPPs before, and doing one of these makes a change from handwritten or typed work. It gives some variety, refreshes their knowledge of using PP, and can count as integrated ICT! I know, terrible of me to use these terms, but it is what we are doing anyway, and presenting it in these words might come in handy one day!
For today's geography the boys wrote up a report on the earthquake in Hati. They used the Newsround website to find out information. Although they had seen about it on the general news anyway they needed to gather some facts. Then they wrote a half side report in their own words. I'm filing all this geography stuff in folders.

At some point during the day the girls went up to their bedroom and were very quiet. It turned out that Ia had been reading aloud the last chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory so that they could find out what happens!!! I'm still required to fill in the rest of the chapters.