Choux pastry

At the weekend I bought a cheap icing syringe as I thought the girls could have fun making or decorating things with it. A step up from playdoh!
A couple of evenings ago we tried making choux pastry for the first time and the girls piped it into blobs on the baking tray. MaashAllah the buns turned out well. I made an icing paste with icing sugar, cocoa powder and water to spread over the top.
I used a receipe from a childrens cook book, but it was the same as the one here. It is a good one to do with children, although you have to be careful about the part where you beat the hot mixture.
They don't keep well, best eaten on the same day. Not usually a problem alhamdulillah!!!

Just a few things from this week

Just a few things we've been doing this week;
Reading aloud some of "When we were very young" by A A Milne with the girls. They enjoyed this, maashAllah, and Ia wanted to try reading the poems aloud herself. (Note to self, don't neglect poetry in read alouds).
The girls have been doing lots of drawing. They draw pictures and tell a story at the same time, maashAllah.
Top Trumps has become popular again this week. The girls have been playing with theRoald Dahl cards, U needs Ia to help her, but they still enjoy the game. Boys have had some football cards out.
The boys have been teaching themselves about web browsers and personalising their home pages.

Then, this afternoon, Ia said that she'd like to make something. You know how sometimes you feel tired and can't face the kind of sewing project where the needle comes unthreaded time after time? I felt like that this afternoon, so I suggested making a woolly pom pom. She is still not finished, but she's enjoying the process, alhamdulillah!

Writing about a picture

Ia sometimes needs some help coming up with ideas to write about. For her English work today I went to Color Me Masterpiece and printed off the colouring page for The Great Wave and she coloured it in using the colours from the original image as a guide.
After that I got her to write some lines about the picture, describing it and saying what she liked about it. This was a good way to get her to write, and inshAllah, I'll do more of these picture descriptions with her,encouraging her to write more descriptively as we go. I suppose this is like the Charlotte Mason idea of narration, except I'm using it for writing primarily.
I'll need to look around for different suitable pictures to use. The colouring in aspect was good, as it helped her look at the details in the picture, and so helped her think of ideas.

This and that

Ia has started using this colouring book to help her learn about times tables, inshAllah. I think you can still find this book on Tarquin, although I bought my copy in a gift shop in Wales! Ia likes colouring, so this is a fun way for her to learn.

I'm doing a science lapbook with Ia at the moment, a ready made one from Hands Of a Child. I don't always find that ready made lapbooks are value for money, but theone we are doing on Heat and Temperature is just right. The topic (at this level) is compact, I think that is what makes it work. As part of that today we did an experiment measuring the temperature of water containing melting ice cubes.

U has been using Starfall today and I also got her to do an early writing exercise that all my children have enjoyed. I read a story to her (Thomas the Tank Engine) and then asked her to draw a picture to go with the story and think of a sentence to go with it. I wrote the sentence first and she copied it out. It is interesting with this exercise to seewhat stands out from the story from the child's point of view.

Reading

I'm reading these stories aloud to the girls at the moment. They are really enjoying the sweet, quaint stories about a little girl and her village life.
In case you can't make out the author's name, it is Joyce Lankester Brisley.

Quran Challenge

A little while ago I bought the knowledge quiz board game "Hadith Challenge". It is quite a difficult game, you have to have a detailed recall of the hadith, rather than the woolly vague recall that I unfortunately have. It is one way of informing yourself though!
There is another game in the series, called "Quran Challenge", a friend of mine has that game and we agreed to do a swap, so that both our families can enjoy taking turns with both games, maashAllah. Today we had a play with "Quran Challenge", it is much easier, maashAllah, the hardest category being on the Names of Allah, although of course it is a way to help to memorise those names, even though you need to look elsewhere for the explanations. The other categories are good for testing general knowledge of the Quran.
Today we played for about 45 minutes, but only got about halfway across the board. We agreed to bring the finishing line forward! Ia joined in too, although I helped her out by just asking the easiest question on the card, not the proper category. There is also a "Junior Quran Challenge" which would be more manageable for her age.

Start and finish

Alhamdulillah it felt spring like today. Looking out at the sunshine we just had to go out for a while, so after lunch we went out for a walk on a nearby hill.
Also today the girls finished off their desert lapbooks. I think I'll be taking a break from general topic lapbooks for a bit to try out a couple of science themed projects, inshAllah. It doesn't harm to make a change and I think we have exhausted our interest in general themes often linked to animals! Also I'm missing our made from scratch lapbooks we did last year on Islamic themes. A handmade lapbook looks so much nicer than a printed out one!
U is almost all done with her All About Me lapbook. Just the sticking together is left to complete. Probably do that tomorrow, inshAllah.