Planning...

Ia and U have been busy with painting, drawings for the scrapbook, puzzles, computer ed, helping make biscuits and play. Ia has also been doing some subtraction work and she made a rods staircase and copied it onto squared paper. Ia works best in the morning, so it is nice when she wakes first and we get some work done together quietly before U gets up.
As for the boys, well, we finished our lapbook project on the Prophet Yusuf (as). I will blog a proper description of it before long, inshAllah. We've also finished reading "The Wheel On the School". There is just so much to discuss and think about in connection to that book that I spent today's English session studying the main characters and their roles in the story. This was a way of looking at the function of characters in moving the plot forward. I will continue to study the book in our English sessions until I'm satisfied we've covered it. Before I began reading the book I was planning to go with the lapbook project laid out in the Lapbook Handbook, but now that I have read the book through I don't want to be limited to that plan, there is just so much more to gain from the text. Anyway this makes me realise that I'm really not the sort of person who should go spending money on ready made curricula, I'll only need to change it all the time. (Exception to this is maths). I should just continue to do what I usually do, look through the layouts other people put forward then DIY the rest.
For our daily reading I've now moved to "Those Promised Paradise", another in Noura Durkee's series on the Sahabah. I do have that short story "Oranges in No Mans Land" waiting in the wings, but one fiction at a time I think, to keep the mind clear. Well, my planning mind anyway, the boys read one story book after another anyway, they read in the morning, at mealtimes, when they should be going to bed....alhamdulillah.

Lightbulb Moments

Reading with purpose

The days have whizzed by, alhamdulillah. Some days run smoothly and others do not. Sometimes there is no way of explaining it.
At the end of last week we came to the poem "Night Mail" by W H Auden, in the English textbook. It is a good poem for reading aloud, as there are distinct sounds and rhythms within it. There are also two distinct landscape descriptions, which gave me the idea of taking a different comprehension approach. Today I asked the boys to divide a piece of paper into two sections and draw landscapes as described in the two verses of the poem. This made them look at the text carefully, in order that all the details should be included. It also provided a context for the discussion of what is meant by, for example, "a glade of cranes".
I do feel a shift in my English approach with them at the moment. Learning to use and understand one's own language is a craft best learnt from reading I think. But not just any reading, reading for vocabulary enrichment, for absorbing style, for working out the hidden meanings. Reading for fun is one type of reading, but reading for enrichment is another. How does this square with prioritising the deen of Islam in our lives? I hope, inshAllah, it can be compatible if the outcome is articulate, literate young people, able to express themselves in the service of Allah's deen.

Today's Geography Task

We've been doing a lot of discussion type ed on our farming topic recently, discussing the food crisis, where our food comes from and so on. I feel that this is a topic that the boys have spent some time thinking about, so suitable for use when the English textbook asks us to write a letter to a newspaper about an issue that we feel strongly about. Well, not sure about the strong feelings from them, but at least they know a little info.
The letter was to be about factory farming. The boys began the task by reading some further information around this topic from the internet. I found them pages on factory farming, (written from a pro animal welfare perspective) and I found some information on what is said in Islam about the correct treatment of animals. As Muslims our opinions on these matters should be moulded by what we have been instructed to believe through the Quran and Sunnah, not just by what we may feel about something. I wanted the boys to be able to address the issue with an Islamic perspective. We read about how a man who denied a sheep a drink of water on its way to slaughter was punished by Umar bin Al-Khattab (ra) for cruelty. Also we noted that animals to be slaughtered for meat should not be kept waiting and animals should not be slaughtered in sight of other animals. Indeed Islam requires high standards of animal welfare.
So the gist of what they wrote was that however animals are to be farmed their welfare should be a priority and factory farming usually (according to our sources) produces hardship for animals. Actually, I have not yet found anything written in favour of factory farming with which to offer a sense of balance. I have to assume it is just mass production for meat hungry populations and greater profits that fuel the industry.
Anyway, they wrote out the letter (it was a joint effort) using a letter template on the computer.

Spring Pictures

Subhanallah, how the sunflower seedlings have grown.

I've decided it is about time I started reading chapter story books to Ia. I started with the boys when they were about five. I read to the girls from picture story books, but without the pictures a little more concentration is needed. We sat on the patio to read today. Ia wanted to read a phonic reader herself. She got on well with help from me. Then we read the first chapter of "Ponder and William", another old childhood book of mine. It is so battered I've put it in one of those plastic jackets to stop it falling to bits, inshAllah. The boys loved "Ponder and William", they laughed and laughed when Ponder (a pyjama case panda) fell into a currant cake mixture. I hope Ia likes it too. U listened as well.

Ia did some more phonic work today, using Education City, a workbook, and copying cvc words into a handwriting book. She is happy with all this, as long as I don't ask her to read anything.

For maths work today she counted out 15 cubes, made shapes from them and drew round the shapes. She also used the 100 chart. I removed some numbers from the plastic pockets, and she had to put them back in the right places.

As for the boys, we've just been continuing with works in progress really. I also began the electricity unit for science, just a bit of theory today, making use of some of the resources on Primary Resources (link in side bar).

Right now they've gone for haircuts. Hope they don't come back in need of a recut like last time.

Am I being fussy?

A city buildings model the girls made with a friend.

The boys have reached a unit of their English textbook where they have a passage about the riches of the rainforest. The passage is written in a brief, breeze through magazine style, with lots of extravagant adjectives to make up for lack of depth. Doing a comprehension on this is fine,doing some adjective related work is fine, but later in the unit the writing task is to prepare an argument to persuade others of the need to stop the destruction of the rainforest. This strikes me as a bit sudden. Asking a child to prepare a persuasive argument on something he knows very little about, something he has only read a few colourfully sensationalised facts about a couple of days ago, does it make sense? Writing an argument like that should come at the end of several weeks study of the topic at least, surely? It can't be good precedent to encourage argument without understanding. In the next exercise they are asking for a poster design to make clear why destruction of the rainforest is an "international disaster". I'm not suggesting that it isn't a disaster by the way, I'm just suggesting that this topic needs much more depth than could be offered in the context of literacy lessons. "International disaster", big words that require serious consideration.Writing an argument is a very good skill of course, but I would think that it is best done in a cross curricular way, using a topic that can be studied in more detail.

I don't even know why I care about that textbook.

Ia was up early this morning, so I did some work with her first. Slowly but surely the phonics is coming along, alhamdulillah. Later in the day we did a little work on number bonds for 8. Colouring in a strip of 8 squares (drawn on squared paper) to match 6+2, 4+4 and so on.

The boys finished the last section of the Engineering Interact activities, did some more on the Yusuf (as) lapbook, plus their other daily activities.

It was a lovely day here, maashAllah, the boys went cycling in the evening and all the children played in the garden until almost maghrib.

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.