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.