More magnets

Some days are just so busy, subhanAllah, that by the end of them I can hardly remember anything! Sometimes I keep a running notebook, but otherwise I'm trying to piece bits together.
Ia has been doing more on the magnets project. Magnetism is such a great topic for young children, my girls find using the magnets quite exciting, alhamdulillah. We have a collection of different sized and shaped magnets, which I keep in a pot along with the magnetic marbles, oversized paper clips and a couple of springs that I salvaged from broken toys. Iron filings are also good to have, but having them inside a plastic bubble works best as otherwise thay just cover everything and are really hard to clean up!
We've tested how many paper clips different magnets can pick up, we've tested the distance from which the magnets start exerting their force on a paper clip and today we tested how many layers of non-magnetic material a coin needs to be wrapped in before a magnet is no longer attracted to it. We wrapped the coin in aluminium, paper and then cloth.
I'd definately recommend putting together a magnets box at home, if you haven't done so already. This can also include items containing magnets, such as a notepad with a magnetic closing clasp, or old reading glasses case. The children can play with these as toys and learn a lot at the same time!

A bit of science today

Ia finished the heat and temperature lapbook we were working on and now we are moving on to a topic study of magnets. This evening I read a library book on magnets to both girls and we got out the magnet set and did some experimenting.
The boys are back on the topicof electricity and circuits in their science study. Today I found a couple of links to try to add variety to the topic:
Electricity games and activities
Skool.co.uk
Although it seems that the boys would be just as happy doing the work mainly out of the textbook! I wonder if there are any intermediate electronics sets out there? We have the basic circuits set, and others I've seen advertised look very complicated. In fact we had one other set given to us. It said it was easy to use but we all found it so fiddly and complicated that we couldn't get anything to work on it at all.
Also today the boys watched "Bang goes the theory" and the girls watched a Primary Geography programme on water use. I'd forgotten all about those BBC schools programmes (currently shown around mid morning on BBC2)! The girls seem to find the geography ones really interesting, and some of the Science Clips are quite useful too!

Links for learning French

I'm trying to do French more often with the boys. I'm hoping a little and often approach will work best, inshAllah. I've been looking around for websites to help add variety to the books we are using, so far I like these:
Bonjour les amis
Languages Online

These are good for us as they start from the basics. Lots of practice is needed, but that means finding lots of different approaches to keep it from getting boring.
Languages Online has pages for other European languages too, by the way.

Book review

Ia has been enjoying this series of books from the library. The dog character has lots of faults and is presented so realistically I'm pretty sure it must be very closely based on an animal known to the author. The stories are not as fluffy as the usual animal stories, in "Jake the Good Bad Dog" Jake saves a man from a violent attack. I think this slightly increased depth makes the story more interesting. The book is recommended for age 7 +, so it is not too serious, just right I think.

Ia has been reading these books aloud to me and after finishing off one of them this morning I asked her to write a book review. Part of my plan to ease her into more independent writing, inshAllah. Little by little, maashAllah!

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.