Layers of rock

In 'Stone Girl, Bone Girl' there are some lovely illustrations showing the layers of rock showing in a cliff face, so today we mixed up some textured paint to make our own versions of the same. Here are Moo's pictures :)

And here are Lamb's. Although you can't really see it in the photographs, the paint is full of all sorts of goodies. The dark blue is mixed with soil, the green with chopped-up dried grass, and the yellow had chopped-up dried leaves in it.

The kidlets have also been doing some more dinosaur stencils to go in their Mary Anning project.

On the left is Moo's work (his pencil control is getting really good now and he traces letters well) and on the right Lamb's.

At the end of yesterday I was left with this odd satisfied feeling. It'd been a good day.

Could today be as good? I think so :)

We've also watched a few episodes of the Magic School Bus. Educational T.V for the whole family ;-)

The boys LOVE the Magic School Bus! I just wish it was still on T.V.

It was another great day for reading too. Lamb had to help his brother to be a 'word detective' today. Using the ABC cookies (wonderful xmas present!) I spelt out 'cow'. Lamb had to figure out what it said so that they could draw the correct picture. It worked a treat. Introducing Lamb to word segments is working well, and 3 letter words are being figured out well now. This I think is at the root of my end-of-day feeling of satisfaction at the moment! The first real steps to reading at last.

Not only that, but a wander around the charity shops in town bought some treasures our way.

("No, I'm not buying you any more teddies, but you can choose a few books each if you'd like.")

We found a lovely book of Scottish Fairy Tales, a book called 'Pounamu's Stones' that has some wonderful illustrations, and a let's-read-and-learn-science book on fossils which tells the story of how a fish turns into a fossil inside a cliff. Must have been fate ;-)

Inside the Earth

 We started off the day making a cut and stick model of the layers inside the earth from http://www.superteachingworksheets.com/ ... which was a bit advanced but it was a good chance to practise some scissor skills.

It also led on quite nicely to watching some videos of volcanoes on

youtube. 

We got hands on for a literacy session today, and played around with the 'ow' sound. Good fun! I was super impressed to find that Lamb was able to start reading these simple words with relative ease.

Lamb isn't ready to put sounds together just yet, but he's getting very confident now with all the phonics sounds and the blends he's learnt so far.

And here is Moo colouring in some dinosaur stentils he's been working on. How funny to hear the word 'stegosaurus' and 'diplodocus' coming out of a 3 year old! 

Lamb requested that we make cookies for todays cooking session (they taste pretty good)

and he then spent ages carefully copying out the ingredient list.

I can't believe how much his handwriting has progressed in this last year. He's now able to mostly write on a ruled line, with letters all of the correct size. It's a world away from this time last year.

I have forgotten the date, but it must be very close to almost a year that we've been at this home-education lark now!

Stone Girl, Bone Girl - the story of Mary Anning

So, for our rocks and fossils topic the literature hook is 'Stone Girl, Bone Girl' by Laurance Anholt.

The pictures are lovely, but it is very wordy, so unless you have a patient youngster I'd say a good age for this book would be 7+.

Luckily for me Moo takes these things rather seriously!

It tells the story of Mary Anning and her discovery of the first Ichthyosaur fossil.

There is lots here for children to talk about aside from the discovery of an amazing fossil, such as bullying, grief, poverty and a little hint of spooky mystery.

We followed up the story with an examination of our little box of Nemnem fossils and some nice messy painting activity, making dinosaur footprints.

These foam letters were an oppurtunity purchase last week, put to good use here. Lamb had to find the capital letter equilvilents to the Mary Anning themed words, and later used them again to find the missing capital letters in an information sheet about Mary Anning.

And the boys started their new tapestry kits.

This is a first try at following a pattern and it went rather well. This one here is Moo's.

We got these from http://www.sewingshack.co.uk/ and they are perfect for little hands.

As you can see the pattern is printed on to flexible plastic, making it easy for little hands to hold, control and follow. The set comes in a nice little paper bag with all the bits and bobs needed. It would make a really nice gift actually.

And here is Lamb's!