More pictures than words

Busy, busy day. Lots of flour everywhere to write words and stick toes into. Walking through the nature reserve. Another session with Norfolk Wildlife Trust (great fun!) camouflaging caterpillars and making nests, making bug homes, planting seeds with songs and stories. Lastly a short session with the utterly brilliant Janet over in the sensory room. Lamb cannot access any O.T resources currently so this offer of sessions in the SureStart sensory room has been a blessing.

I'll leave the photos to talk for themselves today because if I'm honest I'm knackered and can't be bothered to write too much today!

More Phonics Activities!

Keeping phonics interesting and multisensory is taking quite a lot of brain power on my part!

I was pretty pleased with how this very simple activity held the boys attention.

Rainbow puffs, chocolate sauce and training chopsticks courtesy of Z-Chan...

(add a pinch of sensory exploration...)

... And voila! A novel way to focus on the 'ay' sound in written format.

We got all CRazy with the 'cr' onset. (Ha! Don't groan!) It was a shame the 'cr' cookies were kinda odd as we ran out of butter and substituted with oil, but hey-ho the kids ate them.

At the end of the day I was running out of grand ideas and resorted to a nice simple glitter session to focus on the 'in' sound. Lamb has pretty much got 'in' under his belt (and Moo is just joining in with for the fun of it really) so we didn't need to go over 'in' in too much detail.

...

We're back!

It's been a while since the last post because the boys went to their Nana's for a week besides the sea, which I hope was nice for all of us!

This week though we've been back to it and we've been focusing predominantly on the analytic phonics, which because it's not the government enforced thing is actually quite hard to find information and resources for. Ho-hum.

Because Moo is so little but eager, and because Lamb is a very hands-on gestalt learner, I've been trying to make the introduction to each onset and rime (some of which we're re-covering anyway) as

multi-sensory as I can.

We got mucky outside using the big chalks ...

which was a success I think! Both boys enjoyed it enough not to realise they were doing something entirely educational.

They both really loved cleaning up afterwards as well :)

For the 'ar' rime we did lots of printing with foam letters - which the boys enjoyed doing but just as a note:

 foam letters just aren't great for printing!

Great for getting messy though!

We also sang and acted out a little song (sung to the tune of 'the little green frog'):

'ar', 'ar' went the crow, sitting on the wall,

'ar', 'ar' went the crow one day.

'ar', 'ar' went the crow standing up tall,

he said 'ar', 'ar' as he flew away.

(Yes I know I'm not much of a song writer, LOL! It worked though.)

To practise 'th' sounds we got ourselves outside in the lovely sunshine, and spent a happy hour or so 'painting' onto the tarmac with water.

The bowl ended up pretty muddy, I can tell you! It was very sweet hearing Lamb explain to Moo why the water 'th's were disappearing :-)

The King of Tiny Things... and other stuff.

Some days are better than others. The last few days have been 'others'. Friday has arrived with a sigh of relief from mummy.

In the haze that has been this week, we've taken walks in the rain and splashed in puddles... enjoyed completely by Moo was Lamb was unsure whether this constituted 'fun' or not.

This week our literacy study has been 'The King of Tiny Things' by Jeanne Willis.

This is a really lovely story about two little girls learning to appreciate creepy crawlies when the King of Tiny Things befriends them.

Moo is making his own version of the story here. We normally do the routine story-sequencing, which was getting a bit boring. It was nice to do it a bit differently for a change.

The King of Tiny Things wears a neat little leafy crown.

And here is Lamb's leafy crown.

This was actually a sneaky math activity. Before the boys could get messy with the glue they first had to sort their leaves into seperate piles and use an identification sheet to find out what kind of leaves they had.

(er, I'm SURE I rotated it this time...)

Once they'd sorted the leaves into piles, next they had to record how many of each kind of leaf they had on a grid and then draw their results onto a bar graph. This one is Lamb's.

We've been doing bar graphs for a while now and Lamb seems to be fairly confident on drawing them up.

Aside from that we've been digging another pond, which was stupidly hard work; planting seeds (Chard and various courgettes) and reading LOTS of story books.

Thank goodness it's the weekend - the house looks like a tip and I'm more than ready for a day off from 'work'!

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!

Rhyme Monsters!

Finally the bird feeders got finished!

Today's big project was the Rhyme Monsters.

The boys painted up some cereal boxes, added some eyes, hair and tentacles and bob's your uncle!

The monsters hold a card each (which you can laminate if you haven't some how lost your laminator...ahem) and the idea is that the kids then take turns to feed the monster (through the hole cut out for the mouth) words which rhyme with the card they are holding. Lamb needs to work on his awareness of rhyme as part of his speech therapy, and it's a pretty cool activity for Moo's age too.

The activity worked well for Lamb. Keeping to only 2 options really helped him to focus and understand what was being asked of him, and the results were good. For almost all of the words Lamb correctly identified which monster to feed :)