White blood cells go 'rah, rah, rah!'

The boys have been learning about blood today. Here is Lamb's blood collage. As you can see, enormous quantities of glue were used - so much so that the glue has seeped all over the pictures.

Moo in particular enjoyed learning about blood and keeps doing impressions of a white blood cell chasing after germs!

Bodies and broken bones

Hmm, does the heart go here?

Ah, no, that looks a bit better!

The boys have also been learning about broken bones...

So they've been having fun with an assortment of bandages. And if the bandages double up as skipping ropes, well that's creative play right? ;-)

Poppy seed pictures and hairy models

Yesterday poppies were the subject of our crafts once again. It is clear to me (and thankfully also to the new paediatrician who actually listens) that Lamb has quite a few sensory integration issues. Unfortunately the Occupational Therapists are so overstretched that they are taken on only the most extreme cases with most children not getting any help. This is the situation we, and many other families in the area, find ourselves in. Sensory integration is a broad subject and I know only a little, but I've been trying to provide controlled circumstances for Lamb to work on some of his sensory issues.

This is one such activity and it went surprisingly well.

The boys used glue to create a picture of a poppy. The glue had a tiny splodge of red paint in to help them see where they were putting the glue. They then had a whale of a time shaking and sprinkling poppy seeds all over their pictures and Lamb didn't mind touching the poppy seeds one bit. Result!

Later, when the pictures were dry, the boys used the textured pictures to make prints with lots of bright red paint.

Other fun for the day included the making of a hair model (from Easy Make and Do Projects: Human Body). This activity was more aimed at working on scissor and paper folding skills than learning about hair.

Moo is getting much better at controlling the scissors, and Lamb is improving his control when trying to fold to a specific line on the paper. Lamb enjoyed giving his hair a cut more than anything :)

We also made some posters about digestion for our body topic and spent some more time with Nina and her neurons learning about digestion. Both kids grasp the basic concept of why we eat and where our food goes, if not all of the finer details, which for their ages and stages is plenty enough!

Skeleton experiment

We got out the salt dough yesterday to find out why we have skeletons :)

First we all made little people with no bones, but guess what?

They kept toppling over!

So then we tried again and this time we used cocktail sticks as pretend bones inside our little people.

And hurrah! They stand up (they weren't much good at flexing though)!

So why do we have skeletons? What would happen if we had no bones??

Lamb answers in mime: tumbling to the floor in a heap,

and Moo says 'FALL OVER!'.

Poppy and orange cakes

1 cup of self raising flour
3/4 cup of brown sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup of olive oil
about 3 finely grated carrots
2 tbs poppy seeds
1/2 a squeezed orange's juice
grated zest of 1 orange

Bake at 180 degrees for about 20ish minutes. Ta-da!

To continue talking about poppies and what they represent to us in November, we continued by making these little cakes. 'Carrots mummy? Cakes?' It was like a scene straight from Peter Kay! It was also a chance for the boys to have a taste of poppy seeds, which I don't believe they've tasted before and talk about our sense of taste. Lamb didn't like the feel of the poppy seeds in his mouth, and Moo was fairly neutral about the whole thing... but at least there were yummy cakes to eat at the end of it!

Sewing poppies

Now I'm not great at taking photo's but I'm sure you get the idea!

Yesterday we used some Binkamat sheets (which are fantastic by the way!) to sew some simple lines onto our poppies and talked about why we buy poppies in November. The poppy you can see in the picture is Moo's - not bad for 3 years old I think :) He was really getting the hang of it, but decided to call it a day half way round the second line I had drawn on to the poppy for him.

We also watched some programs about our skin and the boys drew pictures of what they had learnt. In Lamb's own words: Skin helps me. Keeps out water and germs. Holds in belly, food and heart.

Heehee, I just love that last sentance!

And here are the stained-glass autumn leaves we made the other day.

Bone necklaces and autumn leaves

We've had a fun but busy day full of play-dough, marble runs, handwriting practise and episodes of Nina and the Neurons 'brilliant bodies'. We made bone necklaces at breakfast. It's a great activity for Moo's age group but is also very pertinent for Lamb as well as he needs to work on his grip strength and fine motor skills.

... and we also made some sandpaper autumn leaves from pink and green mama's blog which Moo devoted some considerable time to.

We also got around to a cut-and-stick eye labelling activity - there were some wicked eye lashes on display but I haven't photographed these!

Georgia O'Keeffe inspired

As we're doing a body topic at the moment we've taken the opportunity to look at some of Georgia O'Keeffe's bone paintings. Moo particularly loves our art time looking at famous artists. Lamb, as you can see in the picture is taking his art very seriously, but is far more interested in his art than some old artist!

Yesterday I laid out a series of different arty activities for the boys and miraculously they had both suddenly finished what they were doing. In this picture Lamb decided to use chalks to draw bones 'with clouds in the sky'. Moo also took the opportunity to paint the floor, which is why all our art time takes place on the lino!

As well as various bone based activities there I also laid out some materials to make autumn crowns, which are still drying as so much glue was used! The kids then took it all to the next level. Leaves we painted and stuck onto bone paintings, they both demanded scissors and before I knew it they had created leafy, black snowflakes... or something like that!

Brain Hats!

We started a body topic this week, and here are the proud owners of two wonderful brain hats (available to download from www.ellenjmchenry.com). We played a pass the message brain game to learn about the way the brain sends and recieves messages, but to be honest they were more interested in threading their neurons onto string!