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Learning with K’NEX

Posted on August 25, 2017 by ofamily

We have just recently discovered the wonderful world of K’Nex sets and Wow my kids LOVE them ! I have been eyeing out K’Nex for some time but I kept putting off buying any sets as I thought my youngest (6 years old) would end up getting frustrated with them. But he didn’t get frustrated, he loves building with K’Nex and has already asked if he can get more sets for his birthday.

The kids were sent two K’Nex Educational STEM sets – K’NEX Education Exploring Machine Set for Ages 8+ Construction Educational Toy, 1432 Pieces and K’NEX Education Intro to Simple Machines Gears Set for Grades 3-5 Engineering Education Toy, 198 Pieces. The Educational sets come with the normal K’Nex goodies and they also include special pieces so that the kids can create the different designs which explain the concepts.

The Levers & Pulleys set comes with a booklet which has designs for 7 different builds (my kids have already done 6 of the 7 in the booklet and all have been totally manageable for them). By simply following the instructions in the booklet, building the items and then playing around with the designs a bit both kids have really started to understand the concepts.

One of the builds included in the Levers & Pulley set was a Balance.

After it was built my youngest played around with it, he adjusted the weights on the different sides and he played with want happens when the weights are moved closer along the arm. The more he experimented the more he started to understand how it worked. And he was able to predict what was going to happen every time he made an adjustment.

My daughter is not someone who normally enjoys building but once she got started she wanted to build design after design and the more she built the more confident she became. She now LOVES her K’Nex and keeps asking me to download more designs from their website.

The Levers & Pulley set was a great introduction to both K’Nex itself and also how important basic levers and pulleys are in everyday designs.

The Gears Building Set was the second set we were sent and it upped the excitement level for both kids.

With the first build (the kids called it the windmill) I did have to help them with the gears, mainly because they had never built anything with gears before and did not fit the two together properly.

But once I showed them how the two wheels needed to fit together they were fine.

We also went onto the K’Nex website and downloaded the extra pages that go with the gears set and the kids choose to make the Eggbeater. They loved it (I do actually have an eggbeater just like that one). They loved the fact that the gears allowed it to move exactly the same as the one that I have.

You can actually download experiment worksheets off the K’Nex website to go along with this set (which we have downloaded) but we have not done them yet as the kids are still very much just playing around with building the designs and understanding how all the pieces fit together.

The two Educational sets that we were sent have been such big hits with the whole family that we have bought the kids a Model Building set (K’NEX Imagine 52 Model Building Set for Ages 7+, Engineering Education Toy, 618 Pieces) and the kids have built and built. I must be honest I have been blown away with how my six-year old has managed the designs. He has built some fairly complicated designs and the only help he has needed is when he has to take everything apart (it can be hard to unclasp some of the pieces).

And yes I am going to be buying the kids more K’Nex in the future – more general model building sets and A LOT more of the Educational sets – both kids are keen for more gears and my youngest is eyeing out the Maker Kit Wheels Set.

I have really been impressed with out first introduction to K’Nex and their Educational sets. It is hands-on learning at its best and is great for kids who love building things (my youngest) as well as for more reluctant builders (my daughter).

We were sent the Levers & Pulley set as well as the Gears set in exchange for us writing an honest review about the sets.

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Posted in Home education resources | Tagged Basic Machines, Gears, home education, homeschooling, K'NEX, Levers & Pulleys, science, STEM | 2 Comments

Extending our 3D shape activities into drawing

Posted on August 23, 2017 by ofamily

Over the last month the kids have been using their Dive into Shapes set a lot. Playing around with 3D shapes, adding shapes together to create new shapes and making some very unusual creative designs (ie mom talk for some strange shape building). So I thought it might be fun to show the kids how to draw the 3D shapes and help them recreate some of the shapes onto paper.

We started off by creating each shape using the rods and connectors from our Dive Into Shapes set.

Then we would chat about what 2D shapes they could see inside the 3D shape – are there squares, triangles, rectangles etc and how are they combined – straight lines or curved lines. And then we just started drawing and talking about why their different attempts were not quite working and how we could “fix them”.

To help my youngest I did get some graph paper out and we practice drawing the shapes using different colours – so all the vertical lines were red and all the horizontal lines were blue.

It seemed to help and after doing a few of these colourful practice shapes he was quite able to create them by himself.

And after just a little bit of practice they started using their 3D shapes to create objects

And yes not all the lines are quite right yet but after just a short drawing session they were both creating 3D shapes with ease and experimenting with ways of using them.

I am a firm believer that when the kids get to play around by building shapes they start to understand how the angles and lines fit together and I do believe that the more they understand the way the shapes are formed the more they will be able to translate that understanding into their drawings.

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Posted in Art and Craft Ideas | Tagged 3D shapes, Children's drawing, drawing 3D shapes, home education, homeschooling, learning resources | 1 Comment

When story books become readers

Posted on August 22, 2017 by ofamily

I love that stage when the kids realise they can read their old story books and suddenly they end up replacing “readers” with fun kids story books. Over the summer my son went through that stage and I must admit the entire family has been enjoying it. His confidence in his reading ability has rocketed, he is now trying all kinds of new books and his older sister is really enjoying having favourite old story book read back to her by her younger brother.

Reading old favourite story books as readers

So I thought I would share some of the books that have become favourite readers for my son.

A Set of four seasonal story books – Owl’s Winter Rescue, Rabbit’s Spring Adventure, Mouse’s Summer Muddle and Squirrel’s Autumn Search. This is lovely set of books which I read to the kids when they were much younger and they just stayed tucked away in the bookshelf until my youngest rediscovered them.

Ark Adventures. We bought this set from The Bookpeople many years ago. It was one of the first set of books that my daughter found her reading confidence with and now my son is also loving the stories.

Ark Adventures. A stunning series about Noah and his animals

Thomas. My son went through a massive Thomas phase for a few years so we have a couple of Thomas books but he has not shown any interested in them for over a year. But about a week ago he realised he could manage most of the stories in this book and he has completely rediscovered his love for the Thomas stories.

Aliens Love Underpants and Thomas' Favourite Tales

Oh and another classic – Aliens Love Underpants – he loves reading this to us.

Lighthouse Keeper stories. My youngest can not quite manage these by himself yet. But my daughter loved these stories so she is rereading them to him and he follows word for word (my daughter actually tests him by leaving out a word every once a while to make sure he is following – he loves this as he gets to “correct” her).

The Lighthouse Keeper's series is a lovely set of children's book which also make great readers

I am really loving these new phase as let’s be honest Kids readers can be a bit on the boring side and these story books are a lot more entertaining.

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Posted in Book Ideas | Tagged books, home education, homeschooling, ks1 english, readers, story books | Leave a comment

Bond Spelling and Vocabulary Workbooks

Posted on August 21, 2017 by ofamily

It is that time of the year again when lots of home educators are looking at which workbooks to use for the new upcoming academic year so I wanted to share some thoughts and photos on the Bond Spelling books (UK based) that we are using with my daughter (aged 9).

And yes I know as home educators we do not need to worry about SATS and I know the books have SATs written broadly on the front cover but for me that just means they tie into the UK curriculum. My daughter wanted to work on her spelling and she wanted to able to do so independently, she wanted somewhere where she got get spelling lists that she could learn and build on. She also likes workbooks that are not too cluttered or too distracting in terms of bright colours everywhere. So for her these look like a good option.

So what is inside these books ?

Each book is broken down into 10 units. Each unit is split over 4 pages. And as you progress through the units the spellings do get harder. Each page includes 2 or 3 activities (like word search, completing sentences, looking for patterns in words) and on each page there is a spelling list (normally 16 words). So that means one unit would include 64 spellings – wow that initially surprised me. But when we started looking at the books my daughter noticed that there were quite a few words that she already knew how to spell in the list and words that were very similar. Plus as she was working through the books herself she could either do one unit very quickly or take her time on the units that she struggled with. (Plus all the workbooks do include the answers in the middle of the book)

The 8-9 book starts off with spellings like – bed, bat, egg, oak but then builds up to harder words. Examples of some of the activities in the 8-9 book are below

and by the time they get to unit 10 the spellings are a bit harder (although I do think they build the spellings up nice and gradually I didn’t think there was a massive jump between any of the units).

The 9-10 book (this is the one she is working through at the moment).

There are some words that are new to her but there are also a lot that are just revision for her. And for me one of the big things about this book is she is learning new words but because the new spellings are mixed in with words she can already spell she is not getting discouraged. In fact I would say it is boosting her confidence.

The 10-11 workbook – we have not done anything out of this one yet but it looks like it is the same format with a mix of words I know my daughter can already spell and new words. And the same sort of activities as the other two workbooks – word searches, complete the sentence, scrambled up words etc.

The 10 -11+ stretch workbook does contain harder words that the 10 -11 book.

They do have a whole range of different English and Maths workbooks in the BOND series but for now the Spelling and vocabulary books are the only ones we have looked at, if you want to see example of their other workbooks have a look here – Oxford University Press

I hope that the photos help some of you when you are choosing your new workbooks.

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Posted in Home education resources | Tagged Bond workbooks, home education, homeschooling, Spelling and Vocabulary, workbooks | Leave a comment

Rainbow Fraction Bingo

Posted on August 18, 2017 by ofamily

One of our ongoing “topics” at the moment is fractions. We have been trying to do fun activities that reinforce my son’s understanding of fractions. Just trying to bring them into our normal everyday life so that spotting something is a third becomes second nature for him. I don’t want fractions to be something that is strange but rather something that is totally normal and not scary. And this game has been a great addition to our fraction activities.

The game is not complicated, it is bingo but bingo using fractions. The set comes with 4 double-sided bingo cards, game markers (circle star cards) and a double-sided spinner. The game has two levels (one side of the bingo cards has a purple background so you use the purple side of the spinner with these ones and the other side of the bingo cards has a blue background so you use the blue side of the spinner with these). Level 1 is basic fraction recognition.

$Rainbow Fraction Bingo game Board from Learning Resources. helps kids to practice recognising fractions$

The kids spin the spinner and then call out the fraction that the arrow is pointing at.

If you have a picture depicting that fraction on your bingo card you place one of the star cards over it and then the next player spins the spinner.

You continue until someone gets three stars in a line.

Really straight forward but great for kids who needed to practice both recognising fractions and calling the fractions by the correct name (eg if the spinner points at 1 over three they need to say one-third ).

$Rainbow Fraction Bingo game from Learning resources. Level 1 is great or recognising fractions$

My youngest enjoyed the challenge of getting the three stars in a line and I must admit that the more he played it the quicker he got at finding the correct fractions.

Level 2 is Equivalent Fractions.

Exactly the same game but now when the arrow points at 4/8 the kids need to work out that it is the same as 1/2 and then place the star marker on the 1/2 picture.

I had intended to just play the Equivalent fraction level with my daughter but my youngest had enjoyed level 1 so much that he really wanted to join in. (I have not really covered equivalent fractions with my youngest yet but he does sit at the table when his older sister is doing her Maths so I am aware that a lot of what she is learning does go in, as he often asks me questions about something that she has been doing).

So to help him we got out our fraction towers and I showed him how he could work out the Equivalent Fractions by seeing if 4 pieces of the eighth tower added together would be the same height as the 1/3 piece or the 1/2 piece. He liked this and happily joined in (we did need to give him a bit of time to match the pieces together every time we spun the arrow but both his sister and I were happy to do that as we like being able to include him).

$Rainbow Fraction Bingo game. Using the Equivalent fraction Tower pieces to help the younger kids work out the answer$

As we played the game he listened to how his sister would work out the Equivalent Fractions, by dividing the fraction by 2 or 3 etc and after some time he stopped using the fraction tower pieces and started doing the division himself.

So in the end a simple fraction recognition game not only allowed my youngest to practice some basic fractions but it helped him understand equivalent fractions and try some basic division. (And yes I know part of that is the fact that his older sister is so good at including him and explaining to him what she is learning and showing him little tricks to make things easier for him).

My oldest actually said “This is a fun way to practice fractions.” So I think it is safe to say that the Rainbow Fraction Bingo game has been a hit both with the kids and with me – any game/ activity that helps my kids understand Maths is a winner in my books. And yes we will be playing it more in the future so that we can practice and so that the kids can get quicker at recognising the Equivalent Fractions.

You can buy the Rainbow Fraction Bingo game on Amazon Learning Resources Rainbow Fraction Bingo

I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

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