ofamily learning together

Learning Posters

Posted on April 25, 2017 by ofamily

I was recently asked about some of the posters that we have hanging up in the house (someone asked after spotting a few of them in some of my photos). I do change the posters from time to time but I will share what we have up now and what we recently had up.

The cork board above the kids desks is in the room with large sliding doors that open onto our garden so it tends to be the home of our British Garden Bird Poster – British Birds – Educational Poster (40x60cm). The kids love this poster and will often check back if they are not 100% sure about the bird they have spotted (although I am noticing that as they get better at identifying the birds they are using it less and less).

We also tend to have Maths goodies up here. At one stage we had the 2, 4, 8 times table poster up (Twinkl platinum), but these days we have the 9 times table poster up (also Twinkl platinum) and we have some skip counting numbers for my youngest – Individual skip counting posters (free to download from Twinkl).

We also have a board up in our kitchen. At the moment this board has a Measurement Poster that I bought – Metric Units and Measurement Educational Poster 40x60cm (this is great for lots of ongoing discussions about everyday life),

a fraction, decimal and percentage poster, (Twinkl Platinum)

the Days of the Week and a mini number words poster. In the past we have also had the 0-200 number poster and the Clock up here (The clock is currently stuck onto the side of a bookshelf).

The cork board in the kid’s bedroom use to be full of Afrikaans items (our 2nd language) but recently we changed this to the Common Word Posters. We did this for my youngest as he likes practicing reading his words in the evening before he goes to sleep. These common word posters have really increased his reading confidence and word recognition speed. (We do a mix of phonics and sight words, I believe understanding the phonic sounds helps the kids with their spelling but I also think being able to recognise high frequency words quickly helps them with their reading. It is a combination that has worked really well with my daughter).

Maybe you are wondering why we have the posters scattered around the house ? Both our children are visual learners and they activity look at the posters, read them and talk about them on a regular basis. Having said that we are very aware about cluttering the boards as too much is very overwhelming especially for my daughter. My daughter also does not like being rushed when she is learning something. So I have found that after we introduce something it is often best to leave it and give her time to process. While she is processing, she will read up about whatever the topic is, write, draw, figure out stuff herself around the topic (we have lots of maths manipulative scattered around the house which the kids have free access it) and then she will come back to me with a bunch of related questions and we will revisit the topic. This works really well for her and we have found that having posters up around the topic helps with this. So we recently talked about decimals (hence the fractions, decimal, percentage poster is up), also she only has two more times tables left to practice – the 9 times and 12 times – so the 9 times table poster is up.

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Posted in Home education resources | Tagged British Birds, Education Posters, home education, Home education resources, homeschooling, Maths resources | Leave a comment

How Plants Work – a stunning children’s book

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ofamily

Earlier this year I spotted this children’s book at Costco and grabbed it – How Plants Work. We already had one of the books in the series – How the Weather Works – so I was fairly confident it would be another good book to add it our bookshelf. And I was not wrong. It is a stunning children’s book, filled with gorgeous pictures, lots of flaps and popping up trees ad flowers. The kids enjoy it and it is very informative. I bought ours from Costco UK for £6.99, I have not seen it in our local bookstore but I have spotted it on Amazon UK here – How Plants Work.

How Plants Work, a stunning children's book which deals with plants, how they grow and what we use them for

The book starts with Why do plants have flowers (and has a stunning pop up flower in the middle which my daughter loves).

How Plants Work. A stunning children's book all about plants

Then it moves onto How do plants grow from tiny seeds.

And What do plants feed on. This includes an explanation about how roots and leaves work aswell as a section about carnivorous plants (I was not expecting this but my kids love the fact these plants were included).

Next is How do plants defend themselves and then Where do Plants Live. My son really likes this page as he likes knowing where animals and plants live, so this helped him put some of it into context.

How Plant Work, a children's plant book by Templar which includes a section on Where do Plants Live

Why are trees so important – this stunning page has a massive popping out tree and the tree has flaps. This page amazes me, the way the tree pops up and then the kids turn the flaps back to see what creatures are making a home in the tree, really well thought-out and designed.

Why are Trees so important - a double page in the How Plants Work Book

Then it is on to What are the World’s Weirdest plants, What plants end up on your plate and How do we use plants.

I Love this book. It is really well designed with lots of pop ups and flaps that keep my kids engaged while they are learning all about plants. The text is not detailed but together with the pictures it is very informative.

The kids and I recommend this book and think it is a great addition to a plant project/topic.

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Posted in Book Ideas | Tagged children's book, educational books, flowers, home education, homeschooling, plants, science for kids | 1 Comment

Year 1 Grammar book we are using

Posted on April 20, 2017 by ofamily

In February I mentioned that we had received a set of Schofield & Sims Grammar books so I thought it was time to give a more detailed review of one of the books we have been using, the Grammar 1 book. My daughter has been doing some of the exercises in the older books (combination of Grammar 3 and Grammar 4) and whenever she is busy her younger brother likes to join in with his own activity. This set has been perfect for that, as all the books in the set have the same style to them so he feels like he is doing “real big work” when he completes a page in his Grammar 1 book.

What is included in the Grammar 1 book (47 Pages in total) –

Sentences – using Capital letters and Full stops (they cover this over a number of pages).

Joining basic sentences with “and”.

Adding s and ed to make plurals.

Questions.

Verb endings (ing / ed / er).

Describing words.

Adding “un” to a word.

As with all the Grammar books they have 3 double revision pages in the book as well as 3 different writing tasks.

Grammar 1 is the first in this series so there is not as much writing as in the older books, sometimes the kids just tick a box, circle a word, underline a word or just need to write one word down.

But there are some instances where they need to rewrite a sentence (nothing too complicated), however my son still writes his letters rather large and he did battled to fit everything on the space provided.

This was not a big issue as I just gave him a separate piece of paper and instead of writing in the book on the line provided he used his piece of paper. For us this meant he could still complete the assigned task but he did not have to stress over trying to reduce the size of his letters but could rather focus on getting his letter formation correct. He was happy with this work around as he knew the answers and wanted the satisfaction of finishing the pages.

I do like the content in the book, I like the way it is broken down and the simple explanations at the top of each page are concise. My youngest is enjoying the fact that he has his own workbook and I must admit I am enjoying that fact that I do not need to spend as much time in the evenings looking for English activities for him.

We still have a number of pages left in the book and we are not rushing him through the book, we are go slowly at this pace but I am confident that when we have finished this book we will continue with the series and move onto the Grammar 2 pupil book.

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Posted in Home education resources | Tagged english, english resources, Grammar books, home ed, home education, Home education books, homeschooling | Leave a comment

Spring Flower Hunt

Posted on April 12, 2017 by ofamily

I love getting out in Spring. The weather is warmer, the flowers come out and the colours just feel so alive after winter. Recently we bought a membership to the RHS Gardens (UK) and the kids and I have been making good use of it.

My daughter is keen to learn more about plants so we took advantage of the warmer weather and did a Spring Flower Hunt (part of the paid for Platinum pages from Twinkl).

We have done colour hunts / season themed hunts / minibeast hunts before but never a flower hunt. The kids loved it.

Initially my youngest was just trying to match the flowers on colour so I showed him he needed to look at other details like the shape of the petals and how the leaves look. He happily started doing that. And when he found a flower he thought might match he would call his sister over and the two would decided together.

What I also really liked about the flower hunt was while the kids were walking around looking they naturally started reading the flower signs that were in the garden. And they did not just read the names they started reading the details about the different plants. So even though lots of the flowers were not on our list the kids still ended up learning about them.

And then just when I was getting ready to go and get a coffee my youngest noticed I had a colour hunt page in my bag (I actually had this colour checklist page with me for a completely different idea but when the kids get on a learning roll I adjust my plans and follow their lead). So the two rascals quickly had a go at making sure they had spotted all the colours while we were out. And my youngest pointed out that the only black he had spotted was actually man-made signs, he thought this was interesting as mommy (me) is always telling them that the shadows are not always pitch black but darker shades of colours.

And my daughter had a great time taking photographs of the flowers, she was talking about using her photographs to make her own flower hunt list for our next visit (but to be honest by the time we got home she was exhausted – the venue was crowded with lots of school children on holiday and although she manages the outings like a pro these days by the time she gets home she needs quite a bit of time to get over the sensory overload – maybe over the weekend I will remind her of the idea to make her own flower hunt list).

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Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged colour hunt, flowers, home education, homeschooling, plants, spring | 2 Comments

Easter Eggs on our sliding doors

Posted on April 7, 2017 by ofamily

Yes the title is correct we have Easter Eggs on our sliding doors.

We have done a version of this activity a few times already but it is such a great activity for a number of reasons so we had another go but this time using Easter Eggs. The Easter eggs that we used are these ones – Easter Eggs Templates from Twinkl (part of their classic package). I taped a few up on the outside of our sliding doors using masking tape and then we got out our STABILO 3-in-1 pencils and some water and the kids had a go at tracing over the templates.

The STABILO 3-in-1 pencils are perfect for this type of activity as they wipe off the glass very easily afterwards. And for younger children they are a nice thick shape which really helps them get their pencil grip correct. (We have used ours a LOT over the 5 years that we have had them – HUGE FANS).

The main reason why I wanted to do this was from an OT angle. Our Occupational Therapist is always encouaging us to do activities where the kids are writing / drawing with their arms raised eg on a wall, as it is a way of working on their shoulder strength.

One thing I must mention about this activity is you are not always going to get perfectly neat drawings.

It is a fun tracing activity where the kids get to write on sliding door or windows. We never go into this with an idea that the drawings are going to be detailed and neat, there are going to be some smudges and it can be hard to trace the shapes perfectly but we make that part of the fun.

Also my youngest loves wiping off the drawings and then redoing them which is REALLY good for his shoulder strength but it does tend to leave dirty streaks on the glass. For me the dirty looking streaks are not a big deal as I know he is doing a very useful activity and more importantly he is having fun while he strengthens his shoulders so I live with the dirty streaks on my sliding doors. And I leave them there for a few days as he will often come back and add to his pictures.