ofamily learning together

Digging for words

Posted on July 23, 2016 by ofamily

I love it when we get to use and reuse the cards and goodies that I laminate and cut out for the kids. The free what’s in the box cards from Twinkl have been one of these that we have used over and over again. We used them as a straightforward match the correct word to the correct picture activity, my son has traced over the words with his STABILO woody 3in1 Wallet of 10 colours – Multi-talented pencil(they wipe off laminated card), we have used them as a spot the vowel activity and this week we used them in a sensory tub as a digging for words activity.

I enjoy including sensory bins whenever I can with the kids learning as they get to have sensory input while they are learning something so it always feels like a win win activity to me. We have used sensory tubs with a letter hunt (for my son) and some number bond maths (for my daughter) and word hunts (with my daughter) so I thought it was time my youngest got to do his own word hunt.

I made sure our bean tub was nice and full and I removed all the extra goodies that always seems to end up in the bean tub – my kids keep their bean tub in their bedroom so small animal toys often end up hidden inside it. Then I hide the words in the tub and left the pictures on top. I left the tub in the middle of the sitting room floor and waited for my youngest to discover it. My youngest likes to discover activities for himself.

He started off by setting out all the picture cards on the floor next to the bean tub and then started searching for the words.

As he found the words, he would sound them out and then try to blend the sounds together to get the correct word. He battled with queen, so it helped that there were pictures to guide him (again he likes to do the activity by himself so it helps if there are pictures guiding him along the correct path).

He did really well and did not stop until he had found a word for each picture.

Our bean tub is much used and loved in our house, it is a combination of a number of beans – including black beans, red beans, kidney beans, butter beans and corn (we originally also had split peas in the tub but they proved a bit of a nightmare for me as they ended up everywhere and drove me slightly crazy, so one night while both kiddies were sleeping the split peas vanished.)

I have included an affiliate link in this post. 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 be the same.

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Posted in ks1 English | Tagged home ed, home education, learning letters and sounds, sensory play, sight words | 2 Comments

Baking Scones is a tactile activity

Posted on July 22, 2016 by ofamily

Both my gorgeous kiddies are tactile defensive so from a very early age we have been using baking as an activity for them to “get their hands messy” and experiment with textures that they would normally avoid like the plague.

We started with very basic store-bought baking mixes where the kids would add a few extras in, maybe an egg or pour some milk and then they would need to mix it.

Now whenever a recipe says it needs to be mixed I interoperate that as – Kids use your hands to mix it all together. Which is why starting with the basic store-bought mixes really suited my daughter, she needed to build up her confidence very slowly. So once we found a mixture that she was happy to mix with her hands and enjoyed eating it afterwards we stuck with it for a little while. For her this repetition was key. Just trying a tactile activity once is not enough, she needs to do it a number of times so that her body learns it is not sore. My daughter feels the softest thing as something sore (example drizzle on her skin is a very sore sensation for her which she needed to learn by repetition was not actually hurting her body). Once she got confident with her current mix we would move onto a another one, slowly building them up so that they included more ingredients and more textures.

And then we branched out onto our own recipes. We found a few that she loved baking and even 3 years later she sill asks for her favourite recipes, only now she does them almost all from scratch (I still work the oven for her and have to help her with tough dough mixes).

When she started helping me make date balls she would only roll 3 date balls into the coconut. The date ball mixture is very gooey and it is these gooey type textures that both my kids still struggle touching. But over time she has progressed from just rolling 3 or 4 date balls to almost managing the whole mixture. Lots of repetition but that repetition has helped her “train herself” (trying to find a good phrase).

She is now progressing to the point where she can do a few recipes all by herself.

Her younger brother also enjoys baking but he normally does not sticks around for the whole process. He tends to choose when to join in and when to exist. He also has a few favourites – without a doubt the animal footprint biscuits are his favourite.

With him I try to get him to be present with the dough mixing and I have found that baking scones (from a store-bought mix) is just the right activity for him at this stage. It is not too long a process, so he normally is involved the whole time and he loves rubbing the dough together plus he gets to eat the scones afterwards and he LOVES scones.

I am happy to resort back to store-bought scone mixes for him as both he and his sister will spend ages rubbing the dough together and it is an excellent tactile activity for both kids. Think play dough but with more texture. And if you watch the way their fingers are working in that dough you just know that it is an excellent activity for strengthening those little fingers which helps with their writing.

When I bake with the kids it is all about their experience and enjoyment – yes baking something from scratch is great (and my daughter is at that stage). But for my younger son he is just not at that stage yet but store-bought scone mixes are perfect for him. And let’s be totally honest we all get to eat yummy scones afterwards

If you are in the UK are two favourite scone mixes are the Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s branded ones

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Posted in Baking with Kids | Tagged baking with children, home ed, home education, sensory play, sensory processing disorder | Leave a comment

Letter stencils

Posted on July 20, 2016 by ofamily

We have been having so much fun with our lower case letter stencils that I thought it was time I put everything in a post. We have used them as individual letters and we have combined the letters to make up words (some nonsense words as well). They have ended up being a great addition to my son’s letter and sound learning that he has been doing.

Although my son does know his letters he can still get a bit confused by a few of them (b and d as well as i and j seem to be the main issues) so we had some fun painting over the letters. I have found with both kids, when they can actually pick up and feel the shape of the letters it helps them to get the letter formation correct. So using the letters and just painting over them randomly was a great for my youngest as he was constantly holding the letters, placing them down and picking them up afterwards. (In the photo below he is using these 12 Paint Dabbers)

We also did lots of tracing around the letters on pretty paper. We started off using our rainbow paper for this. I am a big fan of the kids using stencils to trace as it encourages them to use both hands together.

And the kids got even more creative and made some of their own dotty paper with their dot markers.

My daughter also got involved with the letter stencils and used some of the dotty paper and some of her special home-made writing paper to create two words which she has been really battling to spell. Not sure what it is about these two words but she just can not get them right so she came up with the idea that she would use the stencils to create the words and stick them up on boards around the house so that she could see them everyday.

Oh and we used our lovely blow marker pens (bought from target in the UK). The kids loved using these pens with the stencils.

They did a number of words with these pens and they did it on more than one occasion (the real test in our house – if an activity has been a hit with the kids – they will do it again).

And with my love of collages we naturally had a go at doing some word collages – anything could be used but as we are going through a bit of a magic maize phase our letter collages ended up looking a lot like this.

Two points about the stencils that we used. It helps to stick the stencils down onto the paper while the kids are tracing over them / painting etc. For this we found it easiest to just use a bit of blue tack

Also these stencils are plastic so everything that we have used has just wiped off. The letters have been covered in many different types of paint and felt tip pens and so far nothing has stained the letters.

The lower case stencils that we used in the post were given to use by Baker Ross.

I do get sent parcels of Baker Ross goodies for the kids to use but I also buy from the website on a regular basis.

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Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged children's craft, home ed, home education, learning letters and sounds, sight words | 4 Comments

Enkl just for fun

Posted on July 17, 2016 by ofamily

As a home-educating mom I can be guilty of always trying to link our crafts to a topic and when I find a fun looking craft I do sometimes save it with the idea that it will be great for when we learn about x topic. But this weekend my daughter and I had a go at making some of the Twinkl Enkl crafts just for fun. No topic linked in. Just us printing off some pages that we thought looked cute.

We had a go at the Enkl safari animals and an Enkl desk organiser (The Enkl range is part of their paid for premium package).

My daughter loved the idea of the desk tidy so we started with that. She choose the fox but once we had printed it all out she got very confused so I did most of the desk tidy while she focused on the Safari peg animals. She does love the end result of the fox desk tidy and has already asked if I could make another one for the kids table (I think the fox desk tidy looks good on my desk).

The Enkl safari peg animals were much easier for my daughter, she managed the cutting and most of the folding (she did get a bit confused with the two different types of folds but once I helped her finish the first animal and showed her how to do it she was fine). And she thinks they are super cute – hence all the photographs.

And my youngest thinks they make “cool animal toys”

As part of the Twinkl blogger network I have been given access to their premium range.

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Posted in Art and Craft Ideas | Tagged african animals, crafts, enkl, Twinkl | 1 Comment

Foam dice, hopscotch mat and a whiteboard

Posted on July 14, 2016 by ofamily

This last week we have been taking it slow. My daughter did an amazing job performing in a ballet show over the weekend but now she needs to unwind. She managed the whole weekend without sensory issues, which was huge for us (full post about that coming soon), but I have since picked up a few subtle clues that now she needs to just rest and process it all.

So our normal home-education activities have taken a backseat and we have been relaxing at home however the kids have still managed to create their own learning activities. Learning activities that has been spurred on by them and driven by them.

We got out our old foam hopscotch mat (bought it about 4 years ago from Tesco) and the kids started a game of throwing their foam dice (bought last week from Target in the UK) on the mat and working out what the combination of the number on the dice and the number on the foam mat was.

My youngest needed to write out the sums so I got our old whiteboard out for him to use.

And naturally if one sibling is doing it the other one just has to join in – so my oldest also started writing out her sums.

And as always he kept looking at how she was writing her sums and he noticed that she sometimes wrote her sums in columns, so he asked her why and she explained that when you have numbers with tens in them using columns makes it easier, so he had a go. (Love that he learns so much from his big sister).

But she quickly started complaining that her sums were too easy. So I suggested why not try throwing multiple dice and see where they land. And she did and she started creating longer sums.

And then without any prompting she started turning some of her longer sums into multiplication sums.

I left them to do as many as they wanted and when they had enough they naturally moved onto something else, although my youngest did instruct me to leave everything on the floor as he wanted to come back to it later (and he did).

Update – We have now moved onto using this to work out which numbers are greater than or less than. He throws two dice and we work out the total of each dice (add the number of the dice to the number it lands on) and then he tells me which way the crocodile mouth should face (ie which of the two numbers that he calculated is great than or less than)