ofamily learning together

Word Hunt

Posted on February 20, 2016 by ofamily

My youngest is loving his reading at the moment, he will bring me four of his BOB readers at one go and want to sit and read all of them to me. He is really good at sounding out his words but I wanted to practice reading a few words like “the” with him in a fun way. So we came up with our word hunt game and we ended up including about 10 basic words for him.

The idea was I placed a number of word cards in the lounge / kids play area and then I would give him an instruction and he would need to find the word. Eg Leopard crawl and find the card that says “and” or slither like a snake through the tunnel and find the word “the”. And off he would go. To make this as fun as possible I included things like our tunnel (from IKEA), our small indoor trampoline, his hopper and a few other bits and bobs that we have.

He LOVED it. Honest he thought this was the best game in the world. After he had found all 10 cards he asked me to redo, so we played the game again a second and third time. By the end he was so exhausted he just lay on the lounge floor for about 15 minutes.

Ideas of what we included – slide through your tunnel like a snake, hope like a kangaroo, gallop on your horse, bounce on your hopper, fly like an eagle, jump like a frog. There are so many options and not only did my little man get to practice some word recognition he also got to do some movement and burn off some energy on a very wet miserable day.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged home ed, homeschooling, ks1 english, sight words, word hunt, word search | Leave a comment

New playdough bits and pieces that we love

Posted on February 15, 2016 by ofamily

We seem to have been in a bit of a play dough phase the last few weeks. I bought the kids two new play dough sets and they both have been big hits. The first one I actually found in a sale aisle at our local Sainsbury’s and as my son had just lost 2 teeth that past week I just could not resist buying it.

It is a mini Dentist play Doh set. Total spur of the moment purchase (largely due to the massive discount in price) but as it turns out well worth it. Both kids have spent hours creating the teeth, and giving him fillings and pretending to be a dentist. A fun way of using play dough but also a great play set for kiddies who are apprehensive about visiting the dentist. (Both my kids do not like the lights and noises at the dentist and get very tense when we go).

Our second new play dough purchase was a little packet of body parts. I have been eyeing this out for a new months and I needed another £3 to fill my basket to qualify for free shipping so it was finally purchased.

Playdough plastic body part set. Great little set which adds lots of fun to playdough

The pieces in the set are simple but they both my kids have used them over and over again to create a number of different “people”.

It is a great way of getting the kids to roll the play dough and push and pull objects in and out of the play dough – great for hand strengthening which is so important for writing.

Play dough body part set. Fun, cheap set to add to the playdough

It is also a great imaginative toy – the kids can get very creative with the people / monsters / fantasy people that they create.

Body part set for play dough. Lots of fun for kids.

And we have even used some of the people created to inspire a fun writing project – my daughter made up a story about three of the fantasy people.

Using the plastic playdough body part set to create all kinds of little monsters

Posted in sensory play | Tagged dentist, home ed, homeschooling, playdough, sensory play | 2 Comments

Making some colourful writing paper

Posted on February 9, 2016 by ofamily

The last few weeks my oldest has been going through a “writing notes” craze – not really sure what to call it. She is constantly writing little notes and making little cards for everyone in the family. Her whole face lights up when she gives someone their note or card and they read it and normally end up giving her a massive big hug. My husband and I are both really trying hard to encourage this as not only is it great for her writing and spelling but it is a great way of her expressing herself.

One of the things we thought might be fun was if we made our own colourful writing paper for her to use. The first set of writing paper was very spur of the moment and we just used our heart and flower stampers and inkpad that were lying on our kitchen table (my youngest had been using them earlier in the day).

I am actually finding that the stamps are really good for my daughter to use as she tends to always press very lightly with whatever she is doing – writing / drawing / even using her hands with play dough. But with the stamps to get a nice even result, she needs to make sure that she presses fairly hard and consistently over the stamp. They are proving great for her hand strength.

She was happy with the first attempt and used the pages. But a few days later while the kids where using the tissue paper to do something (I honestly do not know what they where trying to make), some of the tissue paper got wet and it “bleed ” onto the card. Total accident but it reminded me of reading some posts about “bleeding the tissue paper” and well, both kids thought the effect was cool. So we had a go.

We started off with watercolour paper (but we did move onto card later). We used a large paint brush to wet the paper and then the kids covered it with tissue paper. Once the paper was covered with tissue paper we made sure that all the tissue paper was wet and then we removed the wet tissue paper

The result is really cool. I think the plain coloured pages make a really good background.

We also tried some with patches of different coloured tissue paper. This is my favourite page. I love the colours and the movement.

Once the paper had dried my daughter used a few of the stamps to add some extra detail. She did not want the stamps to be bright so once she had covered the stamp with the ink she first stamped a scrap piece of paper and then stamped her background page.

I do love the end effect of the wet tissue paper and stamps together. Who needs to buy pretty writing paper when you can make your own ?

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Posted in Art and Craft Ideas | Tagged bleeding tissue paper, children's art, children's craft, Colourful writing paper, home ed, homeschooling | 3 Comments

Matching heart maths

Posted on February 4, 2016 by ofamily

I love this Matching Heart Maths Activity from Twinkl (it is part of their platinum package). We have used it in a number of different ways and my daughter still seems to enjoy it.

You can use it as a straight forward matching activity, possibly combine it with a simple sensory bin – something like what we did with the matching Stars maths or you could use it more as a cut and past type activity.

Last year we did a simple cut and past number bond type poster with it.

My daughter actually ended up adding some of her own sums.

We actually had the mini posters that she made up on her notice board for some time and she used it to double-check some of her sums.

Recently we used the exact same pages as a way of turning our addition sums into subtraction sums. This is something that my daughter has struggled with in the past but she has been very determined to work on it and keeps asking me to write out more sums for her to practice with. I thought by using the hearts we could make it a bit interesting for her.

We started off by cutting out some of the hearts and for each number we choose one sum which we stuck directly under the heart.

For each heart she would then write out what the other addition sum would be and what the two subtraction sums would be.

A simple way or reinforcing the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction but a more interesting way than just doing page after page of sums.

If you likes this you might also enjoy our older post called – flower maths

Posted in ks1 maths | Tagged addition and subtraction, Heart maths, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 maths, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Kumon My Book of Numbers 1-30

Posted on January 31, 2016 by ofamily

I am often asked – “what workbooks do the kids use ?” – honest answer – not that many actually. When I first started homeschooling I made the common mistake of going out and buying a whole bunch and well not one of the books that I bought was ever completed. Most had a few pages done before either my daughter, or myself, or both of us had enough and stashed it and well never got around to completing it.

I have since learned that my daughter would rather be given a few worksheets to do than a workbook. We now have lever arch files where she files her pages once she has completed them and she likes this. It suits us as we can do far more examples on a certain concept than the workbook might do and we can skip ahead and follow her interests (she learnt about fractions and time before any of the maths workbooks for her year would have introduced it). However having said all of that there are a few workbooks which we have found and used successfully.

She has a set of English comprehension workbooks which she is slowly working through and they always appear to be at the right level for her and they manage to maintain her interest ( I am going to do a separate post about these at a later stage). We have also used a few of the Kumon workbooks. One in particular which I used with my daughter and which my son is now using is the My Book of Numbers, 1-30 (Kumon’s Practice Books)
. It really helped my daughter with her number formation and I have been blown away at how quickly it has helped my son with his number formation. He is happily sitting down each day to do a few pages and is now so confident with his numbers that he even paints his numbers.

The book has a lot of repetition and has slow progress which in my opinion when you are learning number formation is ideal – the kids get to practice and practice their numbers. With our Kumon workbooks I actually tear the pages out and give them to the kids individually.

Here are examples of the pages in the book

In case you missed the link up above here is the Kumon number book that we have used – My Book of Numbers, 1-30 (Kumon’s Practice Books) (affiliate link).

And just in case you are wondering I have not been paid to write this and I have not been given any Kumon resources for free.