ofamily learning together

A quick and easy flower shop

Posted on April 28, 2015 by ofamily

We do not buy trays of cupcakes often but we recently had a little party with the grandparents and the kids asked for store-bought cupcakes. The tray that the cupcakes came in reminded me of the flower trays that you see in garden centers. So naturally we had to have a go at using our tray. I mentioned the idea to my daughter and she jumped on board.

The flowers below are from the lovely people at Twinkl. They are stunning. Honestly my photos do not do these ones justice. We printed the flowers on card, laminated them and cut them out. (The flowers are actually from a flower number game which is platinum on Twinkl)

The play dough that I made is from The Imagination Tree (this recipe is simple and easy to make.) The tray is our recycled cupcake tray

My daughter ended up filling up the tray and still wanted more flowers for her shop so we “borrowed” the mini flower pots that we were supposed to be using for an art project and we used some of the colourful store-bought play dough from my daughters ice-cream shop.

She also dug out her flower price labels. (There are a number of different versions of these flower price labels on Twinkl both are free – one with white letter writing and one with black letter writing). We store all of the role-playing pages and labels in a box on the kids bookshelf and as a result they tend to use and reuse the pages in a number of different play scenarios.

Here is what her flower shop ended up looking like

and a close up of some of those lovely flowers.

I really love these flowers I think I am going to have to find a way of using them in an art project soon.

Posted in Homeschooling, sensory play | Tagged flower shop role playing, flowers, home ed, homeschooling, play dough, playdough, role playing, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Hunting for letters and shapes

Posted on April 23, 2015 by ofamily

We have been having some fun hiding shapes and letters lately. This is actually an activity that my daughter’s Occupation Therapsit recommended for her to do a couple of years ago so I thought it would be a good one to do with my son.

We started off by hiding some plastic shapes in a small denim bag that we have (you could also use a pillow case).

I made sure I had two of each shape. We placed one set of the shapes in the bag and left the other set outside the bag. My son had to place his hand in the bag, find a shape and then guess which shape he was holding (no looking).

My son was so excited when he guessed the correct shape. he kept asking to try again and again.

I thought based on the success of the shape hunt we would try something similar with our magnetic letters. I hid a bunch of the letters in the denim bag and then they had to find a letter, guess which letter it was and then match it to their letter cards. I initially set this up for my son but his excitement at guessing the correct letter was so infectious that my daughter could not resist joining us.

Once they identified the magnetic letter correctly they would match it to their letter cards (FREE on Twinkl – we have been using these letter cards a lot lately).

This ended up being a really fun way of practicing our letters.

Posted in foundation stage, Homeschooling | Tagged home ed, homeschooling, learning letters and sounds, letter cards, shape search, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Making our own money peg cards

Posted on April 21, 2015 by ofamily

We have been using our play money a lot lately with our role-playing so I thought we would try to make our own money peg cards. (If you have never used peg cards before we love them – the kids select the correct answer and then place a clothes peg on the correct answer – see photo at the bottom of the post)

We used the blank peg card template which is FREE from Twinkl (we used this same template when we made our number peg cards) and the British money cut-outs (gold from Twinkl). I did the cutting out before hand as I wanted my daughter to focus on doing the money calculations.

My daughter selected the coins and glued them onto the template then she worked out what the correct answer would be, she wrote that in one of the blocks at the bottom and then wrote two other incorrect answers in the other two blocks.

Once she had finished making her cards I laminated and cut them out for her. She was very proud of the final result and has asked if she can try to make some more tomorrow.

I love the fact that she practiced her maths and writing and made something that she is proud of.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged British money for kids, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 maths, money maths, peg cards, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Dinosaur Dig and Dinosaur stick puppets

Posted on April 20, 2015 by ofamily

My kids fascination with Dinosaurs is still going strong so I thought it was time we had a little Dinosaur dig of our own. There are lots of different ideas on how to make these fossils on Pinterest. I played around a bit with the quantities and ended up using 1/2 cup salt to our 1 cup flour and 1 cup water. I used the kids toy dinosaurs to make impressions into the salt dough mixture and then baked them in our oven for around 25 mins.

I hid them in the kids sand table.

I could not resist adding the Dinosaur Dig banner from Twinkl (gold) and then I left it for the kids to discover by themselves.

They had a great time hunting for the different fossils (lots of shouting when they found one)

My youngest starting asking lots of questions about the different fossils so we moved inside and we started looking at the stunning Dinosaur fossil display photos (also gold on Twinkl). The word cards in the picture are actually the Dinosaur museum topic word cards (gold on Twinkl) I printed these out a while ago for a different activity and they where perfect to use with the fossil display photos.

The dinosaur skeletons we found at a local toy shop a couple of months ago.

And with all the dinosaur dig activities going on it only seemed naturally that it spill over into our art. My daughter has been making her brother a decopatch T-Rex (still a work in progress). We bought ours at Crafty Crocodiles in the UK.

And we also made some decopatch stick puppets. We used the Dinosaur shadow puppet template (yes Twinkl gold again) and some of our Decopatch paper.

These turned out really well and both kids have enjoyed using them in their dinosaur stories.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged Dinosaur dig, Dinosaur fossils, Dinosaur stick puppets, Dinosaurs, home ed, homeschooling, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Paper flowers for Granny and Grandpa

Posted on April 13, 2015 by ofamily

The kids are now officially in overdrive waiting for granny and grandpa to arrive. They have been trying to help me get the guest bedroom ready (well not sure if it is really help or more like causing chaos) and we thought it would be nice to put some flowers on the window sill. Well, they thought it would be nice and I thought it might keep them busy for a few minutes so I could finish some cleaning.

We used the Mothers Day Cut-out flowers printout from Twinkl (gold), I printed 2 copies and the kids started cutting. I also took out some green pipe cleaners and some colourful wooden beads

I showed the kids how to make the first one and then they managed the others by themselves. We used 2 flower cut-outs and threaded the pipe cleaner through the center of both flower cut-outs. Then we added a wooden bead onto the pipe cleaner and threaded the edge of the pipe cleaner back through the center of the flower again. I did this as my kids will probably end up using these flowers in some role-playing later this week and the edge of the pipe cleaners can be quite sharp.