ofamily learning together

Our Tea Shop role play area

Posted on April 12, 2015 by ofamily

The kids grandparents are arriving this week, both kids are super excited and have been talking about what we are going to do with granny and grandpa for ages. The kids know that granny and grandpa like to go to coffee shops and eat cake so we thought it would be fun to make our own little tea shop in the house for granny and grandpa.

We used our cardboard shop from Ikea (£10) and we printed off the Tea shop role play pack from Twinkl (Platinum).

The till, money, playfood and cupcake stand are all goodies we have bought from ELC (in the UK) over the last 2 years.

I also set up a small play table for the kids so they could sit and pretend that they are in an actual tea shop. I laminated the place mats on the table.

The order forms are all laminated so that the kids can reuse them over the coming weeks to write out the multiple orders (we use Staedtler fibre-tip pens for this as they write nicely and are easy to clean off the laminated sheets)

I really like this menu. We have been doing a lot of activities lately using our tens and hundreds and this will fit in nicely with that (adding and working out our change).

The order forms are a great excuse for writing and yes we could not wait for the grandparents to arrive, we have already been using our tea shop (photo below is my daughter taking an order from me).

I also had a turn at taking my daughter’s order (she thought this was great)

We included a tray and my daughter had a great time trying to balance all her goodies on the tray and then bring them to her customers.

I am sure that the kids will have lots of fun taking orders from the grandparents this coming week and the big bonus for me is that they will get be practicing their maths in a fun relaxed manner.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged home ed, homeschooling, ks1 maths, money maths, role playing, tea shop role play, Twinkl | 1 Comment

Our bright fun flower wreath

Posted on April 9, 2015 by ofamily

Last week I bought some lovely looking ribbon and my daughter has been dying to use it but she could not figure out what to do with it. Then while I was tidying up some of our education supplies she spotted our pipe cleaner Christmas wreath and she informed me that we should make a spring ribbon wreath.

We started off our usual way of cutting our paper plates and my daughter painted them green again (this is an old photo from an earlier post but just wanted to show how we cut the plates).

Then we threaded the bits of ribbon around our wreath. We used sticky tape to attach the ribbon to the back of the wreaths.

She wanted to add some flowers. So I printed off on of the free flower colouring sheets from Twinkl (she actually only used page 4 for her wreath – although she did use 3 copies of that page). She really tried hard with her flowers.

And once they were cut out

She then started glueing the flowers onto the wreaths

I love the end result – so bright and cheerful. And a bonus for me was it ended up being a great fine motor activity for my daughter.

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Homeschooling | Tagged children's craft, Flower craft, flower wreath, home ed, homeschooling, Twinkl, wreath | 1 Comment

Upper case and Lower case penguin folder

Posted on March 31, 2015 by ofamily

I noticed that my youngest was confusing a few of his Upper case letters (Capital letters) and he loves the idea of having his own lapbooks so I could not resist making him one.

I used these lovely FREE penguins from Twinkl. I printed two copies – one with the upper case letters and one with the lower case letters (in both cases I printed 8 penguins on a page and that way they fitted nicely onto our folder. For the folder I used the card document wallets that you can buy on amazon or eBay and I cut the sides so that it can open up.

I then started cutting out each penguin (yes this bit does take a bit of time)

I glued the Upper case penguins on the inside of the folder.

Next you need to cut around most of the penguins tummy and just glued the outer edges of the penguin with the lower case letters onto the matching penguin with the upper case letters (remember not to apply any glue onto the tummy area)

As you can see with the “a” penguin the tummy is not glued. And the end result.

And the most important part – my little man thought it was great and he sat with his big sister and went through all of his letters.

Posted in Folders /Lapbooks | Tagged home ed, homeschooling, learning letters and sounds, Twinkl, Upper case and lower case letters | 4 Comments

Letter sensory tubs

Posted on March 30, 2015 by ofamily

Our little man is desperate to start reading. He has actually taught himself most of the letters (the sounds not the names of the letters) and a few basic words but I want to make sure that he has a good grounding in phonics, so over the next few weeks I am going to be doing a number of posts on his letter and sound learning activities.

One of our favourite ways on learning letters and numbers is by using our sensory tubs and our magnetic letters (or numbers). We have been using two different tubs with our letters, our bean tub and our button and bead tub.

We started off with our bean tub (it is a mix of corn, red beans, butter beans and kidney beans) and I hid some of the lower case magnetic letters in the tub.

Then I gave him the letter cards and he had to find the matching letters in the tub. One of the reasons I love using our magnetic letters is so the kids can feel the shape of the letters. This made a big difference with my daughter. She use to like to pick up the letters and feel the shape before she would try to write them.

The letter cards that we used are FREE to download from trusty Twinkl. I choose these ones as it includes the lower case and upper case letters and it has a nice selection of pictures to go with each letter. I also like these as the font is consistent with the way in which he is learning to form his letters (one of the mistakes I made when my daughter was learning to write her letters was not keeping the font consistent and it did initially cause some confusion).

We have also used our button and bead tub. This time I hide the upper case letters in the tub. My daughter only learnt her upper case letters much later but with my son having picked up a lot from big sister he already seems to know most of the upper case letters hence I thought it would be good to include both for him to do.

My son enjoyed doing this and it was a good way of me checking which letters he knows and which ones he still battles with (apparently J and Y are causing some confusion).

Posted in foundation stage, Homeschooling, sensory play | Tagged bean tub, home ed, homeschooling, learning letters and sounds, letter cards, sensory bins, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Ice- cream shop

Posted on March 29, 2015 by ofamily

I have been amased that our local ice-cream truck has already been back doing his rounds since the beginning of February. My kids love it. No matter what the weather they will always try “can we have an ice-cream ?”

So I could not resist the idea of making our own ice-cream cupcakes.

We made our favourite cupcake mixture, spooned some into the cupcake cases and then placed our ice-cream cones on top of the mixture before we baked them.

And when they came out.

Once we took the cupcake cases off they really started to look like ice-creams

I prepared some flavours for the kids (icing sugar with some food colouring). The kids choose the flavours that they wanted and they got going. The flavour poster in the picture is part of the Ice-cream van role playing pack from Twinkl (Platinum).

Both my kids used spoons to add the icing but I found if you dunked the cone into the icing it worked really well.

I personally liked the mint chocolate chip flavour.

My daughter thought it was a great opportunity to sell me some ice-cream. She used her menu and worked out the change herself. (The menu is also part of the Ice-cream role playing pack from Twinkl). Lucky for me the prices meant I could afford a number of her ice-creams.