ofamily learning together

Beginner Spanish Folder

Posted on January 15, 2015 by ofamily

Over the Christmas period the kids watched the Usborne First Fun with Spanish DVD a lot. It is a very simple DVD but the kids enjoy it and they picked up lots of Spanish words just from watching it. Pink actually informed us that she is no longer happy being bilingual she now wants to be trilingual. Luckily my hubbie is very good with languages and encourages the kids a lot but I have to admit it is a challenge for me I am already falling behind the kids in the Spanish words that they have learnt.

So we thought it would be good to start making a lapbook as a point of reference (not sure if it is more for me so I can refer back to it when the kids inform me that the Spanish word for x is …..) Pink and I started making a lapbook but Blue asked if we could rather make it into a folder. He really liked his dinosaur folder and wanted something similar for the Spanish. So Spanish folder it is.

We used these basic card folders.

I included the following for now (the idea is that as we learn more so I will include more in the folder)

We started with the Spanish colour word cards (FREE download from Twinkl).

I included the Spanish number mat 0-20 (gold on Twinkl) as both kids already know the numbers up to 10 (Thank you Go Diego Go) so I thought this would be good for us to learn the numbers from 11 to 20.

We also had to include the FREE farm animal word mat. We are currently learning these words (well to be honest my daughter is I am battling to remember these).

And for now the last cards where these FREE Spanish Days of the week loop cards. I cut them out and put them inside a small bag so the kids could match the correct Spanish word with the correct English word.

Very basic but fingers crossed it might help my daughter is her quest to become trilingual and it might help me try to keep up with my daughter.

Posted in Folders /Lapbooks | Tagged Beginner Spanish, home ed, homeschooling, Spanish Lapbook, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Australian animal writing practice

Posted on January 13, 2015 by ofamily

Both my kids love any learning activity which involves animals. So when I try to come up with writing activities for Pink I often end up doing something with animals.

We started off with the Australian animal word mat (FREE from Twinkl). The kids already knew a number of the animals on the mat but there were some new ones.

Once Pink and I had read all of the animal names together I gave her some pictures of the animals shown on the mat and asked her to write labels for them. For the Australian animal picture I downloaded the FREE editable posters and just printed them 4 to a page.

Once she had written the label she passed the picture with its label to little brother and he had to dig in the magnetic letter tub to find the correct starting sound. This was great for him as we got to have a good look at k verses c and spoke about how k is kicking k and c is curling c.

When Pink was learning her sounds she initially really battled with forming the letters correctly. After I bought her these magnetic letters we did exercises where she used her fingers to trace the letters and then tried to write them and for her that seemed to really help.

Pink ended up writing all the labels for the animals that I had (I was not expecting that) so I am going to give this a try with another set of animas soon, maybe some African animals or South American animals.

While they where doing this they also started singing the Kookaburra song, if you are not sure of the words you can download them from Twinkl (Platinum) – Kookaburra Sits in the old Gum Tree

Posted in Homeschooling, ks1 English | Tagged Australia, Australian animals, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 english, Twinkl, word mats, writing | 1 Comment

More Prehistoric fun

Posted on January 12, 2015 by ofamily

I am glad to report that Prehistoric Park is still going strong in our house. My kids just love it, they have made their own game where they go and look for Dinosaurs to bring back to their own Prehistoric park, and the questions just keep coming. We have watched the episodes so many times yet they are still picking up interesting facts.

To go with the new obsession about everything prehistoric we bought another great usborne book. Who are the first people is very informative and my daughter has enjoyed reading it with me.

She was very taken by the fact that prehistoric man did not write like we do. So we did a little exercise. I copied some of the early signs onto a page and she had to write what the signs meant. She thought this was great.

We also used these lovely Prehistoric animal writing pages from Twinkl and madam wrote out descriptive words and phrases for the Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Rhino and the Saber-tooth cat.

She is still not keen to do lots of writing but she is happy to do pages like this.

One of the kids favourite Dinosaurs from the series is the Ornithomimus. It is not a dinosaur that you can find lots of worksheets etc on so I thought we would try to make our own Ornithomimus picture.

I made the kids a basic stencil (I will attach the stencil at the bottom of the post) and the kids had some fun painting around the stencils to make a picture

I think this week we might try and draw a map of our very own Prehistoric Park

Here is the stencil that we used.

Ornithomimus

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, History, Homeschooling | Tagged Dinosaurs, History, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 english, ornithomimus, prehistoric animals, prehistoric park, Twinkl | Leave a comment

More hearts

Posted on January 10, 2015 by ofamily

My daughter loved making her tissue paper heart cards so I thought we would try another heart craft together. I cut some heart shapes out of old cereal boxes and we got out our old wool bag (we have left over bits of wool in a bag – if you do not knit you can buy a mixed wool bag which is great for crafts from Crafty crocodiles).

Our first attempt we just used red wool. We started off my sticking the red wool onto the card with a bit of sticky tape and then we just threaded the wool over and over the shape creating our own pattern. I was actually amazed at how long she sat and did this for. I think it was quite a calming exercise for her. When she had enough we just threaded the wool to the back of the shape and my daughter stuck it down with some more of her sticky tape.

A few days after we had finished our first one my daughter asked if we could try another one but this time with some different colours. When we added the different colours we just tied the two different pieces of wool together and continued as usual.

Our little man also tried his hand – but he did not last very long.

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Homeschooling | Tagged art, children's craft, heart craft, home ed, homeschooling, Valentine's day craft for kids, wool craft | Leave a comment

We love our snap cubes

Posted on January 8, 2015 by ofamily

I really want to make sure that the kids do not develop a fear of Maths. I want them to be confident in Maths and I want them to understand it. I have found that with my kids one of the ways of really getting the Maths concepts to sink in is to use manipulates. My daughter in particular likes to be able to hold things while she is learning. She likes using 3 Dimensional objects to help her and when she does she seems to understand it.

In the past we have used a number of different counters. We have some mini fishes and some mini dinosaurs which my daughter used to help her understand addition. We used a number tub (still do with the youngest) where she had to dig in amongst the beads and buttons to find her numbers. The number tub was such a hit that it is now considered a toy by the kids.

We have also used our hopscotch mat for lots of jumping Maths – great for counting, skip counting and adding and subtracting fun.

But our latest favourite maths tool are our snap cubes (affiliate link). Ooh we love our snap cubes. We have been using them a lot in past few months and they are still a firm favourite with both my kids.

My youngest loves using them with his counting cards. The cards in the picture are his stick man counting cards that we made using the number posters from Twinkl (gold). We printed 4 to a page.

He has also used the snap cube with his number train. His number train is still his favourite number activity. It is FREE to download from Twinkl for numbers 0-20. We printed ours off ages ago and initially just gave him numbers 1 -5 and then extended to 10 and are just introducing the larger carriages now.

My favourite, in the photo below, are these very cute number dinosaurs. These dinosaurs are gold on Twinkl and are for numbers 1-10 but you could also download these FREE dinosaur posters numbers 0-20. (I would try to just print 4 to a page to make some very cute counting cards)

He also loves using the snap cubes for building tall towers.

My daughter has been using the snap cubes a lot lately while we work on her bigger numbers. In fact today they provided the lightbulb moment. She has been trying to add 3 numbers together but gets a bit stuck, today while using the snap cubes it just all clicked into place. 5+5+2 =12. Once she had figured that out she started adding different sums with 3 numbers in her head.