ofamily learning together

Dinosaur Lapbook, Dinosaur Folder

Posted on November 25, 2014 by ofamily

Last week we made a very basic Dinosaur Lapbook for Blue. Blue will be 4 years old in 2 weeks time but he is determined that he must be given school work with his sister so I was hoping that the Dinosaur lapbook with some number puzzles and some cards to sort into carnivore and herbivore would do the trick. I have only used Twinkl resources for his lapbook/ folder as I was trying to help some of the lovely people at Twinkl get some ideas on how their resources can be used for lapbooks. And I am very excited to say they are going to be producing their very first lapbook pack on Dinosaurs. And here is the link Twinkl Dinosaur Lapbook

He loved his lapbook but he really wanted to carry it around while he played and some of the cards kept falling out. So I thought I would redo it. Initially I was just going to change the pouches where the cards are kept to be more like envelopes but then I decided to rather make it a Dinosaur folder. This way my son can just slot his different cards and even his tracing page in the folder, he can carry it around and he now manages to store it in his bookcase.

Here is some of what we have included inside his Dinosaur folder (they are all part of the gold package on Twinkl).

Dinosaur Scene Word Mat

Dinosaur Arial View including some of the Dinosaur Stick Puppets

Dinosaur number puzzles

Dinosaur Letter tracing page

We also used the Dinosaur vocab poster (gold package)to make our own Dinosaur cards.

Twinkl have also produced lovely Label the Dinosaur pages to go with the Lapbook. My kids love labelling worksheets and these ones look like they will be winners.

I have also included some Dinosaur colouring pages and stickers for him.

Posted in Folders /Lapbooks | Tagged Dinosaur Folder, Dinosaur Lapbook, Dinosaurs, Folders, home ed, homeschooling, Lapbooks, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Present pictures – fun and easy to do

Posted on November 24, 2014 by ofamily

I love doing art and crafts with my kids but after spending the last few nights awake with both kids my normal eagerness for getting creative is just not there. So my answer – print out basic colouring in pictures for Collages and let the kids get creative with how they do them. This is my go to activity for when I am exhausted.

Today’s theme was Presents. And these are FREE to download on Twinkl.

I normally set out some material on the table for the kids to use (but mine often have their own ideas on what they want to use). Today I laid out the usual tissue paper, shredded paper, some stickers, some crafty jewels and sequences, scrap bits of wool and their oil pastels. Glitter would also have been great but I honestly did not feel like I had the energy to deal with glitter today.

This one below with the jewels in my favourite. I love that my daughter matched the coloured jewels to the colour of each flower.

We did not finish the wool one

Even Blue joined in

Now I just need to tidy up the kitchen table so we can have dinner there tonight

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Homeschooling | Tagged children's craft, Christmas crafts, Christmas ideas, Christmas present collages, home ed, homeschooling, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Making a My body Lapbook

Posted on November 23, 2014 by ofamily

Pink has never been that interested in learning about bodies or anything related but a few months ago we bought this lovely book Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book (affiliate link) She loves it, she often just sits on the couch paging thought it and of course asking questions. So this last week while I was making her brother a Dinosaur lapbook she asked if we could make a body lapbook.

We started off by talking about her senses and she helped me make these flaps. She wrote the name of each sense on a flap and stuck a picture to represented it.

Then on the inside of the flaps she stuck some words for each sense (eg for taste – sweet and sour). We used the FREE senses word cards from Twinkl for this .

Once we had finished that she wanted a picture of a skeleton. We used the FREE label the human skeleton from Twinkl for this.

I also downloaded the Skeleton Cut-out page (Gold on Twinkl) and cut out the pieces for her.

She enjoys looking at how it all fits together and has enjoyed matching the loose skeleton cards to the correct part on the main Skeleton page.

On top of the skeleton picture I stuck the Human Body organs picture (platinum on Twinkl). This is just to help her visualise where everything is as she is asking lots of questions about where our organs are located. This page folds up so that she can see the skeleton page below.

Then on the outside flap we stuck the FREE label the body picture. I laminated the labels and they are inside a pouch on the inside so that she can redo this as often as she likes.

Posted in Folders /Lapbooks, Science Ideas | Tagged children's book, home ed, homeschooling, Lapbooks, My Body lapbook, science, Twinkl | 1 Comment

Christmas card with pop up pile of presents

Posted on November 20, 2014 by ofamily

The kids and I have been making some Christmas present cards. We tried something new this year – it a Christmas card activity that I did when I was at school. I liked the idea of trying this as the kids had to fold the paper, cut the paper, do some glueing and they got to decorate it. The idea is that is supposed to look like a pile of Christmas presents. The kids had a lot of fun making them and enjoyed using the stickers and strips of paper to decorate them (I did have to help my youngest with getting the pile of presents to stand out as he did battle with this).

To start off with you need to fold a piece of paper in half. Then you need to draw 4 lines on the paper (on the fold of the paper).

The bottom two are the longest and should be the same length. You need to have an adequate gap between the lines (in our first attempt it was too narrow and it did not look as good – in the photo below you can see the thicker strips look much better). Cut along the lines, open the card up and gently pull the strips out.

Then glue the card onto a different coloured background card. We found that it looked nice if the inner card was slightly smaller than the background card as it gave it a nice border.

And let the kids have fun decorating.

The scissors that we my daughter uses are these Westcott 5 inch Soft Grip Kids Scissor – Pink – and other styles and the glitter Christmas themed stickers are these ones Christmas Glitter Stickers Set for Children to Decorate and Personalise Xmas Cards Collages Scenes and Arts and Crafts (Pack of 120)

I do include Affiliate links. 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 remain the same.

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Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Homeschooling | Tagged children's craft, Christmas cards, Christmas crafts, home ed, homeschooling, Pile of present Christmas card | 1 Comment

Number Peg cards

Posted on November 19, 2014 by ofamily

We are going through a bit of a number peg card craze in our house lately. Blue has done a number of different ones. (links are all below the photos)

Number recognition cards (1 – 10) peg activity (FREE on Twinkl)

Number recognition cards (1-20) peg activity (gold package on Twinkl)

Snowflake peg card (gold package on Twinkl). He was so proud of this one that he asked me to skype just so he could show his granny.

Dinosaur stick puppets (gold package on Twinkl). These are actually not meant to be peg cards but we printed the stick puppets onto card and laminated them and the Blue had to match the correct number of pegs onto each Dinosaur. This has been one of the big hits with him.

So I thought it would be fun to make our own number peg cards. I did this with his big sister about 2.5 years ago when she kept getting stuck with the numbers around 20. We used the scrap card in the house and some stickers to make her number cards. She loved the fact that the stickers were raised off the paper so she could feel them. We ended up laminating most of the cards that we made. I managed to find some of the original ones that Pink and I made (very basic but it did the trick).

The lovely people at Twinkl very kindly made us a blank template to use with Blue for our new batch of peg cards. You can find the FREE template here : Blank Peg cards . As you can see both kids loved using stickers for this. Blue really enjoyed helping to make these and he has already set them out on his table for his “school work” tomorrow (Blue is adamant that he needs to be given his own school work to do each morning just like his big sister).

Blue is not yet able to write his numbers clearly so big sister did most of the number writing for him (great excuse to get big sister to do some extra writing).