ofamily learning together

Cupcakes – role playing and play dough

Posted on October 6, 2014 by ofamily

We love cupcakes in our house. It has become a bit of a family tradition that when it is someones birthday we have cupcakes. So after having our cupcakes on Sunday Pink and I decided that we needed to open up our very own ofamily cupcake shop. We downloaded this great editable banner for our cupcake shop from Twinkl (gold subscription).

Then we started setting up our bakery on the kitchen table. We used lots of different colour play dough , a mix of cupcake holders that we had in the kitchen, mixing bowls and accessories from the kids play kitchen (bought at ELC) and of course our cupcake toppings – beads / sparkle goodies out of our art trolley. Pink even fetched her play scale and started measuring out her different play dough mixtures.

Once we had made a few of our play dough cupcakes we wrote out some labels for them.

I laminated our labels as I am sure we will be re-using them on a playdate soon. The labels I downloaded here : editable cupcake labels (again Twinkl gold). We also priced our cupcakes and Pink had a min money lesson as she had to work out the change every time I bought one of her cupcakes.

Pink and I also made a giant cupcake picture. I drew the main cupcake and Pink and I cut out the smaller cupcakes from some old wrapping paper and stuck them around the picture. Then Pink started thinking of her favourite cupcake words. She sounded them out and wrote them down (I did have to help with some of the spelling).

And after all the pretend cupcake playing we naturally just had to bake our very own chocolate cupcakes

Posted in Homeschooling, sensory play | Tagged cupcakes, home ed, homeschooling, playdough, role playing, Twinkl, writing | 1 Comment

No Dinosaurs just Tiddler instead

Posted on October 3, 2014 by ofamily

I had planned on doing a dinosaur dig with the kids this week but unfortunately it did not go as planned. Before the kids had a chance to dig for dinosaur fossils our dig site got flooded. Very frustrating especially as I had used the last of our sand and I had to order more as none of the shops near us are stocking sand at the moment. Anyway I am going to try to redo the activity next week so fingers crossed this time around it will go as planned.

I still wanted to give the kids a new sensory activity this week but I could not think of anything and after the dinosaur disaster it needed to be fairly simple. Then I overheard Blue and Pink playing, they where re-enacting the story of Tiddler the story-telling fish by Julia Donaldson. So toy fishes and water beads and a new very simple sensory tub was created.

I used a mix of blue, clear, green and some yellow water beads.

We have not used water beads in a sensory tub before. They are great. Both kids love the feeling and I have to admit after dipping my hand in I understand why – it is very relaxing.

Posted in Book Ideas, Homeschooling, sensory play | Tagged children's book, home ed, homeschooling, julia donaldson, sensory bins, Tiddler the story telling fish | Leave a comment

Train of many uses and it is FREE

Posted on October 1, 2014 by ofamily

I think husbands / wives / partners of us Home Edders deserve a medal. They are the ones who have to go to work while we get to stay home and have the fun with the kids, they come home after a hard days work often to deal with an exhausted partner, they get the joy of convincing their partner not to give up and yes they too end up home edding the kids over the weekends. Mine does all of the above but he is also often the voice of reason. The voice that, when late at night I am wanting to create something for the next day will often ask – are you sure you need to do this tonight OR can you not get a FREE template for this off the internet ?

So over the weekend when I had a lightbulb moment and wanted to make Pink a train to use to practice her addition (the idea being that I write a sum on each carriage and then she has to arrange the carriages in order of the answers eg the carriage with 5+4 will come before the carriage with 8+2). So instead of going to bed like a normal sleep-deprived person should, I decided to try and make my own. Normally I would have been able to do this but after spending the whole of last week dealing with 2 kids full of hay fever and not sleeping my attempts where not that great. Lucky for me I live in the age of the internet (have I mentioned my love of Pinterest lately !!). And I found a FREE editable train to download off the trusty Twinkl website. I printed mine off onto card and laminated them so that I can re-use it with my whiteboard markers.

I started off by writing some sums on the carriages that I knew Pink could do just so she could understand what I wanted.

Then we moved onto some harder sums and some counting in 2’s and counting in 10’s (I wrote the numbers on top of the carriages and then Pink had to sort the order out).

We also used them to practice our spelling. Pink wrote the name of the animal on each carriage.

I wrote the number and then Pink got to write the matching word (eg I would write 8 and Pink would have to spell out eight) – sorry no photo of this. I also got Pink to practice her rhyming words. After writing the names of the animals on top of the carriage for a 2nd time we wrote some rhyming words down the side of the carriages.

And lastly I wrote some words on the top of the carriages and Pink had to arrange the carriages in order so that they made a sentence.

And we have still not finished with these yet. Pink informed me this morning that tomorrow she is going write the words on the carriages and then I need to put them into the correct order to make a sentence (she loves being the teacher).

Posted in Homeschooling, ks1 English, ks1 maths | Tagged addition, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 english, ks1 maths, skip counting, spelling, trains, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Label the world – English and Afrikaans

Posted on September 30, 2014 by ofamily

Pink already knows the continents in English but we have been learning the oceans names and I thought it would be a good idea to introduce the Afrikaans names as well.

I used the free blank map on Twinkl (if you register with Twinkl for a free account you get access to lots of great documents to download).

I then made her some simple labels in English and Afrikaans and we used them to label her map. We started off by using the English labels (just because she knows most of them already).

Then we put the labels on my desk and we matched our Afrikaans words to the English words, I helped her with this.

Once we had finished this she placed her Afrikaans labels on her map.

Very simple but we are noticing more and more than doing some of her lessons in her second language really helps to cement it for her

The labels we used are in the document below

World labels -eng afr

Posted in Afrikaans, free printable / worksheet, Homeschooling | Tagged Afrikaans words, home ed, homeschooling, label the world, sight words, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Role Playing fun

Posted on September 29, 2014 by ofamily

The past few weeks my kids have been having a blast playing cafe with the added bonus that Pink has been practicing her writing, her reading and her Maths in a fun relaxed manner.

Our “Cafe” is from Ikea, the till is from ELC and the open sign and opening times sign are part of the Cafe role playing pack in Twinkl. Both my kids had so much fun with the Cafe pack that I ended up downloading 2 other role playing packs to go with our Cafe (the healthy eating Cafe pack and the Restaurant Role playing pack). The three together means we now have a choice of menus which is proving great for adding different amounts together to work out our total bill.

We also have some order forms and recipes which I have laminated to the kids can keep reusing them with their whiteboard markers.

The kids have two clip boards which they use and they walk around asking for our orders then Pink writes it down while Blue makes up the order. Pink does the sums to work out what money is owed and then uses her play coins to pay for the order and work out her change. The kids are both learning lots without even realising it, they are just playing and having fun, the best kind of learning (I do not have lots of photos as I do not want to disturb the play)

On one of our recent playdates Pink and her friend were given some of the pages from the Vet pack. My daughter and her friend spent the entire morning playing vets with their soft animals. The wrote out the order of the animals appointments and filled in the Pet detail sheets, they fixed the animals with bandages and special cream.

And no big surprise Blue has now also become a Vet, my only complaint is that my couch has become the vets office and is now constantly covered with their toy animals, but happy kids learning and having fun is more important, I just need to find somewhere else to sit and drink my tea.