ofamily learning together

monster learning

Posted on July 23, 2014 by ofamily

I love the wonderful themed packs that 3 Dinosaurs makes, I find it is a great way to break up the kids learning as they always love the graphics and think the pages are fun. We never do an entire pack we just do the pages that are relevant. 3 Dinosaurs packs

We have been doing some pages out of the monster pack over the last few weeks. Blue in particular is loving them and keeps asking me for more Monster pages. So if you have never had the pleasure of looking at one of these packs here are some of our favourite pages from the Monster packs

Blue has been doing the pre-writing pages (I have laminated these for him), trace the monsters path and he is obsessed with the find the correct Monster shadow pages.

Pink has been doing mainly the maths and the phonic/ sound pages.

She loved the basic graph pages, and the addition pages are always a must for her

She also has really enjoyed the label the monster page and the sound pages. She like doing school pages where she gets to cut and stick the words – so these have been a big hit !

A great break from our normal homeschooling books that we do.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged home ed, homeschooling, Monster pack | Leave a comment

Truck Cards – numbers and Afrikaans calender cards

Posted on July 21, 2014 by ofamily

Blue has been asking me for some Truck cards so he can join in with Pink when she does her “school work” so I made him these Truck calender cards. He has been using the date cards (numbers 1- 31) to make a timeline and loves them. I am really not fussed if he gets it wrong I just wanted to encourage his desire to join in with Pink when she does her learning activities. Pink also liked the date cards so I made her some calender cards in Afrikaans to go with.

Included are Afrikaans month cards (Jan – Dec), day of the week cards, date cards (1 – 31) -the date cards can be used with any language and year 2014 and 2015 cards. Please feel free to download the cards and use with your kids. But please do not email the documents to others please rather send them my link.

days Afr trucks

Months Afr trucks

Dates 1- 31 trucks

Posted in Afrikaans, free printable / worksheet, Homeschooling | Tagged Afrikaans words, calender cards, free printables, home ed, homeschooling | 1 Comment

Usborne First Numbers – brilliant book for Maths

Posted on July 19, 2014 by ofamily

I have picked up some lovely books at our local Oxfam shop recently and one of my favourite finds was this Usborne First numbers ( I have seen these books for sale on ebay and on Amazon).

The book covers a number of basic first Maths concepts using lovely pictures that encourage discussion. The concepts covered by the book are Maths concepts which you would cover in the British Foundation stage (Reception) / Key stage 1.

A brief summary of what is covered

Counting 1 – 10 and 1 – 20 – including some great spot the animals on the farm and spot the items in a classroom and find the numbers in the town. (Blue who is 3.5 has been loving these pages).

What number comes next / can you find the missing number
Odd number and even numbers
More or Less pages – I thought these pages where very good at clearly showing the difference (I really enjoyed the baking page on this area).
Adding together

What makes 10
One less – Pink loved doing the page where she had to work out which party food the naughty puppy ate.
Taking away
Multiplying by 2 – we have not looked at this yet.
Multiplying by 10 – we have not looked at this yet
double trouble and half a bagel.

A great book which allows you to do maths with the kids while sitting on the couch looking at the pictures and does not involve them doing any worksheets or needing to write any answers. I would highly recommend this book.

Posted in Book Ideas, Homeschooling, ks1 maths | Tagged home ed, homeschooling, kids books, ks1 maths | 1 Comment

Change in routine can mean unexpecting learning

Posted on July 17, 2014 by ofamily

We have had a very mixed up week. The kids have been busy playing with their gran and doing lots of other fun activities so our normal homeschooling work just kinda got left behind a bit – but that is one of the great things about homeschooling you can rearrange your week to suit your family. And even when our workbooks and paper got left behind the kids still kept on learning.

We had a lovely visit to Hampton Court Palace. I am not sure what the kids enjoyed more – the old buildings, the garden or the coffee shop. But they loved it and we now have an annual membership so we can go back and walk through the rooms and talk about what it must have been like living there.

Pink is intrigued by the idea that they did not have toilets like us and can not get over their “stinky toilets”. She also loved the fact that they also ate chocolate – pink loves chocolate and enjoyed going into the chocolate kitchen in the palace. Blue loved exploring the gardens and was thrilled when he stopped some Koi fish in one of the ponds – I was a little nervous that he might try and join the fish.

We also have been enjoying the sun shine and gardening a lot and playing lots of football.

The kids are still obsessed with earthworms and keep picking them up. Snails and lady bugs are also welcomed visitors by my kids (and yes Blue actually brought some snails into the house to show me). They are not scared to touch any little creature in our garden and have learned to be very gentle with them. Although Blue did learn the hard way that it is best not to try and pick up a Bee – OUCH – Do not think he will try that again!!!

We have also been painting up a storm. Pink is still fascinated by Claude Monet and is experimenting with using her brushes to get different effects. The result is we often end up with paintings that do not resemble much but I can see she is experimenting with colour and brush strokes and I am enjoying doing this with her.

Oh an a big bonus about having grandparents to visit is that they get to do story time. My kids love stories, stories and more stories. I have to admit that I have enjoyed the break from reading some of the same stories for the 100th time.

The break in our normal routine also meant that I had some extra computer time. I manged to do some more Maths worksheets and phonic pages for Pink and I finally sat down to do my own planning pages. I like to have rough idea of what we are going to do in the year but I do not plan day by day as I like the flexibility of being able to change and go with the kids interests. So I have made a simple annual plan by month for “themes” – these will change as we go along (in fact I have just changed our theme for August as I heard my hubbie has to go to India for work so August is now going to be all about India). But still I find it comforting to have some ideas planned for our next “school year”. I also like a weekly schedule. This is mainly to put down the kids activities and block off time for projects.

If anyone would like to use these pages I am attaching the document below.

planning doc

Posted in free printable / worksheet, Homeschooling | Tagged free printables, Hampton court palace, home ed, homeschooling | 2 Comments

Counting in 5’s and painting

Posted on July 10, 2014 by ofamily

I have a lovely book called “What your Year 1 child Needs to know”. I like this book as it gives you some great ideas and one of these great ideas was doing hand painting when you start your counting in 5’s. So we did it.

I got Pink to place her entire hand in a tray of paint and then we made some hand prints on a big piece of card (we used some card from an old box)

Once Pink was finished we talked about having 5 fingers on each hand and we counted the fingers and wrote the number under each hand.

She really enjoyed this and naturally once we had finished this great activity we used our paint to make some pictures. We recently read about Claude Monet and Pink loved his paintings so she is know determined to paint using dots – I really loved the little flowers below.