ofamily learning together

Pasta Art Fun

Posted on January 26, 2014 by ofamily

We have been having some fun lately with pasta and glue. Who would have thought it would keep the kids so entertained for so long.

We started off by trying to do a fish with our pasta as we had been talking about the fishes scales and I thought the pasta shells would make good scales. Pink really got into it, Blue had fun even if he did go out of the lines a bit.

I started off by putting the glue into an old food container so that the kids had to dip the pasta shapes into the glue. This did mean that the kids ended up making a bit of a mess and got glue everywhere but that was part of the objective. After Pink finished she wanted to do a bear but asked to use the glue sticks this time.

They had so much fun doing these that the following day Pink actually asked if we could do more pasta art.

And she has already requested that one of our art projects for next week is a pasta art picture !!

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, sensory play | Tagged pasta art, sensory play | Leave a comment

Room on the Broom Fun

Posted on January 23, 2014 by ofamily

My kids love Julia Donaldson books and I have to admit as far as childrens books go they are not annoying like some can be. After the Gruffalo madness seemed to calm down a bit both kids went witch mad. We do not do scarey or bad witches in our house the only witches we really do are Room on the Broom and the Winnie the Witch stories.

I found these great sequence cards on the Primary Treasure Chest website over a year ago but now I can not find them on their website anymore.

I have been since found some other lovely looking sequence cards at Twinkl (these are part of their Platinum package)

We also found some great activities on the Room on the Broom website including this cute colouring in picture

And the home educator in me thought it would be a good idea to do a few worksheets for Pink. Room on the Broom has some lovely rhymes so I wrote out some of the rhyming words from the book and then Pink had to read them and match the two rhyming words

I also wrote out a few of the phrases from the book which the kids have memorized and left out some words so when Pink read the sentences she had to fill in the missing words

I have found with Pink that she actually likes it when I hand write these little worksheets for her as apposed to using the computer.

But by far the favourite activity has been one which the kids did all by themselves. They dug out some witches hats, got two fairy wands that there lying around and got on their toy hobby donkeys (from IKEA )and spent almost half a day re-enacting the story (sorry no photos as all the photos show the kids faces).

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Posted in Book Ideas, Homeschooling, ks1 English | Tagged julia donaldson, rhyming words, sequence cards | Leave a comment

5 Little Ducks

Posted on January 22, 2014 by ofamily

We had such fun with our Gruffalo stick puppets that I thought it would be fun to have some duck stick puppets to go with the song 5 little ducks. Both my kids love singing this song, they first picked it up at a story time at the local library. They have used the stick puppets for the song but they also made up their own stories to go with the stuck puppets and have even combined the duck stick puppets with the Gruffalo stick puppets in their play.

I printed these ducks from the picklebums website (great website worth a good visit) and just stuck them onto some lolly sticks that I picked up at Tescos.

http://picklebums.com/2011/06/14/five-little-ducks-puppet-printable/

This was really quick and easy to make and the kids love it.

The words for the song are below:

Five little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
“Quack, quack, quack, quack.”
But only four little ducks came back.

Four little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
“Quack, quack, quack, quack.”
But only three little ducks came back.

Three little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
“Quack, quack, quack, quack.”
But only two little ducks came back.

Two little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
“Quack, quack, quack, quack.”
But only one little duck came back.

One little duck
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
“Quack, quack, quack, quack.”
But none of the five little ducks came back.

Sad mother duck
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
The sad mother duck said
“Quack, quack, quack.”
And all of the five little ducks came back.

Posted in foundation stage | Tagged 5 little ducks, kids rhymees and songs, stick puppets | Leave a comment

Animal Classification

Posted on January 21, 2014 by ofamily

Pink has a natural love of animals and is always asking me questions about animals- often the type of question that I can not answer so I was glad when she started asking me about the different groups of animals.

The questions first arose after we started reading the Berenstain Bears book of Science. We loved this book as it is a very gentle introduction into a number of the science topics covered in Key Stage 1 science (UK).

After reading the book and discussing the groups I turned to Pinterest and I found these wonderful animal classification worksheets on the Have Fun Teaching website – they where a big hit. I actually printed off 2 copies and about 2 weeks after we did the first copy we redid them again as a revision.

Then by chance I was reading a Julia Donaldson book called Monkey Puzzle to little brother and I realised that the book covers all the groups.

So I called Pink over and we all re-read the book together only this time we stopped and discussed which animal group each animal belongs to. I really liked this as the book deals with -a monkey, elephant, butterfly, spider, parrot, bat, frog and a snake. And if that is not enough if you look at the pictures in the book they include – a fish, a crocodile, a grasshoper and a number of other insects. Also the book talks about how the butterflies babies look different to their mom. Another great Julia Donaldson book

We also have lots of plastic toy animals in the house which are great for imaginative play. So when then kids are playing with them we will often casually talk about the animal, where does it live, what did it eat and now is it a mammal ?

Posted in Homeschooling, Science Ideas | Tagged animal classification, julia donaldson, science | Leave a comment

Tricky Word Fun

Posted on January 20, 2014 by ofamily

Pink has been coming along really well with her reading but I have noticed that there are a few words that she tends to mix up. Here / Where / There are the main 3 words that she can get a bit confused with. When she stops to sound them out she is okay but when she is trying to read a story she can get them muddled up. So I saw this great idea on Pinterest where one of the mom’s wrote out the alphabet on pieces of paper and as she called out the letter the kids would jump on the correct letter, just a bit of modification and we had our tricky word jump game.

I just wrote a number of words out on A3 paper and as I said the word Pink would jump onto the correct word. After a while we changed it up and as she jumped on the word she had to shout out the word. Little brother loved this and joined in so there was big laughter. We also tried a version where we had to throw our small bean bags onto the correct word. Again this was a big hit.