Half Term Update

Apologies for not having posted on this blog for a few weeks. Things have been hectic here and I've been changing over various of my other blogs to the new and improved Blogger Beta format, which takes several hours per blog. I have no plans to upgrade this blog for the moment; maybe nearer Christmas.


Play Dough time, which means plenty of mess!

The boys have been consolidating their learning over the past weeks since the last blog entry. We've just had an extended half term rest period, with Dad at home. Before that, continuing on with reading has been the order of the day.

D. has raced ahead with his word recognisition skills and is now on book 7 of the Ladybird Read With Me scheme - not bad, considering they only started the scheme back in early September.


D. on a roll .... a log roll!

By contrast, M. is taking his time. Not struggling, but definitely not confident enough with word recognition for me to push him too hard. He's on book 4 at the moment, and seems to enjoy his short but intensive daily reading sessions - so long as he's not taken away from some more interesting arts and craft activity in order to do his reading!

We've played some more Missing Vowel games, making it harder by using Consonant-Vowel-Vowel-Consonant words like 'look', 'book', tool' etc. We've also discussed dipthongs in some detail and filled out a number of activity sheets on the use of dipthongs, with pictures to be coloured in afterwards. The boys seem to enjoy these activities too, with their little sister joining in where she can.

Highlight of the past few weeks has to be my purchase of the Alphapet book, with accompanying CD, an alphabet-based animal 'story' which the kids follow in the book whilst listening to the CD. It's a fun activity for all of them, with colourful illustrations of animals, and there are also places for the boys to repeat words they're looking at in the book, to reinforce spelling etc.


Elementary, my dear mother.

Favourite new half term toys include a sort of Sherlock Holmes kit for them to play detectives, with a notebook and pen for clues, plus magnifying glasses. They've been watching Basil the Great Mouse Detective, and then searching the house for clues ...

A Quiet Week

It's been a quiet week, with plenty of going-out-to-town activities, which has effectively meant that not much work has been done on paper, apart from some more worksheets on using vowels and the two times table. In other words, it's been a time of consolidation rather than new projects.

Around the start of the week, we listened again to Peter and the Wolf; this time the kids played along using various percussion instruments, trying to match the 'mood' of the music and, of course, the story itself.

That entailed the kids using shakers, maracas, tambourines, a small African drum, and even a kazoo at one point, believe it or not. M. is rather good on the kazoo, having got the idea of it instantly. By contrast, D. is perplexed by it - as am I! I have promised to buy them a xylophone later this month - even the smallest ones are rather expensive! - which I'm hoping will lend depth and increased versatility to their music sessions. A worthwhile investment, I feel though, since all three children seem to enjoy making music and are taking better care of the instruments than I had thought possible, always returning them to the music box after our sessions and being careful not to drop or damage them.

After listening to the music, they drew some more pictures to accompany the story. This is D.'s wonderfully atmospheric take on Peter and the Wolf, the title being an unprompted addition to the picture. You can see here how his handwriting skills are developing!



We also tried more meals using wholemeal pasta and wholegrain rice this week. Jamie Oliver eat your heart out! To be honest, I was rather annoyed by the headteacher at the boys' prospective school when, in response to me saying we couldn't afford to pay for school meals for both of them - very expensive for two at once! - she recommended I try to find the money from somewhere, as 'it might be the only healthy meal they get all day'. Cheeky so-and-so!

Of course, the boys didn't go to school in the end, and so have missed out on these 'healthy' school meals. Luckily for them, I do actually insist on fresh vegetables at every meal. This is wholemeal pasta shapes with a fresh tomato and mushroom sauce, garnished with parsley from the pot outside the back door and followed by end-of-season apples just picked from our own trees. You don't get much fresher than that ...



We'll be having our 'half-term break' soon, but will return in about ten days or a fortnight with some more posts about our home school activities.

Literacy & Numeracy Take Over Other Activities

Having been reading some of the National Literacy & Numeracy Strategies for primary schools recently, I dropped some of the general knowledge topics on our agenda last week and concentrated on the basics of literacy and numeracy instead. Although I'm aware there's no need whatsoever to follow any national strategies like that, what I read in those documents made perfect sense to me and seemed like a good direction to take.

The boys will make much better progress, I'm sure, with general knowledge topics connected to science or geography or history etc., if they have already mastered the rudiments of reading and writing.

So we looked at vowels again, in more detail. We played a whole series of word games every day, on paper and on the whiteboard, such as Spot the Missing Vowel or Name this Dipthong! Of course, I kept it light and as basic as possible. They did not tend to use words of more than three letters for the first few days, looking at Consonant - Vowel - Consonant words until they seemed comfortable with the concept of vowels.



"We're Going on a Bear Hunt"

Missing Vowels:

w _ l k

w_ _ d

h _ t

d _ r k

b _ _ r


I then took the chance of introducing consonants. This is rather earlier than I had originally intended to introduce them, but the boys are going very well indeed with the current pace of work and I didn't want to hold them up. We sat down together and went through the entire alphabet in a book; the boys would read out each letter phonetically - they know them all off-by-heart now - and say whether or not it was a vowel. If it was NOT a vowel, I would write it on the whiteboard under the heading: CONSONANTS.

When they finished that exercise, we went through the list and thought up words that began with each consonant.

To finish up the week, I talked to the boys about simple dipthongs like 'ch' and 'sh', and our games moved on to longer common words such as 'shell', 'shoe', ship' and 'fish'. It was a moderately difficult exercise but useful in terms of drawing their attention to the length and shape of words, and to visual patterns inside the words themselves. We also touched on alliteration, thinking up lists of words beginning with the same letter. That was quite hard for them to do and I think perhaps a few games of 'I spy' might help them associate the 'sounds' of words like chair and table with the actual look of the initial letter. After all, their understanding of the world has been based around sounds so far; with the advent of reading it has to shift more towards visuals.

As for numeracy, I'm extremely pleased with their progress. Both boys can now count up to 20 with fair consistency and have started to learn the full rote of the 2 x Table, whereas before they were only counting in twos up to ten. Indeed, M. counts in twos at every opportunity. After a dodgy start at home schooling, due to a learning disability, I think he's now showing a real flair for mathematics, and the fact that he's better at something than his brother has given him a great deal of new confidence, which is spilling over into the literacy side of things, so that his reading is now improving at almost the same rate as his numeracy!



Amazing what a little healthy competition can do between twin brothers, though I'm sure the more politically correct attitude these days would be to discourage competition. But if it works and gets him trying harder, then I see no harm in it. It worked for the Kennedy family ...

We'll be back to normal activities in another fortnight, or at least once I feel the boys have really taken on board the skills required for basic competency in literacy and numeracy. I'm sure this new regime - with plenty of viva voce activities and board games - can do nothing but good.