First the Romans, then Literacy Week!

The Romans: An Introduction

I started off the new year as intended by studying the Romans. Ambitious stuff, I agree, for such young children, but they seemed fascinated from the start and not at all out of their depth, even when discussing the 2000 year gap between the Romans' invasion of Britain and the present day. And that discussion came in pretty handy last week when we sat down together to watch the Ray Mears programme about Stone Age people in Britain and how they survived by eating roots and shellfish etc, 9000 years ago!

I covered topics on the board and also using home-made Roman worksheets with b&w graphics of Roman soldiers and villas etc. We talked variously about Roman baths, the Roman army, where Rome is, what Britain was like before the Romans came and what they achieved here, and Roman clothing.


We also looked at a book I have, called FASHION THROUGH THE AGES, an extremely useful resource for home schooling, which shows costume from Romans to the mid-20th century, with accessory sidebars, fold-out sections and lift-the-flap style outfits so the kids can see what went on under each item of clothing ... without compromising common decency, of course! Its ISBN is 1 85707 325 8, and it's written by Margaret Knight (Tango Books, UK, 1998). It can be used by adults as well as children - probably best for early teens onwards though if read without support.


After discussing the pictures and filling out the worksheets, we made our own simple togas out of sheets and towels, the kids discovering how tricky they can be to keep on when walking about!


As you might expect, the boys loved the Roman soldier topic and spent some hours marching about the garden in straight lines, adorned with plastic helmets and carrying 'twig' spears and swords. They also enjoyed exploring the concept of underfloor heating - i.e. for the Roman baths.

Talking about the plans for the baths at Aquae Sulis led to discussions of plans for modern public buildings and private houses, which then led us to attempt a blueprint of our own house.

I found a large piece of paper - this rather crumpled sheet had instructions on the back for putting together a flat-pack heater and had been thrown away before I rescued it for this activity - and helped the boys draw up a plan of our house. Even Indi, now three years old, joined in with this task.

Each child took a room and tried very hard to draw its shape and contents faithfully - and to the correct proportions - with varying degrees of success!



Next month, we will be visiting the Verulamium museum at St Alban's - which I can highly recommend after an earlier visit on my own. Click below for their website.

Roman Museum of Verulamium: St. Alban's.

Later this spring, we will also visit our local Roman attraction, the Lunt Fort at Coventry, currently closed for the winter. Information for visitors is available on the Herbert Gallery website.

More worksheets to follow in the coming weeks - including a revision sheet, plus a new one on gladiators and another on the Roman villa in Britain (involving mosaics, always a popular Maths-Art combination activity!) - should keep their interest up before those visits.

Literacy Week

I followed the Romans with an intense Literacy week, as I felt we had been coasting along much of the time before Christmas as far as reading was concerned and that not enough literacy progress had been made.

So we covered a range of literacy topics at breakneck speed, all of which will be returned to in the coming weeks: days of the week, the names of the vowels (only the sounds of the vowels had been taught before that), the order of the alphabet, word shapes (i.e. tall letters, letters that go under the line etc), and blended consonants. Each topic had its own worksheet, the main gist of which I would cover on the drywipe board first, to make sure they got the point before tackling any solo work themselves. Most sheets involved filling in missing letters or words, or copying out words to practise writing them.

Alongside those topics, the boys also read to me twice every day, for about 5 -8 minutes per session. I like to keep their reading sessions very short, covering about 2 - 3 pages of text, depending on how many words are on each page. After beginning the scheme back in September at a slow but steady pace, M. is now about to finish Book 6, I think it is, of the Ladybird READ WITH ME reading scheme and D. has just started Book 9.



There are 16 books in total in the READ WITH ME series, plus another 8 books in the Ladybird PHONICS scheme which accompanies it. A friend gave me the first eight books last year, but I was amazingly lucky and picked up all the other books of both schemes at a charity shop last month, less than 30p per book.





We also looked at several non-Ladybird books. One was an Oxford Reading Tree book at Level Three, which they both enjoyed and found challenging - because of different vocabulary, I guess - but not overly difficult.




Another was this rather complex story called Through the Magic Mirror by Anthony Browne, probably for slightly older children, which provided many talking points and multi-syllable words such as 'invisible' - they loved this book though, as the story was highly unpredictable and surreal.




What I noticed by Friday was how much more fluent M. had become as a reader. His natural bent is towards wasting as little time as possible, so he tends to jump at words without bothering to sound out their letters, which has not been a terribly successful ploy in the past but is starting to work for him now that he has mastered some common sounds within words, like the repeated vowels 'oo' and 'ee', for instance.

Even D. - a swifter reader than M. in the past but currently going through a sort of resistance-towards-learning phase - became quicker at sounding out new words and, by the end of the week, was actually daring to launch into a few high frequency words without sounding them out at all!

Other activities during the week included Snap games with word cards and a few games of Scrabble.

The simplest junior version of Scrabble is now just about suitable for their level of literacy, but with modified rules: each player puts down only one counter in turn, and the 'winning' element is removed, except that praise in the form of group clapping is given when a particular letter completes a word!



Following the obvious success of Literacy week, I intend to specialise in this way for the next month and see whether that reaps benefits for the other subjects too, focusing in turn on Numeracy, Science, and then Literacy again. With some more History thrown in as well, of course, plus an introduction to some basic French. Their grandfather lives in France half the year, so it seems like a good idea to start them off early ...

Next week is Numeracy Week. What joy!

Fresh Vegetable Regime

New Year, New Food. On the health front, here are the kids today enjoying some delicious vegetable lasagne with fresh vegetables, sunflower seed rolls and home-made fruit salad with blueberries, blackberries and grapes in an orange and mango smoothie sauce. Yum! To my amazement, they ate every scrap of this meal, perhaps due to their lengthy and exuberant play session in the back garden before sitting down to lunch. Unless they're getting used to the fresh vegetable regime at last.



Unfortunately, I somehow forgot to photograph the pink sticky buns they had later in the afternoon ...