Sickness Strikes, the Savage Stone Age, and Bringing in the Washing!

Nasty Bug
I had planned that this would be 'Science Week', with various experiments based around Materials - putting empty yoghurt pots into boiling water to see what happens, for instance, or talking about the properties of metal compared to clay - but I'm afraid sickness has struck and I'm not able to speak very much, my throat having swollen horribly with some nasty cold bug. And since experiments tend to require a fair amount of talking, Science Week has been postponed until I'm better.

Instead, some literacy worksheets on CVC words and Days of the Week have been trotted out, much to the boys' boredom, alongside some rather more inspired activities ...


Treasure Island
For instance, I found an audio cassette of TREASURE ISLAND, an abridged version for kids, and after listening to a few short chapters, accompanied by child-friendly pictures from the Ladybird book, pictured above, the boys drew their own Treasure Islands complete with spooky names and X to mark the spot! Later, when my head hurts less, I'll scan those pictures in for you to see.


Stone Age Food
We've also been talking about the Stone Age recently, having enjoyed the Ray Mears 'Wild Foods' series of programmes on BBC2 about how our hunter-gatherer ancestors somehow managed to scavenge for food and cook it without access to all the metal, clay - and plastic! - food preparation and cooking equipment we take so much for granted. The boys have been particularly fascinated by this, sitting in fixed silence for most of the programmes, then discussing their favourite bits afterwards.

The moment when Ray Mears shot a wild deer was a huge shock to them - and to me, actually! - but they quickly accepted that such things would have been part of daily life in the Stone Age ... and indeed that the chicken and beef they eat also comes from slaughtered animals. Living next door to fields of sheep and cows probably helps them to see the whole thing in more pragmatic terms, perhaps, than town children. Though it can be hard, watching those cute spring lambs leaping about outside in the weak sunshine and knowing that most of them will end up in a freezer before summer comes.

At the library, I found a few of those amusing children's Horrible Histories films - 'Rotten Romans', 'Vicious Vikings' etc - and brought them home on loan. Amongst the best ones is the 'Savage Stone Age', only about 23 minutes long but certainly entertaining and just right in terms of tone/content for such young children.



Not just saving my poor throat that morning, the Savage Stone Age DVD also provided a nice follow-up activity and discussion point for our following of the Ray Mears series, letting us talk about what a 'thousand' means and how long ago 9000 years is. We looked at rudimentary timelines to help us evaluate how long ago the Stone Age was, and watched some BBC Schools programmes on the subject - aimed at slightly older children but still useful when watched with close support - for more information about historical timelines.

We also talked about food in the wild, and much was made of potentially poisonous substances like berries and mushrooms. When Indi was just one year old, she toddled out into the garden and ate a mushroom from one of those sudden overnight mushroom rings that spring up when you're not looking, so we talked about that occasion and how it led to us hurriedly researching what sort of mushroom she had eaten and whether a trip to Casualty was required! Of course, it was not a poisonous mushroom on that occasion, but it was still a useful anecdote that allowed us to talk about being careful when in the garden or out on walks in the countryside ... especially after watching Ray Mears frying up vast forest mushrooms and squeezing wild berries to make a pretty disgusting-looking 'jelly' cake.

From Timelines to the Washing Line
Dad is off work at the moment and, since I've been languishing on the sofa for much of the day this week, has been put to work on various domestic duties. This has caused some jealousy, I think, since it's usually the boys' job to help me out while Dad's at work. At one point we even caught D. standing on a chair under the washing line, trying to take down the washing himself before it rained!

Snow, Number Lines, and Burnt Biscuits

Yes, like many parts of the UK this week, we woke up to a slight covering of snow one morning. I told the kids it would be cold outside and they would not want to stay out there for long, but of course nobody paid any attention to me! The boys ate their breakfast with extreme speed and, as soon as Indi had been taken to nursery for the morning, jumped into their wellies, coats and hats, and made off into the garden. But they were soon making snowballs with their sleeves, having realised that cold hands are no fun! I let them run wild out there for the better part of an hour, then they came in - with obvious relief! - and settled down to some more number work, this being our 'numeracy' week.

Chocolate Wholemeal Biccies

Part of our number work included doing a spot of baking, so we could use some scales and talk about weights, measuring out, grams and kilograms etc. I had originally intended to make wholemeal bread with the boys, but taste buds prevailed when they looked into the store cupboard and we ended up making a batch of these rather burnt-looking chocolate wholemeal biscuits. (M. insisted on branding them all with a fork prior to baking, which meant the flattened-out edges burnt, but they actually tasted a lot better than they look here!)

We've since bought some self-raising flour, plus walnuts and currants, with the intention of making wholemeal walnut bread and currant cakes next week.

Teddy Bear Number Line

My great artistic talent was brought to 'bear' - such a dreadful pun, sorry! - for this counting activity, which involved my drawing a bear and photocopying it twelve times. The children then drew the numbers 1 - 12 on the bears' tummies, sorted them out into the correct order, and we then pegged them up as you can see on this length of string which is now festooned across our living-room.

It was a good activity, simple in concept but rewarding if you think outside the box. First off, the boys went through their Two Times Table, counting along the row, then they had to spot 'odd' and 'even' numbers. Even little Indi surprised us by being able to count all the way through the numbers (though she does tend to get six and seven mixed up if she counts too slowly). We ended the activity by having them look away, then removing three numbers at random and giving them a time limit to spot which numbers were missing. Once they'd guessed correctly, I handed them over and the kids had to replace them in the line.

The teddy bear line is still in place - making it rather difficult to get to the post in the mornings! - so more counting games ahead next week.

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 ...

Our Plans for the New Year!

This end of year/start of new year report will be accompanied by various Christmas moments and other 2006 'home school' photographs - enjoy!


(Older sister, now doing A Levels at school, modelling good reading practice ... reindeer antlers and all!)

Preliminary Plans for Early 2007

The basic plan for January through to Easter is to continue with the acquiring of literacy and numeracy - i.e. reading and writing the 45 Keywords for Foundation Stage (not following the National Curriculum and NLS slavishly, of course, but using them as a good enough guide at this stage) and being able to count objects up to 20 with reasonable consistency, do very simple addition under 10, some basic subtraction, plus consolidating their knowledge of the 2x Tables and putting it to practical use.



To that we’ll be adding the 10x Table, additional words beyond the Keywords, counting BACK in 2s and 10s, and starting work on some NEW projects. These include learning several popular and traditional poems off by heart - beginning with a personal favourite of mine, Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening’ - and doing some preliminary study on the Romans, in preparation for next year’s more concentrated work.



We have a reconstructed Roman Fort fairly near us (Coventry area) and an emphasis on Roman artefacts and lifestyle at our local museum (Rugby), so it should be easy to get the kids interested in the Romans without having to rely too heavily on books and worksheets. I also happen to be brushing up on my own school Latin at the moment, doing local evening classes, so I’ll even be able to introduce them to a few Latin words and phrases ... lucky them!



After starting off last term in a pretty military fashion, as I'm sure the Romans themselves would have done, i.e. insisting on academic work being done both morning and afternoon, life at ‘home school’ has eased off considerably in the past six weeks. We took a long half-term break and changed our working patterns substantially when we started again, doing the bulk of the day’s ‘sit-down’ work in the two hours after breakfast - since the boys are clearly better at academic study first thing in the morning - with less formal activities scheduled for the afternoon or even early evening.



Morning work is now usually worksheets and games/role-play or practical activities - finding ‘rhymes’ in oral poetry, shop play, counting with coins etc. In the afternoons, they tend either to play music - using our growing box of percussion instruments, many of them home-made - do exercise of one sort of another - after tiring of yoga for children, they now sometimes accompany me in doing DVD aerobics! - or do arts & crafts: drawing, painting, junk modelling, play-dough, bead threading, sock puppets, ‘theatre in a box’ etc.



When Dad was off sick recently, we took the opportunity to set up a home cafe, named Munchies Cafe by the boys, where they took it in turns to be chef and waiter. A menu board was created, meals priced up, a range of drinks and sandwiches actually made by one child while the other took the orders from their toddler sister, Mum & Dad, and finally, bills were drawn up with real coins exchanged.



Some adult supervision was, of course, necessary - especially when the sandwiches were being cut in half with a large bread knife! But overall, the boys managed most of the cafe ‘work’ on their own, and it was a very good experience for them.

Speak to you again in 2007!

Winter: Rhymes, Songs & Growing Another Year Older

This week we've been talking about winter and the seasons in general. It's actually still the tail-end of autumn here in Warwickshire, I suppose, but a few hard frosts earlier this month made me think it might be a good time to start discussing snow and hibernation etc.

So we've been learning a few easy songs/rhymes like this:

The North wind doth blow
And we shall have snow
And what will poor Robin do then, poor thing.
He'll sit in the barn
And keep himself warm,
Hiding his head 'neath his wing, poor thing.

These are probably not exactly the right words of that old English nursery rhyme but that's how I remembered them and the sentiment is about right. They always make me think of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, and the song of Winter:

WINTER

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
'Tu-who;
Tu-whit, Tu-who'- A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
'Tu-who;
Tu-whit, To-who'- A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.


So we talked about that too, and the kids, although not able to understand all the words, did find parts of it amusing! And marvellous too, a real country poem: owls and robins in the snow, shepherds, logs, and even milk frozen in the pail. It has such a lovely verbal texture too, so much rich imagery, Marian's red raw nose and those roasted crabs hissing in the bowl ...

We haven't yet had any snow, and long may it hold off, but here are the kids enjoying the snow last winter. We looked at these photos too and discussed how the children had changed, both physically and in terms of things learnt, how their knowledge of the world and themselves is expanding every year!

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.