Lets read.

Lets read.

I am not a fan of phonics being the main system for teaching reading - which it is at the school the boys attend - and although only in nursery they have started to learn letters and are sounding out words.  He is really enjoying it and has been asking to read words that he sees.  A couple of weeks ago I dug out a tree poster we had made when teaching the oldest son to read and quickly printed out comon words on dinosaurs.  When interest arises we have brought out 3 or 4 new words and played some games to encourage him to read/memorise these words.
Today was one of those days and today he chose "me", "on" and "dog".
(dog and am don't seem to be on poster guessing they were still on table!)
When we use the words they are removed from the tree and played with.  He likes to choose the games now that he has played a few times  his favourite is running up to the ballon with the correct word and popping it before running back with the word.  He also likes bashing the words with a squidgy hammer from one of his games. To start with we have a few in a tub and he chooses which he wants as I read them out (I put about 10 in a box that should make sentences but if they don't we make up any words we need.)
At nursery they sing "I am going on an adventure" so with "I" "am" and "going" already on the board "on" was added, "me" for look at "me" and "dog" to add to "cat" which we already have.
Other games we use are hiding the words under colourful bowls and as he turns the bowl over he has to say the word - or I lift the bowl up and he has to shout the word before the bowl eats his fingers!
I will add some more of the games we use as we go.
The sentences he makes at the moment all start with I so I would definately recommend starting there.  We have "I look up" "I see a cat" "I am big" "I look at a cat" "I look at me" - this game obviously used a mirror!! "We look at a cat" "I am going to look at a cat" and then today dog replaced cat and was added to cat "I look at a cat and dog".


We also sound out the words phoics style but he doesn't know the sounds like "oo" etc

Marble run

Marble run

Both the younger boys love marbles and with the arrival of some coffee boxes and a collection of tubes we set to work on a marble run. Blue was the chosen colour and each piece was given a quick coating.  The older of the boys kept telling his little brother how it made it more exciting for the marble!! while the youngest kept saying "wow" (he's only 1 and not at sentence level yet!) in reaction to his brothers excited voice.  Anyway, after lots of painting the hot glue gun came out (youngest was distracted with the bag of marbles and an ice cube tray) and we stuck on the pieces going down the box.  Sometimes he glued and I held in place, sometimes I was allowed!! to glue.  After a few experiments to check the piece were in the right place, we set to work making bumpers so the marbles couldn't escape.  These consisted of the cut away pieces of tubing and some cotton wool! his choice.  The finished run was quite impressive and the boys were excited to show big brother when he came home.  This then led to our shop bought marble run being brought out and an extravagant marble run being built next to the box. They really wanted to build it on top of the box and have the marbles drop from one to the other, but little one kept climbing into the box and knocking the whole thing down.  This is maybe a task for when dad is home or youngest is having a rare nap.

Maths - Taking away by adding on

Maths - Taking away by adding on

5 year old

This week we were working on taking away by adding on.
We started by looking at small sums and moving coins around to show that we could work out any missing number if we had 2 parts of the sum.
Then we went outside and drew a large number line on the driveway.  We placed an alien on the number line and choose a number card to take away (alien had to be on a number between 10 and 20 and the number cards were from 0 - 9).  We started of on the alien card and jumped down the correct number.  Then we started on the number of the card we had drawn and jumped up the number we needed to see how many we needed to add on to get to the alien.  (if number card was 8 we started at 8 and jumped up to alien who was on 12. sum 12-8= 4: 8 jump up to 12 is 4.) We did each sum both ways to ensure his understanding was there.
Next we used coins to buy toys and receive change.  I let him choose which way he wanted to do the sum.  Finally, we moved on to some alien worksheets. This is usually received well as i try to include his favourite TV show or toy of the moment!
He loved the sheets, happily drew out the number lines and after ensuring he wrote the number above the jump for both the tens and units, was able to answer each question easily.

Lets make light

Lets make light

One of the kids got a new science kid for Christmas.  His school project at the moment is light and dark, so he asked if we could try out making some light.
Kid was quite complicated having to join positives and negatives the right way round but this was great for encouraging the kids to look really closely at the pictures and make sure each piece was in the correct way.
We successfully made a few circuits, making the lights stay on, switch on, flash and finally adding buzzers to our circuit.  Boys came up with loads of ideas where their circuits could be used.

Make the world

Make the world

A project both boys are enjoying!
We started off by covering a balloon with kitchen towel dipped in a mix of glue, blue food colouring and water. This would be the world.  We normally dry paper machie on top of the aga as it dries amazingly fast - so not thinking that's where the balloon went.  But NOT a good idea half an hour later a big bang sent us into the kitchen to find the world had blown up!! Blue coloured paper covered the kitchen.  After blowing up another balloon and recovering it in the rescued bits of paper, we had almost saved the world!! It wasn't quite as good as the first attempt but the kids had spent ages on it so I decided we would continue and see what happened.
Day 2 - balloon dry and fairly solid. We set to work drawing in the continents.  I had printed and cut out the correct sized shapes so the boys drew around these, using a globe and world map poster to position them correctly.  The boys used red thread to represent the equator. This helped them to work out positions.  When we thought we had a good representation we started to colour the continents with pen.  We had to finish off with paint as all the green pens manged to run out. 
We had to rescue Africa when the youngest had gone a bit wild with the pens! A bit of blue paint rescued the situation.
Next job was looking at the arctic circle and after a quick look in some books we decided to paint the arctic circle white. We used a bit of white thread to represent this and painted the area white and icy.  The boys have been watching "polar bears on Ice" on the TV so this was their choice of starting place. Next job was to find some pictures of arctic animals.  This was the oldest job, he searched the web and copied the pictures to publisher.  After we had looked at the size of our arctic circle and the number of animals he wanted to fit in, we decided that each animal would have to be pretty tiny.  After printing and cutting out. We glued the animals in place and used some sticky foam letters to spell out arctic.

Foam stickers were found in the sticker drawer and with a very useful animal globe and some of the kids books we found out where our animal stickers homes were.  Youngest had great fun sticking on the stickers while his brother was busy on the computer.  each continent was labelled (and places that the kids were particularly interested in).

The kids loved this project and the finished result looks great.

Paper Tearing pictures

Paper tearing - spotted some fab pictures while out made of torn paper. Took this idea home and started off with lots of sheets of coloured paper on table. Boys panicked when they found out they were to tear the paper, as normally torn paper means a ripped book - which spells TROUBLE!

However, we started and very quickly realised neither boy had any idea how to tear paper.  After lots of explaining and demonstrating we eventually got a few strips torn.  This was enough to get started.  The boys had already chosen favourite toy and they were going to use this to copy.  (My original idea was to develop the kids drawing skills - both draw sticks for arms and legs and round circles for heads and bodies.)

Boys started gluing their torn strips and copying their models, they copied a lot more than I thought they would but this was their choice . I tried to encourage them to add backgrounds and think of 'bad guys'  they could be fighting but both wanted to accurately show their character. As the pictures began to look like the characters the were really impressed. By the end of the pictures they were happily tearing away at the paper and had developed a new skill.

The final pictures were quite impressive and have been hung on the wall - when daddy recognised the character the boys were really pleased.