Junior Chef

This weekend the boys went to a birthday party all day at their friend's house. They are here popping bubbles and there was a bouncy castle plus lots of  playtime with friends and tasty treats. 

We did a 'create your own jigsaw' kit, both of them painted theirs and they are currently waiting for them to dry. 

Caden opened up another of his birthday presents, a junior chef set. He really loved it. He read through an entire step by step instructions guide, getting stuck at the temperatures which he hasn't really learned properly yet. He chose to make meatball spaghetti and scones this afternoon with me so we have a nice cookery session planned after our trip to tesco for the ingredients. We will be going with a budget of £10 and he will be helping me to add up the amounts and see if we are right at the checkout. We will also be looking for which is the cheapest and best value (in terms of cost per 100g etc) to keep learning about living in everyday life. 

Today we crunched the division section in his Year 1 maths program. It seemed short and it was good to watch him slowly grasp the concept. He grasped it quicker than multiplication weirdly but I wonder if his time spent doing multiplication last week has prepared him for the division better. It is basically the reverse of what we did in multiplication. It was fairly tedious with lots of counting but was all pretty much correct at 85% and his errors were more for not concentrating properly. He did pretty well with it all in all. Next section is fractions... we are also planned on for doing money which will mean that our planned trip to the supermarket for ingredients will lay a few foundations for that. 

Miles is carrying on with his reading programme. He mostly plays though, works things out with his toys and sees his friends. He just asked me how a helicopter flies in the air - yikes... how to explain that to a 3 year old. Just saying the rotor blades push the air down so that the helicopter goes up should be enough I hope. Maybe we will need to do an experiment on this soon... 

We have a nice chilled week planned. Nothing major going on. Woodcraft folk, all their friends as usual and projects at home planned in. We will need to plan another museum outing in soon. I have a busy month of studying ahead as final exams in June so I will need to stay close to home so i'm not too tired to study in evenings. Summer of fun and outings planned though come the middle of June. 

Tie dye and more maths

A friend and I have started up a Thursday science club. We plan on doing experiments with them each week. There are loads of ideas on Pinterest and elsewhere on the web. The opportunities for practical science seem limitless after looking through the suggestions on the web. 

This week we did tie dye. The colours were yellow and Caden chose ocean blue. 

We found a few white items of clothing.  

We explained to the kids how this would work and tied string around the clothes by bunching up pinched areas for circles or entire sections for rings around the clothing. Then we dipped the clothes into the buckets. 

Miles and Caden both had a go at mixing the clothes into the buckets.  Here is Freddie (9) helping Miles. 

The blue bucket with a two tone dye attempt from Betsy. 

Miles and Meg played in the mud and cleaned off in a bucket of soapy water afterwards with their cookies. Look at Miles' happy face here. :)

We have also done quite a bit of maths again this week. What started off as a great maths week with the subtraction ended up with some noticeable areas that need work. We worked on the multiplication today. We got through the section but I want Caden to take a few weeks to do other maths things and then come back to it. It required some memorisation of doubles ie 11+11 (2 x 11) = 22. I have made a sheet for the wall with the things he needs to memorise and ticked off the ones he already knows. We will work on those every time we remember until he knows them then see if he can fly through that section as easily as the subtraction. I'm glad to have found an area that needs work, this means that going back over the year's maths was worth the effort to me. 

We have also been reading The BFG this week. Caden is really into it but Miles only finds it a good way to get off to sleep quickly. The weather has been rainy so we have spent more time indoors playing and doing puzzles, iPad games and art/craft stuff. 

We also have lots of fun stuff over the weekend planned. Hopefully the cinema together and a friend's birthday party on Sunday which will be great fun for them! 

Academic progress update

It is interesting that since we have had a reasonable break of a few weeks since we tackled much specific maths work, we have come back to it with lots of enthusiasm. Caden practically begged me this morning to do maths. We made a huge amount of progress, he flew through the entire subtraction section for the entire work expected of Year 1 in the national curriculum in just this morning. He totally gets it now so it is easy to teach him. I am glad we had a break when he didn't want to do it. He is very pleased with himself for getting 100% across the board with the subject and getting a platinum certificate. For anyone interested we are working from the conquer maths program which is an online study program, based on the UK national curriculum. It works very well for us because I always know what level he is at on the curriculum scale, what he needs to learn and we can pick and choose what topic, year (we could go right to the top level in one area if he really wanted to only stick with one topic, for example). We can go as quickly or slowly as we like and that suits us all well, he can learn at his own pace. This is clearly working for us anyway, as long as he leans everything he needs to in the end to get a good grade in his GCSE maths, it really doesn't matter what order he does it in.

Miles did some more reading work with me today. I noticed in the last few weeks that he seems very ready to learn reading. He is showing an interest in words and seems to be picking them up fairly quickly now his spoken language skills are much improved. He also is starting to understand how a laptop mouse pad works which means reading eggs and mathseeds are much more accessible for him. I plan on getting mathseeds started next year, no rush. We are already 5 eggs into level one of reading eggs and on level one of the 'Your baby can read' program which supplemented Caden's reading learning very well. The current plan is to do this with him early every morning (while I have my morning coffee at 8am) for as long as he is interested and this will be 'Mummy and Miles' special time where we cuddle and read the words together.

Another thing I thought worth mentioning today was that while I was working on subtraction with Caden, he wanted to sit on my knee and cuddle while we worked. I thought how nice that was, that he was feeling relaxed, loved and happy while he was learning. I hope this means he feels warmer towards the subject than I did when I was at school, I really hated maths when I was a child. I was told I was rubbish at it, so I was. I can see now that there are important fundamental aspects of maths that I wasn't taught and that no teacher that I remember ever identified and helped me with. It meant that I personally didn't get the later stuff at all and subsequently thought I didn't have a brain for maths. Now I can see that with maths you are just 'scaffolding' the learning, level by level.  It is important to me that they enjoy the things they learn so getting these basics right and fully understood for the kids is vital. I feel they won't struggle later on with more difficult concepts.

So there were lots of academic developments today. Caden has been playing a shark attack game on the iPad which he loves. It has radar type grid maps that he has to follow and has a fairly realistic graphic of a shark that he controls. He now wants to 'study' sharks (his words) so we went to the library today and found a book on marine fish which has lots of shark-facts among other fish-facts. Miles found an extreme dinosaurs book and we got the first Harry Potter book to start reading a couple of chapters a night, I will attempt it anyway. I am hoping Caden gets into this because I loved it so much. It's up to him though. He still likes the short picture books like the Gruffalo, just as much. Bletchley library has a really excellent children's factual lending library. An entire wall of books about every subject you could think of. Such a superb resource to have access to.

There has been an explosion of intelligent questions from Caden lately too. Clearly cognitive developmental leaps have been made. Today's most memorable was 'Does the moon make noise?' (when it orbits - we were talking about orbits again).  He has been asking questions about the stone age and the middle ages, he learned the words 'rennaissance' and 'ancient' (from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece) so I am now on the hunt for a massive timeline poster of world history by Christopher Lloyd which will hopefully inspire lots of learning about human history. This will be a nice background to our tour of England's Castles and other historical areas of interest that I have planned for them in a couple of years to support their education. They look pretty invaluable. https://whatonearthbooks.com/shop

We haven't been going to Woodcraft folk as much in the last couple of weeks and Forest school is taking a break but I am hoping they will both start up again soon. I am looking forward to the Summer so much. There are lots of exciting things planned in this year.

Rockets and Scones

Today Miles wanted to make a rocket ship. We got a kit out that we had from Christmas. 

He loves practical stuff so he began fitting things together straight away, he needed a little help but we worked out where things went. Here he is with all his bits organised and laid out, ready to go. 

Putting wood glue in the holes ready to put the dowels in. 

Painting the shell. 

It is drying at the moment but it is obviously a masterpiece, especially with the stickers all over it too. 

Then he wanted to make scones for breakfast so we rolled out the dough and used interesting cutters to make the scones. Miles ate star shaped scones with butter and jam. Caden loved them too. 

Birthdays and Easter Eggs!

This is my new way of getting about in MK with the kids. I am totally in love with my new (second hand) trailer and the boys love being carted around with me. I am hoping it will keep me fit over the Summer as well as keeping my petrol costs down. So far so good!

Caden had his 6th birthday party which I hosted at home. He wanted it to be a minecraft/nerf gun theme and luckily the weather was beautiful so the kids all played games out in the garden and went on the tablets indoors. 

Caden chose his cake from costco, you get to choose the fillings and the design. There was far too much cake for everyone though.

My sister Fiona visited with her four kids and the boys had a wonderful couple of days playing with their cousins at the playground ...

and the local parks. 

We received a kit to make your own bouncy balls for Caden's birthay so we made them. It was very interesting. The crystals simply need cold water and time to harden. Very simple. They really loved pouring in the crystals and making their own patterns. 

Examples of the balls we made. 

Testing the bounce. 

Caden wanted to make a king's crown to go with the royal robe he was wearing. We cut out a shape from a cardboard box that was knocking about and we spray painted it gold on the grass. Miles wanted a knight's shield which we spray painted silver. 

Then they decorated their new items with glitter, bits of tinsel, feathers and other things with UVA glue. 

A serious King. 

Miles was very proud of his shield. 

It was Easter, they got two eggs and had lots of fun devouring them!

MK Art Gallery Workshop

We visited the MK Art Gallery today for a workshop on the artwork by Melanie Smith who is currently exhibiting work there. On the way to the art gallery the kids played around the various pieces of art and sculptures that we came across. MK is great for this I think, there are lots of interesting pieces all over the centre that they love playing on and talking about. The one below usually has water in it that flows down and I believe it is meant to represent the path of the River Ouzel through MK. 

We had a little wait outside the gallery so they played with friends, chasing and running about. 

In the gallery they were encouraged to think about why they might be immersed in colour and they paid attention to the sounds coming from the speakers that intentionally accompanied the light. 

They watched a short piece of art film about Mexico City and saw how the film was taken from a helicopter that spiralled further and further away. Caden liked this bit, especially when the woman running the workshop held up a world map. We have done work on Geography lately and he loves learning where countries are in relation to each other. He pointed out in the group that it was alongside the North Atlantic Ocean (he read it from the map though). 

There was an interesting exhibition to accompany the short film with many display cases filled with very unusual pieces like a green plastic brain, forests, thumbs, vases and so on. I had to write down the words of things they had found and Miles, Caden and Megan ran off excitedly and came back to tell me what they had seen in the cases so I could write down as many as possible.

Then they sat down and looked at all the orange items on the display. They shouted out what the items were and enjoyed participating in the group. Then they pointed out that these in fact were all made of plastic and this was man made. A group discussion about what constituted man-made and what was natural in materials followed. 

This is the group of children finding similarities in the items they had written down. All those that occur on all three groups' sheets are ticked off. The children had to read each others' sheets and shout out when they found a matching set.

We also watched two films in a dark room which showed us all about the Fordlandia project. This was a purpose built town which was placed in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The jungle quickly took over, people got diseases and nature effectively won. This was the premise for much of the artists work and the kids were interested to see the films that showed how the trees had grown back into the buildings which were abandoned now. 

After this rather excellent session we said goodbye to our friends (we know all the children from various other groups/classes we have attended), we went for our picnic. I remembered from a cycle ride the other day about a new sculpture in Campbell Park that the kids liked so we walked over there. The kids are here playing in between the posts. 

Caden wanted to roll down the hill so I took our packed lunch to the hill and drank my coffee while they had a great time rolling down and running back up again. 

Some beautiful flowers we found. 

Caden squelched his socked feet about in a boggy bit of grass at the bottom of the hill so when he came back up that time he wanted to take off his socks. He then found a rather creative way of wearing his socks... tied in knots around his feet. This amused him and he ran about for a while with them like this. haha!

Milesy rolling about and having fun!

The art gallery in MK is a brilliant resource as many of the exhibitions are free and incorporate lots of different aspects of learning. Today's session covered so much about art but also about Geography, science - materials, the environment and history, plus Caden was using his reading and writing skills in the session and learning how to observe differences and similarities in groups of objects. 

Geology

The boys have been having a lot of fun. We all went to the Hungry Horse for dinner at the weekend. They got balloons and decided to dance to some music that came on. This is them having a great time! 

The weather really perked up this week. I felt like Spring cleaning and Miles was desperate to clean the car so we got out the sponges and soap. He was soaked by the end but between us we did a pretty decent job. 

Then he helped me do the laundry. I love how he is so enthusiastic about house jobs. He loves to join in. 

Caden and Miles turned a box into a monster which they then wore on their heads. It had loads of eyes.

They worked on a poster project this week. This involved cutting out images of sea creatures (and in Miles' case, just cutting out shapes) and sticking them onto a big sheet of paper with UVA glue. 

They went to Harrold Park near Bedford for a play in the sun. This is Miles practising his swinging on the bar. 

Caden found a snail.  He played with it and tried to feed it a banana. We established that they don't like banana but probably ate flowers and leaves. He knew it was a mollusc and we talked about its exoskeleton. He watched it hide in its shell and then reach around looking for things to move about on. 

Miles having fun throwing stones at an owl here. There are some excellent wooden sculptures at this park. They found an eel sculpture that they said was an Icthyosaur. 

They collected a bunch of daisies with long stalks which I made into a daisy 'crown' for Miles. He also wanted a daisy 'sword' (of course) so I tagged a few together for him and he brandished them for a while. 

Miles was interested in some cobwebs under the bench we were sat at. We threw the daisy heads at it and watched how some of them were caught and some tore the web. Then they collected some sticks and we made a web out of sticks. 

We have also been out with their friend Megan. They played together at a local playground which is really great for climbing and is near the River Ouzel. 

We did some excellent bits of work at home this week. We did a creepy crawlies project. Here is Caden reading the captions next to the stickers of insects and bugs etc. He is sticking them in the right places and reading about them to me. We learned new words and especially the word arachnid. 

Miles found stickers and did some sticking of his own at the same time. 

We did a lot of work from their encyclopaedias. We have been using the contents and index pages frequently lately. Caden is getting very used to the purpose of these. We read about molluscs and we read about lots of other animals. Miles really enjoyed his pictures of things that happen on a farm, he liked talking about what was happening in the book and all the different things that were happening on the pages. 

Then I found a spider and caught it in the bug jar. They are usually scared of spiders and initially freaked out a bit but got over it pretty quickly and were then fascinated. They looked at its head and eyes (we couldnt actually see them) counted its legs, looked at where the spinerettes would be and its thorax. The boys both giggled watching it walking around the jar. Caden wanted to know how they had babies, he knew they were  called spiderlings. We talked about the egg sac and how they bind them to doorways and other safe places. He wanted to know how many they had and I didn't know so we googled it and found images of the wolf spider which carries all of its babies on her back, even stopping for the ones that fall off. He learned that spiders lay between 2 and 1000 eggs and we read through all the blurb on the web page about how different spiders operate, even how they eat the males so the males have to be very careful. He was so interested in this. It makes such a big difference to see him learning things he is actually interested in, he is totally engrossed when it is a question he has asked and we find it out. As opposed to me simply trying to give him facts that he has no real interest in. 

We had been talking about life cycles prior to this photo being taken too. About metamorphosis (we have done a few projects on this before). His favourite was the life-cycle of the mammal, (dog in this case). 

Mr Spider!

Miles really giggled at the spider moving about. 

Caden spread his own jam on his rice cake and did a good job!

We got out my World Atlas and started doing a bit of Geology. We talked about plate tectonics again and looked at the fault lines in the atlas. We did an experiment with rice cakes and a bowl of water. We looked at how the rice cakes let the water (representing the magma) through, when they were separated. We also saw how they crumbled when they rubbed against each other and how this might cause an earthquake or cause mountains to form. When the rice cakes got soggy, he wanted to do it again, so we did it twice. 

We also talked about hot smokers, the structure of the Earth and also actually the universe too. 

We talked about the layers of depth in the sea and about pressure and why we cannot visit the bottom of the sea (without a very pressurised and strong structure around us) and why things from the bottom of the sea cannot come up here. The pressure difference means that we would be squashed and the things from the bottom of the sea would explode as they need the pressure of the sea around them to survive. I think we will have to do an experiment to show this at a later date. Any suggestions welcome. 

We also discussed the different layers of the atmosphere and for the first time Caden learned about the international space station. I think we will be looking in the night sky for it soon. You can see it with the naked eye, it's the brightest thing in the sky. 

This is Caden yawning when we did grid referencing. Haha! We didn't do it for too long. It was more of an introduction. I showed him where Milton Keynes was, he wanted to know where Birmingham was and we both found London together. 

We also looked at Egypt and South America. He has a personal interest in both areas. 

We did some art. Caden found he could make interesting patterns by painting squidges on plastic coated paper. 

We made crocodiles out of egg boxes with paint (they are learning to mix their own colours from just the primary colours), googly eyes and teeth from cut out, zig zag paper. 

The finished reptiles!

We had a bit of a look at the globe. We talked about the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Why the equator is hot and the poles are cold. 

Caden is pointing to the equator line here (I am playing a game with him of where is.....)

Here he has found Antarctica. 

I needed to change a fuse on a plug. Miles is always interested in this sort of stuff so he watched while I did it and tried to put the fuse in himself. 

Hugely busy and interesting week. We are planning a bit of down time over the next couple of weeks so I can Spring clean. It's half term anyway so it sort of feels like the right time to do that. We will of course continue home ed work throughout. They never stop learning!