Sunshine after the rain!

So, my new tactic for getting the kids to knuckle down is the promise of something nice after a couple of hours graft doing the things that, as far as they are concerned, are just unnecessary in life! Things such as math and English.  Yeah, those really non essential skills that we never use on a day to day basis.  Fortunately for me this bit of sunshine can include: science, art, crafts, nature walks, baking etc; basically, anything except Math and English.

Bearing this in mind this morning kicked off with some word games that Sprite made a while back.  The 'clue cards' have descriptions of words that the children can either shout, spell or act out once they know what it is. The alphabet cards are used for spelling and the pink cards are from the Jolly Phonics books and are basically spelling/matching games.

We then moved on to making sentences using the DK Silly Sentences game; after making their sentences - which were very, very silly - they had to write them in their books and draw a picture to match.  Sprite didn't quite understand the list of several instructions that I gave [it's a dyslexic thing] so made some mistakes.  I really must remember to give him one or two instructions at a time. They then went on to do their maths on Maths Whizz.

Then after lunch came the sunshine stuff which began with blow painting.  Daisy also wanted to do blow painting in her art journal. And then everyone wanted to do their art journal.  Of course they would!

So here are the aforementioned art journals:

This is Crush's journal page that is based around the pictures they took for the
library's Homeschool Group

This is Daisy's journal page.  She is so creative and has firm ideas about what
she wants to do.  I just love the photo of the doorway.

This is Sprites journal about Spring; obviously!  He does his pages all by himself
with no input from me.  He has used several techniques on the background page
and the flowers are made from old jam tart trays.

We then painted some nice large stones that we found whilst digging up the
garden.

Lego has picked up his Word War 2 project again and completed another two parts to the project.

And last but not least; I found this science kit in the charity shop for £1.50 and thought that it might be nice for the little ones to have a go at.  The box was taped up so when I got home and opened it up I was surprised to see that the kit was completely intact with all the contents still sealed.  So, as it would be neglectful to let such a blessing go by unused, we will start working through the booklet of experiments at some point this week God willing.

Phew, it's now midnight and I am hoping that I can keep the up the pace...goodnight xXx

Lazy Days

Sprite, Crush & Daisy are did another play at their tutoring session; can you guess what it was?  If you guessed Goldilocks and the three bears then you guessed right.  Sprite volunteered to make all the masks again so we printed off these cool 3D masks and he painted them and customised them using some fur from the hood of an old coat...he gave the daddy bear a beard too lol!

We have also been enjoying the sun and have had some long afternoons in the park with friends and have been digging over the garden and have managed to get one little area done and placed the raised beds reading for planting.  It sounds easy but we had to dig it all over [not easy with clay soil!], level it out, lay the weed membrane and then wheelbarrow over heaps of sand and shingle.  We were soooo tired at the end of the day we just had to have a take away for tea.

 We also began to demolish the 'oven' that hubby spent so much time and money on and I am so pleased that it's on its way out of my garden!  Can't wait until it's all gone.

We have holidays from Scouts, the library  home school group and madressa so have been taking it really easy; giving me lots of time to plan and think about the way I want to go with the children's education.  Group tuition isn't really working out for Sprite because of his dyslexia.  One of the main things that the educational specialist said he needs is to be over taught any subject and he isn't getting this at tuition. He understands and gets all the worksheets etc correct on the day but he is not retaining any of the information. On the other hand he does enjoy it and it is giving him confidence to see that he is on the same level as his peers - but I;m not convinced that's going to last!  Need to do a lot of thinking about where to go with him!

The colder weather has left us all with colds but God willing we will be back to a proper learning schedule next week.