Wednesday 6 November 2013

Craft, shop play numeracy and poems

Apologies for the disorganised nature of this post - I am including activities from the whole week to catch up! It has been a very crafty week so far - we had firework pictures on Monday, outdoor art yesterday and a visit to House of Objects today. This was a building full of delight for Harry especially, as it contains hundreds of items for craft and junk modelling, donated by businesses. He made CD man and a sky for a landscape. I was pleased that Harry got on quite independently as I had to negotiate with Peter a few times to stop him unrolling big rolls of string, paper and thread!



Peter did spend around half an hour adding items to a big collage and enjoyed it, but the one and a half hours we stayed was too long for him! 


The boys were still feeling crafty after this morning so we got the paints out this afternoon. We did some leaf printing, painted toilet roll tubes (we will add leaf 'hair' to these another day) and painted egg boxes to form the start of a poppy wreath for Remembrance Day. I had seen this on a friend's Facebook page recently and liked the look of it. Hopefully it will look something like this.






Harry was also given some film reels by House of Objects to bring home showing pages from newspapers. He has been cutting these out this afternoon into single images and using them as tickets in a ticket shop for Peter and I to buy.



We started this morning by playing shops with Lego bricks - different colours represent different food in a grocery store. We used real money up to 20p to help with adding and subtracting to 20. This is an effective way for Harry to learn and he likes calculating the change. It means we can all play together too instead of trying to keep Peter busy while I work with Harry - Peter can practise some counting at the same time. We have kept the Lego and money out to play with tomorrow too.

We also had a sing and dance to some Barefoot Books videos on YouTube this morning - we especially like The Journey Home from Grandpa's. Harry practised his cello and shared the reading of Mr Dizzy with me. He likes reading Mr Men books and they have some great words for him to attempt.

As we had been thinking about firework poems on Monday and Autumn art yesterday, we talked about words to describe Autumn yesterday too and Harry dictated an acrostic poem. I just wanted him to concentrate on the poem instead of the writing so I wrote it down for him. It went like this:

Autumn is my favourite time of year
Up in the trees there are conkers
The leaves fall off the trees
Under the trees there are helicopters
Magic leaves changing colours
New bobble hats, cold weather

We talked about adjectives afterwards and how he could have used more to describe the conkers, helicopters and leaves. He easily came up with several for each.

Harry finished his day today by helping me to feed the Christmas cakes. Peter had gone to bed already and Harry had been reading with Stuart but he was delighted to come back downstairs! 


We also had sparklers and toffee apples in the garden on Tuesday and the boys were delighted to see some huge fireworks in the distance. Harry is not keen on the noise so we haven't been to a large display yet but they did enjoy some garden fireworks on Saturday night at a friend's house.

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