The BFG activities

The BFG is no ordinary bone-crunching giant. He is far too nice and jumbly. It's lucky for Sophie that he is. Had she been carried off in the middle of the night by the Bloodbottler, or any of the other giants—rather than the BFG—she would have soon become breakfast. When Sophie hears that the giants are flush-bunking off to England to swollomp a few nice little chiddlers, she decides she must stop them once and for all. And the BFG is going to help her! (Amazon.com)

We spent last week doing an activity each day based on The BFG, which we have read and listened to several times. Activities based on books are very popular with Harry and Peter and I usually find it easy to give Peter some appropriate activities to join in with. I often use this great site for ideas.

Maths

Harry really enjoyed doing this! We measured his height and foot length. He used Lego bricks to measure his foot then measured that in cm.

We then compared his height (4ft) to the BFG (24ft) and the Fleshlumpeater (54ft) to determine how many times taller than him the giants are. When we had calculated this, he built towers of Lego bricks to show the comparison.

He broke down the Fleshlumpeater tower to see how many times bigger than his tower it was.

Having determined how many times taller the giants were, we went outside to draw footprints with chalk. Harry drew his own footprint length, then multiplied by 6 to draw the BFG's footprint length and multiplied by 13.5 to draw the Fleshlumpeater's footprint length.

English

Harry and Peter wrote their own 'golden fizzwizard' dream. This kind of dream is the best kind in the story! I wrote Peter's out for him.

We also talked about acronyms, using the example of BFG, for Big Friendly Giant. We found some others we use often, such as CD, DVD, ASAP (Stuart and I often say this to each other!) and PwC (where Stuart works). 

Geography 

We looked in more detail at some of the places mentioned in the story using our Bear map and information cards: Sweden, England, Wales, Greenland, Chile and Panama. We collected the cards inside Bear yoyo dried fruit snacks and got the map in the post after sending barcodes!

Harry found the countries and marked them on a blank world map and we looked at which continent they are part of. 

He was also inspired after this to complete his Europe jigsaw, which has pieces shaped like the countries.

Science

As the BFG has very big ears and good hearing, we looked at hearing and sound. We read the relevant section from a body book, which explained the parts of the ear and how sound waves vibrate at different speeds. We practised making high and low pitched sounds with our voices.

We made elastic band 'guitars' using old shoe boxes so that we could twang the strings and see them vibrating to make sound waves.

We also did a simple demonstration showing how sound waves bounce around. I dropped the marble into the bowl and we listened to the sound which echoed for some time.

I then dropped the marble into the blanket-lined bowl. We still heard a thud but no echo, as most of the sound was absorbed by the soft surface, rather than bouncing around the hard surface.

History/culture

As The BFG and Sophie visit The Queen in the story, we read this book alongside it. Harry's favourite facts were the corgi dogs and waving from the balcony. We have seen Buckingham Palace on two previous visits to London and Harry remembered it.

We also watched a previous Queen's Speech on YouTube and videos of the coronation from Pathe - the procession and the crowning. Pathe have just made hundreds of historical film clips available on YouTube, so I think we will be using this resource quite a lot.

Harry was interested in the Crown Jewels in the videos so we read about them here. We also read more about the St Edward's Crown here.

New reading books and speech therapy group

Harry's new reading books came on Saturday and he has read them both already! He loves super heroes and usually chooses this genre at the moment. I ordered level 3 this time as they are much longer so will help him to develop his stamina for reading more text. He enjoys audio books too, either at bedtime or while he is playing and has just finished listening to the Magician's Nephew and started The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. 

We did lots of jobs on Sunday which Harry and Peter enjoyed helping with. We washed the windows at home, cut the grass and planted a few new plants. We also spent a couple of hours at the allotment, weeding and clearing dead growth to tidy it up.

Harry started at a monthly speech therapy group on Monday, which is designed to help pronounce tricky sounds. He struggles to articulate the 'ch', 'j' and 'g'sounds. There were four children of similar age and they played games for nearly an hour designed to help practise making those sounds. The speech therapists then gave me some exercises to practise at home. Harry was a bit tense at first but he really enjoyed it by the end and was disappointed that it's only a monthly and not weekly group!

Harry has practised his cello daily and started back at Beavers this week too. Yesterday we joined some friends to play with Lego and in the park with nerf guns.

Peter has had his enjoy-a-ball class and has been enjoying Reading Eggs.

Home education and art, sport and music

I like having time at home during our week for me to cover academic work with Harry and also unstructured time for them to play at home, go to the park and visit interesting places. Our Fridays and Saturdays are quite busy with structured classes, however, which I also like as it gives Harry a chance to be taught by someone else and work in a group situation. In the case of art and music, he is being taught skills I am not able to teach. 

Just one of the great things about home education is that you can access as much or as little as your child needs and plan your week in a way that suits your family. Harry's only class purely for home educated children is art and we also meet up at least once a week with other families, sometimes for structured activities and sometimes for play. The other classes are out of school time and include schooled and home educated children.

Harry started a new art class on Friday morning with other home educated children. I am hoping he can improve his drawing skills and learn to use different art materials. They each chose a picture and worked on it for the whole hour. Harry chose a Batman image and will be finishing it next week, so he didn't want me to photograph it yet! He said 'I loved art' on the way out.

Peter is not ready to focus for a whole hour yet so we sat on some seats just outside the room and read books. I took his sketch pad so he could do some drawing too and he really enjoyed this.

There is also a play area over the road so I expect we will go there with the other children after art, which will cover exercise and socialising too. 

The builders are still busy with our new bathroom and it's going well. We can use the bath now so the boys have enjoyed trying it out as it's much bigger! We have also started some sanding in the hall as we plan to decorate it this year. 

Harry also had his first enjoy-a-ball class of term on Friday. This is his fourth year of this class! I really like it as it's a general skills class and introduces aspects of all the ball sports, so it's a good foundation for whichever sport Harry might want to continue playing. He really likes the coach and has a few friends there. Peter also does this class on a Monday, with his own age group.

We started back at The Sage too yesterday for cello and music class. Harry is quite rusty after the summer holiday and has three pieces of music to practise this week so we will be doing daily practise. He was all smiles when he came out of the group session and he enjoyed it. We often take Peter to the under-5's music session at the same time, which involves singing, small instruments and parachute play, but this doesn't start back until next week. 

French at home, a new bathroom and IKEA

We have nearly finished our BFG themed activities this week and we spent most time this morning doing that. Harry also completed a page of his handwriting book.

After that we needed to go out as there was a lot of crashing going on upstairs due to the builders starting work on our new bathroom!! I am very excited as it desperately needed doing and I am sure it will be lovely, but for now it will be disruptive for a couple of weeks. Here is Harry in the place where the bath was yesterday! 

We went off to IKEA as I needed a couple of storage boxes and we had lunch there. The boys got some exercise in too in the sun of the play area.

At home, we did some French activities. Our structured class is not continuing this term but I am going to keep up learning at home. We played our French version of Orchard Toys Shopping List. 

I then hid some of the game tiles under scarves and asked Harry and Peter where they were. For example 'Où Est La Pomme?'. They found the tile then said the word and colour of scarf in French. Harry also did a section of Duolingo on the iPad with me relating to colour.

Not Back To School Picnic

We have had a super day with around twenty other home educating families to celebrate the start of our 'school' year. It was a great turnout and the children all had a brilliant time in the bushes and trees of Jesmond Dene. It was nice to see people we haven't seen for a while and meet some new families as well.

We have continued with our BFG themed activities this week too and Harry has been doing the money maths lessons on Conquer Maths. He also wanted to make a new target for our place value maths game, using numbers up to one million.

Harry had his swimming lesson yesterday and swam at last with his face in the water! This has been a real mental block for him so he was very proud of himself. Peter has contented himself in the paddling pool for water play!  

We have been playing Alphabet Lotto and Bananagrams at home.

Harry has been playing cello every day ready for lessons starting again at the weekend. He has also been building his Lego shuttle, which he added to by making a moon buggy to hang underneath it. I love his creativity! 

Back to school, home ed style

Phew! The first full 'normal' day back has been a good one! We started this morning productively as planned and got dressed straight after breakfast then played board games - Shut the Box and Incy Wincy Spider, which has really helped Peter to learn shapes. 

I wanted to start this week with literature based activities as they are always popular and Harry asked for The BFG so we will be doing a themed activity each day and I will post these together at the end of the week.

I found these activity pads for Peter in The Works recently and we also did a page each of these. The activities are very quick so I think we can fit them in for some pen practise even if we are going out. 

Harry did a page of this activity book on the three times table, which also has quick activities that should only take ten minutes.

Harry finished his Summer Reading Challenge by finishing this book, which is a level 12 Oxford Reading Tree book. 

We are going to be learning about a few famous people from history this year and we started with Charles Darwin today, by reading this book. Harry liked the Galapagos illustrations of giant lizards! We also watched a programme on iPlayer about Darwin. I downloaded this a couple of weeks ago so it's not on there any more but it's a good series from CBBC called Absolute Genuis which features the work of scientists. There are episodes about Newton and Archimedes on iPlayer at the moment.

Harry and Peter worked really well together to complete several jigsaws.

We were using chalk on the drive as part of our BFG activities so the boys did a few of their own drawings too and we played football on the grass.

I drew shapes for Peter and asked him to drive his car on particular ones.

Peter had his first enjoy-a-ball class of the term this afternoon and did really well. I read to Harry while we sat at the side. Afterwards, we bought coffee (for me) and cake (for them) to take to the park to celebrate our return to school. 

We ended up staying for two hours as we met two other homeschooling families who we know and the children all played together really well in a very involved imaginative game in the bushes! Tea was quite late and Harry and Peter were worn out, but it's been a lovely day. I am looking forward to many more like this!