Floating and sinking activity

As it was a warm afternoon yesterday we did an activity I have had ready for a while based on the science of floating and sinking.

We read this book from the library first (Harry also read a page to me) and I gave Harry and Peter a selection of objects and a tub of water. We used a plastic spoon, a metal spoon, a cork, coins, marbles, shallow plastic tubs, wooden sticks and an orange. I really liked the book and I am going to look out for the other titles. It had a good combination of explanation and practical activities.

Harry guessed that the metal objects, the marbles and the orange would sink as they are heavy. He loved the fact that the orange floated! This was explained in the book but I skipped that page until after the activity so he could see it. We then peeled the orange and tried again and it sank. The orange skin traps a layer of air which helped it to float pre-peeling.

The plastic spoon and plastic pots floated until filled with water then they sank.

The boys played with more water for another hour in the garden and when they came back in for tea we read the book again and talked about what we learned.

- Heavy objects usually sink and light objects usually float. Wood and plastic are lighter than metal.

- Air helps things to float, such as the air inside an orange, a life jacket or a rubber ring.

- The shape of an object can help it to float, such as a boat or the plastic pots. 

Writing

Harry has been doing some great writing recently and all from his own ideas. He has also been making good attempts at spelling the words himself by sounding them out loud. 

He has been making an Octonauts reference book, by drawing something from the Octonauts and writing its name on the page. There are 12 pages so far, looking like this.

Stuart bought Harry some new police Lego so we have been building that and playing games with it. Harry has been writing to-do lists for the policemen.

At Ouseburn farm today he wrote all the things he had seen. 

Painting session

We spent a really nice couple of hours doing some painting over the weekend. We painted dinosaurs, flower and butterfly shapes. Harry painted a bee on canvas and I cut out some colouring pages from a knights and castles colouring book for them to paint.

Peter was very focussed. He liked doing some sponge printing too

Harry liked the effect that it left on the paper when he lifted his painted shapes up

Harry used the paint bellows and then a straw to blow and splatter light paint on top of a darker background.

This is how we clean up after painting at the moment and it seems to work well. Harry washes the pots and brushes in the kitchen sink and Peter is content with a bowl of water and a cloth. I am sure he will want to be in the sink before long though!

A trip out - Seven Stories

We had a really nice visit with friends to Seven Stories today. We also visited the small community farm next door. Peter was very taken with the baby birds and the chickens wandering around freely, he is a real animal lover! Harry had his clipboard with him and wrote down all the things he saw. We enjoyed spotting the vegetables growing that are the same as the ones in our allotment.

We managed to visit both exhibitions at Seven Stories. Peter wore his knight outfit to visit so he could play with the dragons!

They both made dragon masks and we also listened to two stories in The Attic.

There were lots of pretend picnics going on in the Enid Blyton exhibition, as well as visiting lands full of treats in the Enchanted Wood area. This is such a great place for stimulating imaginative play.

Purposeful play time

These play activities cover a few weeks as we had three trips out last week plus a museum workshop and French class so there wasn't much time for home-based activity!

While Harry did some Roman craft I gave Peter tissue paper and pva glue. He ripped the tissue paper himself (good fine motor practice) and glued it to paper. We talked about the colours as he did it and he was really engrossed for half an hour. He loved holding up the glue spreader and seeing the glue fall to the paper.

I have started using these alphabet colouring pages from Activity Village with Peter. We have just used 'A' so far and he pointed to the objects and named some of them while colouring them. I pointed them out too and emphasised the A sound.

We have been getting a lot of our Orchard Toys games out again recently. I love playing board games with both boys and they both mainly play really nicely, taking turns and follow it through to the end. We played Spotty Dogs and Peter liked spinning the spinner and we counted the dots and bones together. We will use games a lot over the next couple of years as we did with Harry and we also play with all of us together sometimes - Spotty Dogs and Ladybirds are both great for early counting.

We also played Red Dog, Blue Dog, a lotto game. I asked Peter which colour his object was each time he chose a card and he mostly gets it right now. 

I have been using these books from the library for counting. We read them while Harry was doing his gymnastics class. We also talked lots about the pictures on the pages and the colours, as well as counting the objects.

There is a room in the building where Harry does his enjoy-a-ball class which stores the playgroup toys and we go in there sometimes to wait, which is where we found these great magnets. Peter made them into 'snakes' and he made a long one for daddy and a short one for baby, so we talked about long and short while he was making them. He also made flowers and we talked lots about the colours he was using while he did it. This was such a great learning activity for concepts of colour and size and he remembered when we went back this week and asked to go and make snakes!

Early summer allotment progress

We have been at our allotment for a good few hours today - there was a lot of weeding around the edges to do! Everything seems to be growing really nicely. We planted out courgette and squash seeds today and moved some of the tomato and cucumber plants into grobags. I topped up my crushed eggshell slug repellant too. 

The tap broke when we were there, spilling a lot of water so Stuart had an additional job to do in fixing that. There are still a couple of beds to fix up, some greenhouse panes to replace and a bit more heavy duty weeding but we are happy with the progress this year. I am going around 3 times a week with the boys on average, plus we usually manage to go at the weekend. I don't think we could manage more than this at the moment so hopefully it will prove enough to get some good results. 

Harry was raring to go with a to-do list and has been really helpful weeding, collecting up weeds and sweeping. Peter was happily occupied as well with collecting weeds and watering.

The greenhouse is full of tomatoes, cucumbers, coriander and peppers. I will be giving some of these to other people though. 

In the beds we have leeks, broad beans, carrots, sweetcorn and potatoes (3 varieties planted a couple of weeks apart). They are all in their infancy but look healthy so far! The first beetroot seedlings and pea shoots are coming up too and I will be planting more next week.

Romans and our home educating schedule

We had a good productive morning today! We usually do home/table based activities straight after breakfast as Harry is alert and I try to grab him before he gets into doing anything else. Peter is generally happy to play on his own at this time too if he doesn't want to join in with us. This also has the advantage of leaving the rest of the day relatively free for other activities/play/trips - today we went to our allotment followed by French class then playground. The flexibility to plan your day in a way that suits your family is a great advantage of home educating and also means it can work for many different families with different routines and preferences.

We went to a Roman schools workshop at the Hancock museum yesterday where we had to think about how we know so much about the Romans and look at some objects to decide what we would take to a party for the Emperor Hadrian. We also spent time looking around the Roman displays in the museum. There is a large Roman area with a display of Hadrian's Wall which is obviously of local significance.

























So to follow up from this we read our library book this morning and looked at some pictures of the Colosseum online. 

Harry made a Roman Soldier spoon puppet from a kit he received as a birthday present and was really interested so he also completed some pages of his warrior dressing sticker book. This included Hannibal's army so I read him the chapter of our history book 'A Little History of The World' relating to Hannibal and the Romans.

Harry and Peter then dressed up as soldiers and role-played Romans for a while. Harry thought that a magician would be needed to defeat the Romans with secret magic as they were so strong and powerful.