Days of learning - elementary

Wow, a flurry of new interests and activities this week. Binx has been desperate to get on the computer for some time now but I was holding back while I searched for some good content, we are not by any means ready to just let her loose on the internet. Khan Academy has filed that gap for us, I certainly haven't explored the whole site yet but what we have used is amazing. Binx has been doing the maths and the computer programming. I was happy to see her doing maths but amazed to see her progressing through the computer programming at such a rate. This is something I have zero experience in and could never have taught her but here she is (only 3 days in), creating shapes, colours and using variables in code. She is practicing all four operations, graphing, plotting points, and pretty advanced algebra formulas and best of all she doesn't even realise it because it is fun! I was getting left behind by the whole thing so I created an account so I could learn too. As a parent/educator you get progress reports including how long they spend doing each thing, which areas they are focusing on and which areas they need help in. I think we are quite late to the party here because Khan Academy has been around for a good while but we are excited to be joining in now. Note: no one paid me to review this site, I am just a mum and a homeschooler and we like it!

Of course, the more traditional materials still continue, below was a lesson on suffixes which involved the invention of many random words and was pretty fun.

We explored different types of mountains and how they are formed several weeks ago and this week binx revisited it and created posters showing the main types of mountain.

Story of the World has been great for history and projects this week had binx building a ziggurat out of blocks and painting a shirt to make a kind of dress coat.

Here she is exploring a lesson on ways of combining. We mixed water with salt and water with copper sulphate to show solutions, water mixed with chalk dust to create a suspension, sand and iron filings made a mixture (that could be separated with a magnet), and bicarbonate of soda and vinegar gave us a chemical reaction. The albums that we are using have many chemical reactions shown but I can't seem to get hold of the chemicals because I am not a "proper" educational establishment and I don't have a license. 

Quite a lot of maths got worked on this week. Addition and subtraction on the bead frame, the division board, multiplication of fractions and this fun work on square numbers. While drawing out these squares binx said out loud "I think I get this!" in a really excited voice, and that is what it's all about.

Days of learning - primary

Rogue enjoyed using the pegboard for quite a long time. Whenever he uses this he always puts the pegs in lines or blocks, never just a random sprinkling of pegs.

Carrot grating proved a bit difficult so I think we will have to practice grating with something softer. No fingers grated though so that's a bonus!

This was a new activity that I put out, pouring pecans into a bowl and then using the small ladle to put them back into the jug. Simple, but entertaining.

I got out cylinder block 2 this week and as it looks the same when they are all in he was pretty surprised when he picked up the widest one and found that it was really thin! He tried the two blocks together and really enjoyed that, it seemed to be just the right level of challenge for him. 

 These bird pictures were cut out of an old calendar and usually calendars have little thumbnail images on the back of all the pictures so they provide a perfect matching game.

Rogue had fun exploring the 3d shapes. He just held them, tried to build with them and then experimented with rolling them. He discovered that the cube doesn't roll, the sphere rolls a long way, and the ellipsis is really really funny when you roll it!

Days of learning - elementary

Binx has had a pretty full week, these are just what I got pictures of - sentence analysis work, (she loves this and would do it all day, I feel like I have to come up with new sentences every single evening), exploring multiples with the bead chains, commutative and distributive laws, and spelling practice with a homemade small moveable alphabet.

The classification with buttons came about because she was looking at the six kingdoms of living things and was concentrating pretty hard when she suddenly looked up at me and said 'but why?!' 'Why do we put everything in different groups?' For an answer,, I went and got the button box and dumped a load out on the rug then asked her to find me one particular one. Binx tried to just nudge them around to find it at first and then started sorting them into piles of different colours of her own accord. I had a minor fanfare going off in my head, but tried not to let it show! I just sneakily dropped a few ideas in here and there like, 'ooh, I wonder if you could split those white ones up anymore?' And pretty soon she had me writing her labels (still a reluctant writer!) for the classifying you can see in the picture. She ended up answering her own question when she said 'it's much easier to find it once I've sorted them out a bit' "lightbulb moment!"

Last picture is of her experimenting with the thermic tablets, these are small pieces of different materials (wood, stone, metal, glass) which you can match together by feeling the differences in weight and temperature. I find it interested that she is still so interested in the sensorial equipment, she obviously doesn't repeat things over and over like a three year old would but she really seems to get a lot out of it. Maybe it's a sort of downtime activity as it does quite often follow a quite intense bout of learning, maybe it's just fun, or maybe it's a sibling thing (he's doing it so I want to as well?!), whatever the reason it's fine by me. I wonder if students at a montessori school get access to the younger students work? Anyone know?

First language shelf and other areas

In the last post I took you through some of the sensorial and practical life activities we have out and today I'm going to quickly show you another shelving area that is set up for rogue. (I will show you what binx is up to at some point, honest!)

We'll talk about the top shelf first which is language, the box on the back left holds my homemade sandpaper letters (not made of sandpaper - I'll post the process I used soon), at the moment it only holds the four that he is working on a, m, s, and t. Next to that is a white board where I write one of the letters. I usually change it each evening and he comes in each morning and tells me what sound it makes. Just in front of that are some little classification cards. He has to sort which objects belong in which room, (please be nice, I'm not an artist, I'm just trying to help my kids learn!). Next are some 'what-goes-with-what' sorting cards which were a free printable from montessori for everyone. And lastly on that back row are just some precut squares of paper for the 'metal' insets. So...yes...as you can see the front of that shelf holds our 'metal' insets, which I made from card! 

The bottom shelf holds an A3 minisun light pad. The light pad is not a traditional montessori material but we love it loads. Next to it I change out different baskets of manipulatives to experiment with. At the moment we have, coloured perspex 3d shapes, some stain glass window effect shapes that I made from black card and coloured kite paper, red and green glass nuggets and stars and a selection of mirrors and clear prisms. This gets lots and lots of use every day, it's so much fun.

There are a couple of other areas set up for rogue but they are less structured. There is a very small roll top desk that he can use if he wants. This has a few of his favourite puzzles on top plus another whiteboard for letter learning. There is a little draw under the desk which has some coloured pencils in and Inside the rooster box is a basket with another puzzle.

There is a small selection of books available all the time which I swap around frequently and also a basket of instruments which is not available all the time because it quickly descends into chaos! I think that is everything that rogue has going on at the moment but it changes so frequently, in fact I took these pictures last night and this morning I made something new for the language shelf and a simple colour sorting activity so regular updates will be needed. Any thoughts on improving my set up will be much appreciated.