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 - elementary

Lots of good work on the bead frame this week. Binx has been working on addition of 4 or 5 addends in the ten thousands. One (of the many!) thing I love about the montessori materials is that really complicated processes are achievable and enjoyable because of the way they are taught. Just being faced with a huge addition sum on paper might have been intimidating but because we got to know the bead frame and worked through the steps then it is just a natural progression and before you know it you are working on problems that seemed really difficult before.

Binx is working on learning division facts here, this is an activity designed for younger children but she wanted to revisit it because she still has difficulty recalling division off the top of her head.

We read a good book about Van Gogh this week and that set off an impromptu art session that everybody got involved in.

Looking at the notation of squares of numbers in a very hands on way. Sneaking in some times tables practice too! 

Binx is always one for the science experiments so I usually do them at the end of the day because I know she will spend ages on them. After looking at the properties of solids, liquids and gases last week we looked at solids in more depth today. We looked at the properties of rigid, elastic and plastic solids (using a ping pong ball, a sponge ball, and a ball of clay), and we also looked at how a solid can be made to change by applying weight. The experiments involved changing the amount of weight, and also the length and thickness of the solid. Lots of fun! 

Days of learning - elementary

Ok, so pretty much the day after posting all those pictures of our school room, I started seeing all it's imperfections and problems and got the urge to move it around. I am always moving the house around, my family are very understanding! I ended up moving the entire school room down to the kitchen and getting a lounge back. After our first week down there we are all really liking it, it is great to have access to the sink for practical life and science activities and there is more floor and table space. It took me about 14 hours to move everything but it was time well spent.

Binx used the hierarchical material this week, comparing sizes, labelling, discovering the families of numbers (simple, thousand, million) and how that relates to where we put the commas in numbers. She was very impressed with the size difference between the 1 cube and the 1,000,000 cube, so was I really, it's quite impressive to see it in such a hands on way. 

On Wednesday, after 2 days using the hierarchical material, binx started using the large bead frame, practicing building large numbers and then reading large numbers that I built. We then did some addition to practice the exchanging of beads. This work was mostly just to get used to the frame and feel comfortable with 'reading' it.

We did some work looking at the composition of the earth. We looked at the different layers in terms of what to call them (barysphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere), and related it to the density experiment where you put the syrup, water and oil in a jar and you get the separate layers. This is because everything settles according to its weight so in the earth the barysphere is heaviest, then the lithosphere etc. As you can see from the picture below, we also looked at the relative thicknesses of each layer. Binx was pretty interested in the hydrosphere (water!) so we did an experiment to show how much fresh water there is in the world. You get a great big bowl of water which represents all the water in the world and you take about 4 tbsp and freeze it to show all the fresh water in the world which is frozen and then 2 tbsp which shows all the fresh water in the world that all living things have to share. All the rest of the water in the bowl is salt water. Pretty mind blowing actually. 

We have been learning to play Chinese chess. My parents brought this set back from Vietnam last year but we haven't played it until now. It is similar to western chess but with some important differences and some great pieces (we have elephants and chariots instead of bishops and rooks!). 

I was busy with Rogue at one point and when I came back, Binx had made herself a den with a blanket over two chairs and was inside exploring an electronics set. 

We explored polygons and learnt some new quadrilateral names like the rhombus and parallelogram. Note: everyone should try to have a two year old present while learning the word parallelogram, lots of fun! 

We finished up the week with a review on the states of matter, solid, liquid and gas. This was mostly review work but we added in a few extras like changing a solid with heat, (melting wax), and making holes in the side of a tin to show how a liquid pushes sideways as well as down but a solid only pushes down.

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?