WOMBAT STEW- Mammals & Marsupials

Wanting to revise Mammals, we started by revising what a Mammal was, then sorted these plastic animals accordingly.

Then we went outside and discovered how to recreate animal tracks in the dirt.

Then we watched a PLANET EARTH dvd, which Miss 6 loved, in which the presenter mentioned Marsupials - a perfect introduction.  After discussing that all marsupials have pouches, we made these cute paper plate pouch Kangaroos with Joey. It involved some paper folding from one of my resource books I’ve had for years.

Following from this, I found a great new website while I was looking for Lapbook ideas http://www.homeschoolshare.com/wombat_stew.php with a whole study unit dedicated to WOMBAT STEW full of Mammals & Marsupials. We started by reading the book then went on an excursion looking for the ingredients to make our own stew.

Here’s the girls cooking their Wombat Stew on the campfire of sticks they made.

Luckily, I had some puppets suitable for this story and we made it into a Puppet play.  It was a great opportunity for the girls to learn about being organised, sharing roles, props and re-telling a story.  They did the show (after a few practices) for their Dad that night.  Miss 6 painted the sign, Miss 4 did the stars.

The SHOW!

It was also  great opportunity to introuduce ’shy i’ and ‘tough Y’.  Both girls managed to read all these words from the book.  Miss 6 sorted them into groups of same sounds.

This book also presented a chance to talk about friendship and what being a friend means.  We discussed what the animals in the story did to help their friend then did this little fold-up person booklet.  I got the girls to draw pictures of things they could do to be a friend.

We all really enjoyed this little unit of study.

 

Catching up - Phonics & our Vowel Forest

Hooray!  I finally got Photoshop re-installed, now for the picis of what we’ve been doing the last 2 weeks.

Even though the girls have come leaps and bounds with their reading, imagine my shock when I heard Miss 6 reading this Pony Pals book with about 100 words to the first page.  She read a whole sentence unaided - WOW! A couple of months ago, she would have just tossed it straight in the too hard basket.

The girls went on an impromptu leaf hunt looking for Autumn leaves finding all different shapes and then sorted them into shapes using the text book as a guide.  Fitted in great with the fact that we were learning long ‘a’ and magic ‘e’. They then made their own little sand garden in a tray.

Continuing the leaf shapes theme, we printed some of these beautifully shaped Liquid Amber leaves in Autumn colours.

We also cut some simple yellow leaves to be used later for our ‘Vowel Forest’ that the girls wanted to make but first used them for a game of Postman.  The idea was that the girls had to sort the word into families and put them in the correct envelope, then mail them to the corret word family being ‘ay, ‘ai’ or long ‘a’ with magic ‘e’. 

Miss 6 really enjoyed this.  They took it outside on the verandah and played it several times.

Next we used up most of our toilet rolls, painting them to make a rainbow snake of long ‘a’ words. It turned out nice and bright and they enjoyed threading them as they called them out.

Next we started putting togther our own VOWEL FOREST. The inspiration came from the Jolly Phonics DVD but this was our own version.  We printed the raindrops with a potato, the cloud was made from sponging, I painted the tree trunk and the girls stuck the leaves on as they read them. I asked the girls to paint a picture of themselves in the forest and rain, for a reason - their names both had long ‘a’ sounds in them. Here’s the finished product.

 

Unschooling or just unorganised?

Firstly let me say, I am lost without my Photoshop software.  I can’t blog my photos of what we have been doing - very annoying and all thanks to a computer crash (aarrrrgggghhhh)! I will catch up on this asap. 

Meanwhile, somedays it feels like I’m not filling my kids needs as far as homeschooling goes.  Some weeks we fill out time easily with a study unit of interest, other times I wander the house thinking, shouldn’t we be doing something (as in Homeschooling, sitting at a table, out on a field trip, building, making, creating)?

I read a post on http://lapazfarm.homeschooljournal.net/ today about how she had comfortably come to the decision that Unschooling was the way to go.  As much as I think this all sounds great (for her), I’m not sure its the way to go for us? (Of course more research is needed).

I think of the kids at school, working away, wondering what they are learning today. Is their anything my kids are missing out on information-wise. I am one of those Homeschooling mothers who does not want to hear how her children are ‘behind’, despite my best efforts to see above this towards a greater goal. I had planned a year of reading/writing mostly, no real themes as such, but now the girls are reading even 7 letter words all of a sudden with the synthetic phonics program & Miss 6 is already ‘bored’ with Grade 2 Mathletics, I just find myself a bit lost - especially when she asks “Mum, what can we learn about today? “

I really look to the girls for my inspiration - if they become interested in spiders, then that’s what we ‘do’.  I thought a recent trip by her Grandparents to New Zealand might get them interetsed in Maories or volcanoes, but ah ahhh, nope -it wasn’t personal enough. It had no emotional attachment.

SO, what to do next?  This last week we have covered David & Goliath with about a days interest in giants and measurement.  We started the YELLO DYNO child safety program which they got the hang of quite quickly, stating the video was boring ( it didn’t really appeal to them because of the raspy, almost yelling dinosaur). Have to admit, I didn’t like it either.  Yesterday we re-discovered Mammals and learned about Marsupials with a fun day of WOMBAT STEW cooking, puppet shows and craft which had aspects of friendship/character to it,  the inspiration provided by http://www.homeschoolshare.com/wombat_stew.php

So I just don’t know.  With grandparents arriving tomorrow for a few days visit, this will ‘fill time’ with some interesting activities thrown in compliments of her Grandma, but I just can’t seem to get comfortable with Unschooling.  The Reviewer we had visit last year wasn’t too keen on it and warned there are ‘issues’, as in , there is no definite goal in sight and children need some direction. After all, they are like big sponges, just waiting to be soaked.

Somedays it seems like there are endless topics to learn about, other days I just don’t know. I am topic-less.  Probably being 5 weeks pregnant doesn’t help this; confusion and procrastination reign supreme.

Oh well, the girls have started building their own cubbies - that’s the next few hours of childhood enjoyment taken care of ……..(he he he). Until inspiration strikes next, cubbies it is.

Anybody else have days like this?