kidsinlockdown-blog

[kidsinlockdown-blog]

1/04/2020

We started the day with some buttery pancakes and milk moustache:

Then the girls had a rather long session in the park - rollerskating and scooting around, playing frisbee and lying in the sun.

Later that morning we discovered that we missed a few tasks/homework activities on Firefly from yesterday (it’s so hard to keep track of all separate disciplines and tasks even with the simplified timetable), so we spent part of today just catching up on what we didn’t manage to do yesterday - that being music and French.

I’ve somewhat given up on following the French lessons on Firefly (this week that is!) as I couldn’t spend any more time offering Laura my undivided attention (she refused to do French independently) I found an alternative - setting up a profile for her on two of my language apps - Duolingo and Memrise. She now uses both to do her French. Better than no French at all I guess!

We did a singing warm-up with Ms Duval - very fun. Laura sang the ‘Seeds are amazing’ song and played at least 5 different pieces on her recorder from memory:

Still on our to-do list: write down the 4 bar music piece/rhythm.

Ellie did all her action songs - particularly enjoying performing the Easter bunny song:

Ellie and I spent some time reading together (Oxford Owl is a brilliant resource!). We picked ‘Turnip is missing’ to practise our ‘ur’, ‘igh’, ‘oo’, ‘ar’ and many other sounds. Reading isn’t her favourite activity, sadly, but I noticed that towards the end of the book her word recognition/guessing skills improve dramatically. She certainly gets better at identifying the digraphs with every page we read. I’m hopeful that if we keep reading 2-3 books a day we can make a huge progress in the next couple of weeks.

After reading we went on to practise our letter forming using letterjoin.co.uk. Ellie loved using the stylus pen I got her a few weeks ago to trace her v, w and z:

Laura is yet to finish her maths tasks that she’d started (update to this post to follow) and to complete her English. Now we’re moving onto some self-reflection (PSHE). 

[kidsinlockdown-blog]

31/03/2020

Today we...

- did a spelling bee with the Year 3/4 Statutory spelling list. Laura did well spelling 15 words, getting about 75% of the, correctly. We went over the ones she got wrong and corrected them together:

- Laura wizzed through her maths and grammar activities with a little bit of extra encouragement. She was done with most of it by 10am which was very impressive. She got only a couple of fraction related questions wrong but only because she started losing focus towards the end and really wanted to move on to another activity. She also refused to do the subtraction in column from the time challenge - but we decided to come back to it the next day. All-in-all, her maths is very impressive:

- Laura made a lovely symmetric picture of the Tower bridge out of magentic shapes - completely independently coming up with that idea. Very proud of of my little architect.

- We used watercolours for our creative session. Ellie made a lovely picture of spring flowers whereas Laura was focussing on illustrating the story of Mufaro and his daughters. She came up with 4 adjectives for each character.

(Original spelling) 

Mufaro: proud, suprised, kind, care-free Nyasha: kind, humble, caring, fogiving Manyara: mean, jelos, manipulative (I helped with this one!), envios

Laura wasn’t keen to perform the snippet of the story rather stubbornly but underlined the parts she’d emphasise. She later on read me one of her own books with a lot of expression (she clearly feels more relaxed when it’s not part of the task - how do I get her to do it when there is more structure around it?!).

The girls had a short break in the local park, they did a lot of pretend play together and seemed to have been getting on really well.

In the afternoon we all watched Michael Rosen’s poem and stories - absolutely loved it. I ordered a book of very silly poems for Laura - she will no doubt giggling to it at bedtime reading:

We did some soundmat activities - Ellie managed to find her ‘nt’, ‘lp. and ‘st’ pretty quickly. We’ve run through the card deck we printed out yesterday looking for ‘st’ words. We then came up with our very own ‘st’ words. Ellie suggested: ‘steaming’, ‘stairs’, ‘best’, ‘stump’ (”Like when we go to the Forest school!”_. We then threw in ‘guest’ and ‘stick’. She picked the word ‘stump’ to draw and write in her Phonics work book. I suggested that she might want to add some trees around it to make it look like the stump is in the forest. “Forest is an ‘st’ word too mummy!”

Ellie had a go at the Dragon’s den game by PhonicsPlay. She was quite hilarious feeding some rather silly words to the ‘real’ word dragon:

Finally, we had a lovely video call with Laura’s friend and wrapped up for the day with a puzzle:

[kidsinlockdown-blog]

30/03/2020

Ellie the Giraffe

We started with opening Mr Welch’s eco-letter. It was lovely to actually hear the birds in the background as we were reading it. Ellie then decided to draw a picture of the spring, with a little cheeky squirrel sitting on a branch of a tree:

When I was going through the folder of Ellie’s learning materials, I found an observation diary. Not sure whether it was meant to come with a bean or whether the bean got lost in transit, but, fortunately, I remembered that Laura bought me a gift of two beans from the School summer party last year that have been sitting in my kitchen drawer ever since. Not sure they're still good but we decided to give them a go. And to avoid disappointment, we threw in a garlic clove too (that surely will sprout!). The growing adventure begins:

We then played with the sound mat. Our grape landed on ‘ou’ this time so we set off to draw some clouds and practise our spelling. We still have some funky ‘e’s but the ‘d’s are getting sturdier (thanks to dad’s efforts last week).

Moving onto the ‘lt and ‘lp’ sounds. We made our own card set to play with - Ellie patiently did half of them by herself to then group them later into pairs and read them out loud (in her head first).

We found a dinosaur colouring sheet in Ellie’s folder and spent ages trying to work out which type of dinosaur it was - the neck seem to short for it to me a brontosaur! We ended up colouring it in and naming it ‘Dindee’:

A well-deserved tablet break followed after a rather productive, creative morning (15min of my actual work done so far sniff sniff). Ellie loves colouring in different dinosaurs on the Archaeologist app:

After having a short-ish break, we did some naughty maths. Why naughty? We may have used skittles for our additions and subtractions. Ellie got the idea of additions pretty quickly (”We start with 3 skittles. But what if you wanted more? Say, 5. How many would you need to add to your 3 skittles?”):

At the end of the day we realised we haven’t made our dinosaur. After digging around we found some materials - plasticine, googley eyes and pasta shapes. Our dinosaur went through a few metamorphosis stages, got a name of ‘Antee’ and ended up looking like this:

Laura the Giraffe

We had a rather slow start this morning (I tend to keep the first morning after they change households fairly relaxed to help them transition). We had a lovely breakfast (pancakes and eggs and soldiers) and played a game of Blokus - Laura is extremely competitive, choosing a fairly aggressive ‘blocking’ strategy.

Laura’s work started with a bit of a meltdown around spelling. She still finds it quite hard and slightly discouraging. To ease her into it (and for my own sanity) we moved to maths to warm her up. She did brilliantly with her 2 minute challenge (only got 2 of them wrong - and only because she wasn’t paying attention - she corrected her mistakes herself pretty quickly once the time was up).

I had to get my head round the fraction additions using the bar model (thank you Ms Davies for your helpful explanation!) - that’s not how we were taught to do it in Russia but I’m always up for learning new tricks. It was fun!

Back to spelling. She managed to find most misspelt words in the Mr Whoops story (with a little extra help from me). We then cheated slightly by having Laura write them down consulting the Year 3/4 Statutory Spelling List. Our next challenge would be to do a spelling bee game with my reading out a word after word to her (say, up to 10 words) and having her spell them using her sister’s little whiteboard. She’d be earning points for each correctly spelled word.

Finally, we watched some videos about mammoths and mastodons and other animals that walked our planet 70,000 years ago (Connect+ fun!). We didn’t get round to doing any creative activities around it but we will be getting back to it in the next few days. We also laughed our heads off watching Horrible Histories - Savage Stone age (https://youtu.be/fDDlhCtIdQ4) - the weather forecast part was absolutely hilarious.

Laura had a lovely call with Esther where they were showing each other their toys, discussing recipes, talking about the fun things they’ve been up to. Laura showed Esther some snippets of Woody Woodpecker and other Looney Toones that she loves watching on YouTube.

With rather a lot of enthusiasm, Laura finished off her work for the day with some computing - she used the Google coding game and then did an ice skating pattern for Elsa:

We’re done with work and learning for today. Now I just need to do 6 hours of my actual work...

Bring on Tuesday!