We are a family with three 'wee winkles' exploring the pleasures and perils of educating at home using Scripture, Montessori and a lot of love!

Sunday 17 June 2012

Cherry's activities

As Cherry approaches 32 months...
she has become a lot more interested in her letters. She sits at our little table and chairs dictating letters for herself to write (they come out gibberish on the page of course), sings the alphabet in the toilet a lot (there is an alphabet chart on the back of the door) and has started tracing the sandpaper letters with care.
We have introduced her to numbers up to nine with the bead material. Her counting is flawless but she still needs help matching to numbers above six.
Here she is sponging water from one bowl to another.
She is also a regular fixture in the kitchen now. While Lamb tops and tails beans, she is chopping mushrooms with a butter knife and she is so much like her Mummy....
...this is how orderly she leaves her chopping board!




The Solar System

We had a great time looking at the Solar System.
It all started with a few new books and a trip to the library of course...

We talked about the order of the planets from the sun and I made a little sun, moon and earth from felt so that we could enact the orbits singing:
"The earth turns round and round,
the earth turns round and round,
once a day every day, the earth turns round and round.

The moon goes round the earth,
the moon goes round the earth,
once a month every month, the moon goes round the earth.

The earth goes round the sun,
the earth goes round the sun,
once a year every year, the earth goes round the sun"
(I've seen this little ditty on several sites so I wouldn't know who to credit it to)

We did several activities...
We made glittery night time pictures
Stuck star stickers onto a star outline

Star and planet cellophane cookies
And matched our planet cards to colour our planets correctly.
(The colouring sheet is from www.coloringcastle.com. The planet cards came from Montessori Print Shop) 

Lamb had a lot of fun on the Nasa Website playing games and things and we visited the planetarium at Scienceworks which was fun for all of us!

There are tonnes of great You Tube clips one can watch too on Aurora Borealis, shooting stars and the like. 


Friday 15 June 2012

Update

Well and here we are....still here!
 I had not realised how long it had been since my last blog post but there are of course very valid reasons for our absence...WE MOVED COUNTRIES!
My husband was offered a great job in none other than New Zealand...where we moved from 6 years ago so after but a moment's hesitation we were all packed up and on our way!
It has been a roller coaster ride, not least of all because I have been heavily pregnant throughout the shift but children are resilient and apparently Mummy's are too.
We are all settled and have just gotten back into learning proper over the last fortnight with a unit on frogs. We did an entire solar system unit before leaving Australia so I will have to blog about that one too.
While on the move we have done lots of drawing and walking, Ready to read units from the Moffatt girls and stories galore. It has been SO nice to set up their shelves again. In fact the first day Lamb was so excited he spent more than an hour going from item to item with the occasional question about how things go together and whathaveyou.
Just two weeks until my due date with wee winkle number three so I daresay it will be slow going over the next little while but the winkles will have Daddy and an assortment of grandparents to keep them amused!!!