Teaching And Home Schooling Ideas

To make a Harry Potter wand we used a piece of dowelling, a glue gun, paint/spray paint. Saw the dowelling to the right size, we cut ours to about 45cm in length. (Be careful of the saw, adult help needed.)  To make the handle swirl the glue gun glue around the end of the dowelling to create the desired handle.  Then drip the glue gun glue along the dowelling in places along the wood. (Be careful of the hot glue.) When the glue is set you can paint the wand. We spray painted the wand gold. Then painted black on the handle. Once the wand is made you can re-enact parts of the Harry Potter stories and let your imagination run wild! We made our wand for World Book Day. 

Make kitchen roll paint patterns. Fold up a piece of kitchen roll. Dip the corners into watery paint. We dipped each corner into a different colour. The paint will run along the paper. You can talk about how the paper absorbs the watery paint and you can see where it travels. Fold out and let dry. (We did this a few years ago.) We stuck the patterns to card to make birthday cards.

Go on a nature hunt with the egg box challenge! Write/draw on top of the egg carton some objects to find on your nature hunt. Could be... Feather Acorn Pinecone Leaf - smooth edge leaf / serrated edge leaf Flower Petal Grass Soil Twig Stone Nut - walnut Shell Seeds Then hunt for the objects on the walk and collect them inside the egg box under the corresponding picture/word. Happy hunting!

Make a wax crayon scratch picture. Colour in your paper with wax crayons. Then you can either paint over the crayon in black paint. (Picture is below.) Or draw over in black wax crayon. I did this on my first attempt but the black wax crayon didn't cover all the coloured wax. Then scratch a pattern/ picture in the black wax or paint. (1 is black wax crayon, 2 is black paint.) Let us which method you tried/preferred. 

We did some work on metaphors. What is a metaphor? A phrase that describes something as if it is something else. Eg The cliffs are a face looking out to sea. We discussed what a metaphor is and how it's different to a simile (  What is a simile? A phrase that compares something to something else using as or like. Eg The sun shone like a diamond or the wind blew as fast as a sports car.)  We then completed the metaphor sentences. The sea is..... The tree is.... The forest is.... The waves are.... The cliffs are.... The river is.... The branches are.... The waterfall is. ... The leaves are .... The sky is.... The sun is.... Let us know what metaphors you write.

School suggested we create a piece of lockdown art. We chose some colours to represent this time at home in lockdown, then painted a piece of paper (he decided to paint with his fingers!) When dry we tore up the painting into fragments then glued them to a piece of paper randomly. We then looked through newspapers we had for words associated with time in lockdown and glued them on.

School suggested we could write a poem about this time in lockdown. We chatted about this and Thomas came up with a couple of sentences. I then asked a few questions as prompts. First thoughts when you heard school was closing. How did you feel? What do you miss most about normal life? What don't you miss? How long in lockdown so far? How do you feel now? What have been the highlights? What's difficult about lockdown? What have you learnt about yourself? How has life changed? How has your family reacted? What will you remember the most? We used the answers to the questions to come up with some sentences for a poem. I wrote each sentence on a strip of paper in different coloured felt tips. We could then reorder the sentences. Another day we typed up the poem. The process took 3 days. Thomas suggested an acrostic poem called isolation where the letters of the word isolation start the sentences but the sentences we came up with didn't fit.

We did some work on similes. What is a simile? A phrase that compares something to something else using as or like. Eg The sun shone like a diamond or the wind blew as fast as a sports car. We discussed what a simile is and then completed sentences. The drink was as cold as..... The lorry was as wide as.... The snow fell like.... The tree was as tall as.... The rocks crumbled like.... The waves crashed like.... The wood was as dark as.... The branches hang like.... Her eyes shone like.... The leaves are as green as.... The sunlight sparkles like.... The water ripples like.... Let us know what similes you write.

I have tried out wax and water colour leaf rubbings. Collect leaves that will make good wax rubbings. Take care to collect non poisonous leaves. (Note rhubarb leaves are poisonous as an example.) Place a sheet of paper over the top and using white wax crayons do wax rubbings of the leaves. Then paint over the leaf prints with water colour paints. I did a different colour for each leaf.

We made a clay handprints ornament.  I had some airdrying clay and rolled it out.  Then we drew round our hands with a pencil so it made an indentation. I wrote Lock Down 2020 using the pencil.  We let the clay dry then we each painted our own handprint and we painted the background.  Once dry I went over the lettering and handprint outlines in black sharpie pen. When the paint was dry I used modge podge (glue) to seal the paint.  If you don't have any clay you could use salt dough.  For the salt dough use 8 ounces of plain flour, 4 ounces of salt and mix with warm water until the mixture comes together. Add 100ml of water and then just keep adding water till the mixture combines to form a dough. Roll out the salt dough and then draw round your hands and write your wording using a pencil. Then put in the oven on a low heat to bake for 1-2hours. Then paint and seal. Alternatively you could draw your handprints onto paper and paint....

Draw a tally chart of birds seen in the garden. After we made our bird feeder from a recycled milk carton we talked about the birds we might see and noted the birds that were using the feeder. (Mainly sparrows, blue tits and great tits.) We had a look through some bird books and listed birds we might see in the garden and that we have seen in the past. (Good reading exercise.) Then we drew a chart and picked out 7 birds from our list. Ask / Explain what tally marks are and how to represent 5. (Good for practising 5xtable.) Fill in the tally chart with the number of sightings.

Thomas wanted to draw a dragon's eye so we found a tutorial on youtube that we kept pausing so we could follow the steps. (You can find tutorials for drawing lots of different animals or objects that your child is interested in.) We drew in pencil, then went over in felt tip. I double mounted onto complementary coloured card. We will use the artwork as stimulus for a piece of descriptive writing about the dragon eye.

Can you make as many different calculations as you can using the numbers in the star. Think about the different types of calculations, can you do the calculation the opposite way round? So 1+4 then 4 + 1. Also try to work methodically and logically through the numbers. Eg Do all the addition first. Also work through the numbers eg 1+2,2+1, 1+3,3+1,1+4,4+1,2+3,3+2,2+4,4+2,3+4,4+3. What other operations can you do? eg subtraction, multiplication and division. You can then extend the maths investigation by doing other stars with more numbers.

We are lucky enough to have some tadpoles. We have been learning what we can feed them and how to look after them We have learnt about the life cycle of the frog. I printed off some pictures from twinkl of the different stages of a frog's life from laying eggs, leave eggs, frogspawn, tadpole, froglet to adult frog. We cut out and stuck the pictures and labels onto green paper cut into a lily pad shape. We drew arrows to show the life cycle order.

Practise x tables with a Calculator Connect 4 game. Draw the grid of numbers.  You can only use the following numbers to multiply.  1,3,5,6,7,8,9,11,13 Take it in turns to multiply two different numbers together using a calculator.  Colour in the number on the grid.  First player to get 4 in a row wins.  We carried on and got a point for each four in a row we made. 

The skittle rainbow experiment looks at sugar dissolving in warm water and osmosis. Place skittles around the edge of a white plate, alternate the colours making a rainbow pattern with the skittles. Add a small amount of warm water to cover the bottom of the plate. The colours starts to move towards the centre. Ask your child what is happening to the sweets? Why is the colour coming off the sweets? Talk about the coloured sugar coating is dissolving due to the warm water and we can see the sugar in the water. The coloured sugar is moving and creating a straight line to the centre due to osmosis. The colour particles from the skittles move from a high concentration - the sweets, to a low concentration, through a permeable solution. Thomas enjoyed swirling the plate and making the colours go a brown colour! Don't forget to save a few skittles to eat as a treat. 😉

Practise x tables with a x table colouring sheet. We have a minecraft fan in the house and twinkl have some minecraft x table sheets on their website. I am sure that they will have other themes so you can get your child to practise their x tables whilst colouring in a picture they like.

Go on an animal perspective walk. This was my attempt to make a walk up the lane more interesting to a nearly 8 year old boy! Imagine you are a countryside animal eg fox, bird, butterfly, mouse, hedgehog, bee etc Then take a walk imagining what are the treasures and troubles for the animal. Eg we chose the fox 🦊and talked about the treasures being... Our hens/chickens for food.  Grass is soft to walk on. Mud mound for a den. Field of crops or long grass for hiding when hunting.  Rabbits and hares, prey for food.  We talked about the troubles being...  Farmer/people that they might be frightened of. Gravel lane, could get stones stuck in paws and rough to walk on.  Sticky buds could get stuck in their fur.  Enjoy your walk and let us know what animal you were. 

Learn spellings playing hangman game. We have a list of Year 3/4 common  exception words to learn so we have played hangman to practise them. Write the words on card and then take it in turns to pick a word and get the player to guess the word picking letters from the alphabet. We talked about vowels - a, e, i, o, u, and commonly used letters eg s, t, p, r, f, d, b etc Thomas wanted to think of his own words, not his spelling words so we went with it. I used the spelling words for my turn. Thomas really enjoyed this game and we spent about 45mins playing it and he wanted to play it again the following day.

Skittles Erosion Experiment. You need 3 plastic cups, 3 skittle sweets and water. Fill 2 cups half full of water and leave 1 cup empty of water. Put one sweet in each cup. Swirl one cup round in circular movements for 15 seconds every 5 minutes for up to an hour. Observe any changes. Discuss what is happening to the sweets and how this relates to weathering and erosion of the coastline by the sea. What has happened to the sweets? Why is this happening? What effect does the water have on the sweet? What effect does the movement of the water have on the sweet? What has happened to the sweet without water?

Draw a bar chart of the length of objects you have measured either in the house or from the garden. We used the measurements from objects in nature we had measured on a walk down our lane.  https://teachingandhomeschoolingideas.blogspot.com/2020/04/measuring-in-nature.html?m=1 I drew the axes and Thomas labelled them. The lengths were drawn in mm going up in 10s. (Chance to practise 10x table!) I measured two centimetres for each 10mm and so could put a mark for every 5mm as we had an object that measured 15mm. Once axes are drawn and labelled, then draw the bars at the correct length. Colour in each bar a different colour. We gave our barchart a title - This Is A Bar Graph To Show The Lengths Of Objects.

The Yes list idea comes from The Imagination Tree instagram page. We created our yes list this weekend, with lots of treats that we can do over the coming weeks. So the yes list includes treats and things that we can do now during lockdown when we fancy treating ourselves. Let us know what's going on your yes list.

Make Salt Dough Fossils. For the salt dough we used 8 ounces of plain flour, 4 ounces of salt and mixed with warm water until the mixture came together. Initially we added about 100ml of water and then just kept adding water till the mixture combined to form a dough. Roll out the salt dough and use a cutter to make the shapes. Place on a tray.  Print patterns in the dough with dinosaur toys or any toys you have, lego pieces, cars, playmobil people, toy animals etc You can air dry them for a few days or bake in the oven at 120 degrees for 2 hours or until hard.  We waited a few days before we painted them.