Teaching And Home Schooling Ideas

Make a mini raft to float. We got some twigs of a similar length. We bound them together with string. Added a twig for the mast and a leaf for the sail. We put the raft in the Beck to see if it would float and it did. If you don't live near a Beck or stream then you can float it in the sink or bath. If you have a group of children they can work together or make individual rafts.

Does your child love cooking or baking? Thomas made his own salad the other week, a tomato, pea and cucumber salad. Simple but tasty. We then wrote instructions for making the recipe. We used a template from twinkl but you can just set it out like a recipe. Have a look at recipe books. We looked at Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes book. We listed ingredients, equipment, then wrote out numbered instructions using verbs eg cut, put, add, chop, wash. We used time vocabulary to start sentences first, then, now, next, finally. If you make the food first this helps when you come to writing the instructions.

Practise your times tables with a pack of cards. Turn over 2 cards and multiply the numbers together. Eg 2 x 8 =16. First person the say the correct answer wins the cards. We said ace was 1, Jack was 11, Queen was 12 and King was 0.

Write a postcard to a friend or family member. If you don't have a blank postcard you can always make one from white card and do a picture on the front of what you have been doing. We usually ask how the person is, tell them what we have been doing and ask them a few questions so they can reply.

Make sentences or silly sentences from flash cards. You could write them out, punctuating correctly. Next time we will extend them with connectives. Add your own words to cards as you think of new words for your sentences.

We read Superworm by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. On A4 paper I drew an oval shape in the centre and wrote the questions, What is Superworm like!? What does Superworm do? After we read the story Thomas drew Superworm in the oval and then wrote phrases from the story about what Superworm was like and words to describe Superworm's characteristics. Eg long, strong, stretchy, wriggly, kind, caring, lots of friends, Wizard Lizard is his enemy, scared of crow, helps his friends, hero, super... You could also pick out what Superworm did in the story to help his friends. We found some stickers we had from the Superworm story and added them to the page.

We have the bananagram word game at home. Give each person 21 letters and then they make as many words as they can out of them, forming their own crossword style pattern with the words. You can swop letters with the main pile but the rules say if you put a letter back, take 3. It's a good way to generate words and learn spellings. You could have a dictionary on hand to check spellings of tricky words are correct. If you don't have this game, any word game with letter tiles is good to play this. Or you could write letters on white card and make your own letter tiles so you can play.

We enjoy painting along with Ed and Daisy and when Ed said we could use our fingers for the next painting, I knew Thomas would enjoy it. Create your own Van Gogh masterpiece by watching Ed's video on the cheese and wine painting Facebook page.

As the topic is healthy food we looked at the art work of Guiseppe Arcimboldo. We watched a youtube cartoon about Guiseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian painter from the 1500's who painted portraits in a fun way as he painted fruit, vegetables and flowers to make up the faces and bodies. Here is the link for the youtube video we watched.  https://youtu.be/hrHZL8pp--M I found a website were you can make fruit and vegetable faces on the computer. Here is the link for the website where you can create the faces online. http://www.middlestreet.org/archim/archimframe.htm I couldn't see how to print the pictures we created so I took a photo of the screen. I also cut out a cardboard head and shoulders and got some fruit and veg from the fridge (some of which was going past it's best) and Thomas created a fruit and vegetable collage portrait. We had fun and the results were great.

We got lots of food from our pantry and sorted into healthy and unhealthy groups, with a few going in the centre as they could be both. Thomas felt that flour could be unhealthy as makes cakes but I said it could also make bread. Also felt meat could be both eg tin of corn beef. We cut out food pictures from a supermarket magazine and stuck them into different categories - healthy, unhealthy, balanced meal/could be both healthy or unhealthy.