Teaching And Home Schooling Ideas

I don't know about you but we have lots of teddies in our house. We have sorted and grouped them into animal teddies. Draw a chart and list all the groups of teddy animals. We physically sorted and grouped them and laid the teddies in lines like a graph so they were easier to count. We counted each group and wrote down the amount in tally marks and numbers. Next time we will answer some questions about the groups of teddies. eg How many teddies altogether? How many more bears than dogs? How many fewer rabbits than dogs? How many groups only have one or two animals? How many bears are there?

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.

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.

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.

Draw a grid onto paper, I drew an 8 x 8 grid making the squares quite big. Then colour in squares in the grid to make a robot. Then count the number of total squares. So 8x8 is 64. This is the denominator. Then count the coloured in squares. We had 37, which is the numerator. Can discuss what numerator and denominator are again. Numerator is number of parts working with, denominator is total number of equal parts. Then workout how many not coloured. Could do a subtraction. Eg 64 - 37 = 27. Extend by asking what fraction is coloured yellow, purple, green etc. Can also talk about symmetry as robot has a line of symmetry down the centre. (Except for the hands being a different colour!) We would love to see your fraction Robots so send us your photos.

We counted some bean seeds we had saved and shared them out. You could count sweets, milk carton tops, buttons, lego pieces, coins etc We then worked out half, quarter and eighths by sharing the seeds out. We also practised counting in 2s, 3s, 5s. You could workout different fractions.