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.