We did some science, writing, reading and thinking all in one today! Below is some fill in the blanks about the Animal Kingdom and its groups. What is the distinguishing features of each. The children all read out a line, then when we came to a blank we checked out what made sense out of the "word bank" and added them onto the blank space before moving on. Below is Kai at his best writing (he started writing this year):
Can't forget little Raven, here is his cute and advancing colour in skills, he was barely making marks early this year so when he insisted he be allowed to take part I really wasn't sure, but I certainly am now, he spent 3/4 of an hour colouring in these two:
Labyrinth's worksheets:
Here are Dantes:
Above is Labyrinth's work, but the three eldest did it. Its just an example really of our grammar lesson, which was homonyms. Labyrinth was very good at these, Dante and Kai a little slower, but still they caught on pretty fast, some of them they genuinely didn't know though, as they'd never been exposed to some of the words, for instance hoarse (we are likely to describe it as a sore throat or a frog in the throat which is not quite the same, I know), and wring or plain. So it was a good opportunity for them to learn some new words for their building vocabs.
As I seemed to spend too much time on the phone today to various people, that's it for formal lessons. They played heaps though, and Labyrinth tried reading a book quite a bit above her level.
We also brought a brand new harddrive, 750g, so we could replace one we are giving to a friend (who is having an upgrade) as her system just wasn't running smoothly or quickly enough for Andrew's preference, so she is quadrupling her hard drive in size to a 160g. The 750g is going into our media centre computer, and we are going to rip all of our DVDs and other movies to its hard drive so the children can't hurt the poor defenceless DVDs anymore. Its going to double as a computer for surfing and have childrens games and educational software on it, plus we have Thomas the Tank and Dora Explorer mini game units. We will be buying another cordless mouse and keyboard and making a table so the children can use it with ease. Come late mid-year we will be buying the largest Sony Bravia LCD screen that will fit into our TV cabinets cavity, so it will be all good stuff. We already have an excellent portable TV card, we ditched pay for TV because there was too much crap on it, to be honest. Yes, the National Geo and Animal Planet etc was excellent, but they were not worth the extra monthly expense, we will put that into buying DVDs to rip, including docos and educational ones (at the moment will be things like Muzzy in Spanish, Japanese and German and lots on ocean and fishies and animals, that kind of thing). We considered getting a play station, but nah, not yet if it all. Games on PC, surfing the web etc can all be done anyway, so what's the point.
For typing we have Sponge Bob Square Pants Teaches Typing, but personally I prefer Typing of the Dead. Other home edding software we have: Reader Rabbit, The Land Before Time, Dr Suess, Clue Finders, Arthur, Blues Clues, Dora the Explorer, Garfield and others that I can't recall and I'm too lazy to get up and look for them at the moment. Oh, there is crappy Bratz, but honestly, that doesn't really count, does it?
Considering buying a sewing machine, yes I who broke more than one in class (I won't say exact amount because it's embarressing), but I'm convinced that it was all the sewing teacher's faults for not teaching me properly (as I can sew a bit now, and I even did a TAFE course for about 2 weeks and none of them got broken). I just want to make cushions and toys and use it for scrapping (and making curtains), just fun stuff really. I don't think I'll ever be patient enough to make clothes, but we'll see... the stuff in the shops gets me down and in my head is much better than mass produced crud anyway. Plus Labyrinth is very short and her figure is strange, so nothing fits, she has a thicker, stronger more athletic body, so she has to go for 10-12 sizes but they are all too long! She is also designing clothes at the moment, so maybe.
The ways we change... and grow and learn...
No comments:
Post a Comment