Gotta love it when ...

... the girls are forced to use math to share our food evenly

In our house the girls are very, very keen on portion sizes being equal (must be a big family thing) so when we had some apple pastries to share out it was entertaining to watch them compare the area of the rectangular pastry to the circular pastry and then get into a debate about cubic volume because the rectangular pastry was thicker.

 At least they remembered the right formula for area of a circle :)

Lego Activity Day

Our latest Home Ed activity day was all about Lego.

We had Lego programming - programme the codes in and see if your car follows its commands correctly

Lego strategy board games

Lego fact quiz and design your own minifigure

Lego Science - looking at surface tension using Lego flats and watching them move to the edges when washing up liquid is dropped in the middle

Lego catapults 

  

and a Lego zip line - looking at slopes effect on speed 

January read alouds

Our book basket read alouds for January are

Life of Fred, Dogs - the girls love the fred books

The Genius of Leonardo - this is a Barefoot book and we always enjoy those.

The Secret Life of Math - Rose has been asking lots of questions about why we do math the way we do and who chose the names for numbers etc so I think she'll love this

Mathematicians are people too - this is a carry over from last month (it's a long book so we won't finish it this month either) full of funny and educational stories about real life mathematicians and their discoveries.

  

The History of Counting - again in response to Roses questions.

I'll let you know what we thought of them when we've finished.

New year, new goals

Hope you all had a relaxing Christmas break.

It's that time of year when you reflect on the past and set goals for the year ahead.
DH had a wobble the past few months because Lilly is 13 and he was panicking about exams and tried to convince me she needed to go to school (thankfully he came to and realised home ed is the better path) but during his 'wobble' we did discuss what we could improve in our home ed journey so that the girls would get more out of it, we came up with some ideas/goals so I thought I'd share them with you do I can be held accountable (in other words I have to do it now)

1) institute more independent research
    I've tended to clump the girls together into two groups but realised that this makes some work too
    easy for the oldest in each group.

2) attend more home ed groups
    We've had car issues since Sept which means we've hardly been out, the girls missed the activities  
     so added attendance to our goals list this year.

3) assign non fictional reading books for each child to read in their free time
    Aiming to get them to read 2 or 3 books a month that will appeal to their interests and write a
    report/make a poster - this will let me cover more topics without having to teach them.

4) do yoga three afternoons a week
    Another the girls picked - could be fun or could be painful

5) do more read alouds
    Another request from the girls - seemed they missed their math stories over the holidays

6) include more music and art
    I panic sometimes trying to fit in enough math, science, geography etc that I often let the
    arts slide. Need to make more effort to include at least one specific art class a week (Lilly and
    Sunflower both do music practices but want additional lessons)

The girls enjoyed their time off but are ready to go (they've given me a massive list of questions and topics they want to study - roll on nonfiction reading).