Rivers, Dimmer Switches and crackers

The girls have been doing a lot of work this week on Rivers with the help of a great little workbook from School Express. I think their favourite activity was labelling the parts of a river on our homemade fabric river

they also created a river collage and labelled it

and looked at rivers of the world.

For our electricity work we've focused on dimmer switches and buzzers.

Rose has worked with her Arctic box

Tulip has done some more pink reading

and all the girls have made some Christmas crackers.

Creative Poetry

As I seem to lack the poetry bug, I seconded my mother to do some work with the girls on various types of poetry (it was also a really good excuse to have a bit of a break)

I was very impressed with their collaborative effort at a Christmas poem so decided to share it all with you.

Hang your Baubles on the tree,
for Christmas time is soon to be.
Then hang your Holly on the door,
wreaths and stars, decorations galore.

Merry Christmas to all on earth
'cause it's the time of Jesus birth.

Make the cake and cook the goose,
scrumptious biscuits on the loose,
pigs-in-blankets, salads and sweets galore.
Then Santa's treat left by the door.

Merry Christmas to all on earth
'cause it's the time of Jesus birth.

Christmas morning rise and shine,
gather for breakfast just past nine.
Presents all beneath the tree,
what has Santa left for me?

Merry Christmas to all on earth
'cause it's the time of Jesus birth.

Where is Christ this special day?
Why have people chased him away?
Remember scripture, remember prayer
and keep his commandments everywhere.

Merry Christmas to all on earth
'cause it's the time of Jesus birth.

Elementary roundup

Both Lilly and Sunflower have had a busy time.
We had a 'part's of speech' poem followed by identifying other examples of nouns, pronouns etc.

did some more electricity work on parallel and series circuits and switches.

worked on their math challenges, vocabulary/spelling, geometry patterns, Russian folk tales (from Old Peters Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome - caution you may need to pre-read these to decide if they are suitable for your child) where they drew the story as they listened to the tale.

and got carried away with their button craft :)

Movable alphabet with a difference

Today Tulip was working on some CVC words and to make it different we didn't use our homemade movable alphabet (made from pipe cleaners) but used some alphabet stamps

She had to select the correct stamps from the tray to make the words. Needless to say Rose thought this looked like fun and tried to take over join in : )

Button Craft - Christmas

Due to a profusion of green buttons from our classification work, Tulip got creative (it probably helped that she had been to a mosaic workshop last week)

She outlined a Christmas tree on some paper and glued green buttons all over

next she added a wooden star and some brown felt for the trunk - it looked so cute I popped it in a frame.

then she got carried away and made a wreath - by which time all the other girls had spotted what she was doing and joined in - I now have requests for a bag of yellow buttons and a bag of red buttons so they can make some more Christmas pictures : )

Science Fair

We went to our Home ed groups Science fair today - The girls had opted to do a presentation on the digestive system (mostly because Sunflower wanted to make vomit again)
They worked all week on knitting the intestines to the correct lengths and writing up their facts, then spent most of yesterday putting the presentation board together.

They used contact paper for the bottom half of the body (sticky side up) with the idea that kids could pull the intestines off and compare lengths. (7m and 1.5m)

Then Sunflower had a 'vomit station' where she taught the others to make vomit bags to take home (which made her quiet popular with the children, but not with the mums)

other presentations included as series of experiments for sound,

paper chromatography,

principles of flight

a great demonstration for hot water being lighter than cold water (the red water is hot and the green is cold) when the red is on top the colours stay separate but when the green is on top they mix creating a mucky brown.

and air pressure experiments - including sucking an egg into a bottle
(my battery had gone flat by this time but it was amazing to watch)

2011 Homeschool Blog Awards - Vote now.

Wow - I  came back this week to some fantastic news - I've been nominated for three of the 2011 Homeschool Blog Awards : )

I've been nominated for the following categories
Best new homeschool blog
Best homeschooling methods blog
Favourite homeschool mom blog

Just to be nominated for something this prestigious is a real blessing - so I wanted to say a great big THANKS to everyone who nominated me and encourage you all to pop over both to vote (for me if you're so inclined) and to browse all the wonderful blogs nominated.