Geography Corner

So Christmas is over and we are nearly through the January birthdays so I am in planning mode!  I looove planning for the new school year and rearranging our learning space.  I think it must be the teacher in me, I was always a planner!!

We will have a big focus on geography this year as my kids are slightly geography obsessed.  So it made sense to set up our geography area first. This set up is mostly for Liam and Samuel.  Liana does geography at our Home school group and is way beyond this.  She can pretty much locate most of the 196 countries and know about 50% of their flags too.

We have a subscription to Little Passports this year.  We will be receiving the World Edition for Liam and the Early Explorers for Samuel.  Each month I will change the table to focus on the continent that matches our Little Passports country.  I plan on using a lot of the ideas from Living Montessori Now for Sam as well as some extension activities for Liam.

The first month is a general introduction, so our table is focusing on the continents and oceans.

Here is a look at our table

We have our World map to track Sam and Sofia (from Little Passports) as they travel around the world, Our Montessori inspired continent 3-part cards,  our Little Passport suitcases, A world pin map - one side is colour coded for easy matching and the other side is plain to make it a bit harder.

Then we have our felt continents map complete with labels for the continents and oceans.  Through the year we will keep adding things to this map like landmarks, animals and flags for the children to locate on the correct continent.

So there you have it, our geography corner.  Next on the list is our science corner!

MFW ECC Week 6 - Canada

This week in Exploring Countries and Cultures we travelled to Canada.  Here are Liana and Liam complete with airline tickets and passports.

They get so excited when we pull out the passports and print off their airline tickets.  I love it that such simple things still bring joy!

We did a lot of reading and discussing this week, so not many things to photograph!  They continued to add to their geography glossary.  This week was learning about canyons, particularly the Grand Canyon.

We also watched several short documentaries on the Inuit of Canada and made some minit. books.

For art this week they finished painting their Mexican Sun Faces from last week.

Other things we did that have no photos include, reading about William and Catherine Booth, the founders of the Salvation Army, learning about the Garifuna from Window on the World and studying food chains and food webs.

To finish, here is Liana doing her Latin homework in her Indian Costume, sitting outside, just because she can!  One of the joys of homeschooling.

Circus Fun

Last week we headed down to Dwellingup for a little break and to help out with a group of Sudanese refugees on a special camp. Their theme for the children's group was the circus so Paul went to help out with some circus skills and I chased Samuel around!!

The kids had a great time camping (pretend camping in a chalet) and joining in the fun activities. They even got to perform in the concert. Liam was a little(ok a lot) stage shy but he eventually got up and did some tricks with his Dad which is huge for him.

Liana as usual had no problem getting up and performing. Plus she got to get her face painted by the awesome Morris Jacobs!

The highlight of our holiday for Liam had to be the train. We were staying right near the Hotham Valley Steam Trains. We got there just after the train finished for the day, but we got to check out the train and have a play with the points and other technical thingies that I have no idea about. Good thing Paul knows what he is talking aboout!

Learning With Liam

We are still working on the same reading unit with Liam. I find he needs lots of repetition of the same thing to really grasp it. If I move on too soon he forgets everything. He enjoys really mastering something and thankfully doesn't tire of doing the same thing over and over again.

So we worked again on the short a vowel sound. He really started to take off with sounding out cvc words as opposed to just the cv sounds we have been practicing. Yay!! Finally some progress. I am not really worried but it is hard not to compare his progress to how his sister progressed at that age, and as I mentioned last week, they are totally different in their learning styles.

So here are some pictures of what we worked on with our reading this week.

"a" word slides

Matching cvc words to pictures

Puppy dog file folder game. I made up an activity to sort "a" words to the right dog depending on what it started with ie ca, ba, fa,etc. He found this really easy as he just sorted them by initial sound. Hmmm, would work better with the same initial sound but different vowel sound, ie ba,be,bo etc. Will have to remake this one later on!

I also pulled out our montessori word drawers that I made when Liana was this age and we worked on the first 2 drawers, matching cvc words to pictures.

For maths we are still working on learning our teens. He seemed to have a much better grasp of it this week than last week. We continued to use our number family charts and MUS blocks to make and identify each number. We are still having a bit of trouble remembering 11 and 12 but he can identify them as oneteen and and twoteen thanks to MUS so we will probably work one more week on the teens and then move onto the 20 family. I don't have many photos as we played lots of games and didn't get a chance to photograph most of them.

For Bible we are learning the Bible Verses and songs from Seeds Family Worship. We love, love, love these cds and can't recommend them highly enough. For each song there are some awesome printables available from here . Each week we sing the songs, colour the picture, do the copy work, make the minibook and then recite the verse and song to Daddy on Fridays. I only have a few photos this week but will try and get some more action shots for next week.

To see what others are doing this week head over to Preschool Corner {and 5K too} and Teach Me To Read Thursdays

Learning With Liam

So, I am discovering that teaching Liam is VERY different to teaching Liana. Liana picked up reading and maths so easily that I never realised it could actually be hard to teach these things!! I kind of feel out of my depth at times, even after having been a teacher for many years. The problem is, that by the time the kids reached me in year 3 or 4 they already knew how to read and all their numbers. So here I am fumbling my way through trying out different things desperately hoping to find something that works with my little man!!

I have looked at some of the awesome reading programs developed by homeschooling mums but none quite meet all of our needs. So I have decided to take bits and pieces from this one and this one and this one and add in a few of our bits and work with that

I am not using the sight words just yet as it was getting too confusing for the poor boy to know when he should be sounding out and when it was a sight word. So for now we are sticking to just the phonics part.

Unit 1 is focussing on the short vowel sound of a. This unit will take us about 3 weeks to work through.

This is what we worked on this week.

Reviewing the phonograms

Matching lower case and upper case letters

Learning our "a" blend ladder

Finding the end sound for "a" words

and reading our 'ca' word wheel.

We also played lots of games and file folder activities but I keep forgetting to take photos. I am going to try to remember to take more photos this week, although sometimes it is impossible with two kids to teach and a toddler to keep out of mischief!!

To see what others are up to this week head over to
Preschool Corner {and 5K too}
and
Teach Me To Read Thursdays

History

This term I started History again with Liana and Liam. We are repeating what I did with Liana when she was 5, but she doesn't seem to mind and enjoys being able to remember a lot of what we are covering. Liam is enjoying doing History for the first time. We are using Biblioplan with Story of The World as our spine.

The last couple of weeks we have been working our way through Ancient Egypt. We have practices using hieroglyphics and cuneiform





Made sugar cube pyramids






Made mummies






and a sacrcophagus to put our mummy in.





History is sooo much fun!!