How to Use Narration in Your Homeschool

We narrate all the time. When you tell someone something that happened to you yesterday; that's narration. When you talk about something you saw at the park; that's narration. When you tell a story your father used to tell you when you were a child; that's narration. We do it as part of our everyday conversations, without even thinking about it. So, why not use this skill for learning as well?

How to Homeschool Multiple Age Groups

Making the decision to homeschool is not always easy. One thing that people often have to consider is whether they will be able to homeschool children of different ages at the same time. When you are homeschooling one child, it is all about them. However, if you have more than one child you will have to think about how you can meet all of their different needs.

Meet the Artists Curriculum Review

I am a very creative person so I love to do arts and crafts with my children but one thing that was missing from my own education was an appreciation and knowledge of great works of art. I know of a few artists, but not many, and I don't know much about their lives and inspiration. Because of my lack of knowledge, I wasn't sure how to start teaching my own children about this subject. Therefore, I was delighted to be sent a copy of this brand new art curriculum, Meet the Artists, to review.

A Liturgy of Love Morning Time Curriculum Review

Morning Time is a concept developed by homeschool mum of 9, Cindy Rollins over the last 30 years. It is a time for the family to come together and connect while reading, singing, learning and worshipping. It is the gentle way to start the day before moving on to more structured lessons or learning activities.

Top 50+ Hajj Activities For Kids

Today was the start of Dhul al-Hijjah, the twelfth and final month of the Islamic year. It is a special time of year for Muslims and is marked by the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. This pilgrimage is one of the five pillars of Islam so every Muslim must aim to go on Hajj at least once in their lifetime, if they are able to. 

Learning about the sense - Taste

As you know we have been learning about the senses. The next sense we have been exploring is the sense of taste. I think this was the children's favourite as they have been asking to do these activities everyday since! First, we read the next book in our senses series; 'Taste that'! 

Then, we did some practical activities. I am a big fan of practical learning experiences, especially for young children. It really engages their attention which makes it more likely they will enjoy, understand and remember what they learn. Here's what we did.

Learning about Skeletons

Now that we have finished our astronomy topic, we are moving on to the human body. We started off by learning all about bones and the skeleton. 

Learning About Astronomy - the Planets

Our final astronomy topic was the planets. We started by reading these books about the planets which are great for children. Each book covers two planets.

Then we made posters with all the planets on. This was a lot of fun. The children were given a long, thin piece of black paper and circles of white paper of different sizes. They then used poster paints to paint each planet. They looked at pictures of the planets to help them do this.

As they painted, we talked about the different features of each planet. What colours were they? Were they made of gas or rock? Did they have any moons or rings?

Bilingual Language Activity - Finger Painting Wildlife

As you may know, we are a multicultural, multilingual family with quite a few different languages being spoken in our surroundings. As the children's father is from Turkey, Turkish is the main language we are teaching the children. It can be very difficult to teach the children a non-native language, and even more difficult to maintain it. Therefore, I am always on the look out for new ideas or thinking up creative ways to make language learning fun.

The weather has been glorious lately so we have been spending a lot of time outdoors. I try to encourage my children to participate in outdoor play activities as much as possible and prompt them to observe the environment around them. When we go out and about, I point out the flowers and wildlife that we encounter and encourage them to talk about their own observations. I thought it would be a good idea to start learning some more wildlife vocabulary in Turkish so we can use it on our outings, or even just in the garden

Learning about astronomy - the Earth

We have already learnt about the stars, the Moon and planets. Our next astronomy topic covered the Earth. As our planet, the Earth is something we all know a lot about. We started by thinking about all the things we love about our planet. 

Celebrating Laylat al-Qadr

Laylat al-Qadr is a special night for Muslims around the world. It is the night of power when Allah revealed the first verses of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad pbuh. We do not know the exact date of Laylat al-Qadr, we only know that it is one of the last 10 days of the month of Ramadan and it is an odd numbered night (21st, 23rd, 25th, 27th or 29th). This night is very special because it is said to be worth as much as 1000 months, or 83 years. The angels come down from the heavens and are among us, although we cannot see them. Muslims carry out lots of acts of worship during the last 10 days of Ramadan in the hope of gaining the blessings of the night of power. They pray, read Quran, make dua and do other acts of worship.

Building a Stone Age Den

We have been learning about the Stone Age as part of our history curriculum. We have done many crafts and activities, which you can read about in this post, as well as attending a workshop at the local museum. After all that, I thought it was time to get outdoors for a practical lesson.

Learning about the Stone Age

We have spent the last couple of weeks learning about the Stone Age. We are following the 'Story of the World' curriculum for history, which is the only curriculum we follow (apart from maths). I really like the 'Story of the World' curriculum. It comes with two books; a reading book and an activity book. 

Learning About Astronomy - the Stars

Our next topic in our astronomy project was stars. Stars are such a broad topic and you can cover many different areas; types of stars, the life cycle of a star, the birth of stars and our star - the Sun. We started off by watching a short video about stars which I found on YouTube by Storybots. Storybots really make learning fun by introducing topics through song.

Learning About Astronomy - the Moon

We have spent the last month or so learning about astronomy as our science topic. We have learnt about the planets, the Earth, stars and the moon. We go to a project group once a week where the children learn about these topics together with other children. They love this weekly group and have started to make some good friendships. We often continue learning about these topics at home and they form the basis of our science curriculum, giving it structure and focus.

We were not able to cover the moon during our project group sessions so we spent a week learning about it at home. 

Indoor Fun Review

The second of the review posts I am doing will give you an idea of all the indoor fun we have had over the last two years. Yes, two years is a very long time but I will try my best to sum it up.

Learning about the senses - Smell

        

The final installment of our learning about the senses posts! This time I will be telling you all about how we learnt about the sense of smell. This was an interesting one to think up activities for. I don't think I have ever done a smell-based activity with the children before but these activities were great fun. 

        

I soon spotted this post which was all about spice painting and thought it would be a great way for the children to explore different smells. To make spice paint you simply dilute some PVA glue with a bit of water and then mix in the different spices. The children loved helping me prepare the paint. We used herbs as well as spices for some extra sensory fun!

        

Here are the paints all ready to be used. I love the earthy colours.

               

The children got stuck in painting pictures with their homemade paints. We talked about the different smells as they painted.

        

R looks like he's enjoying it!

        

D was practicing her writing. She just loves to write at the moment, Though she's not so interested in reading yet.

        

Here is some more writing.

                   

D also painted a picture of a girl. She likes to draw and paint people.

        

This is what R painted. I think the spices worked better for these paints as they were ground up very finely so mixed well with the glue. The herbs, because they weren't ground up, did not work so well.

        

Next, D surprised me by coming up with another sensory idea I had never thought of before. She found a little scented pouch of lavender she had made and brought it over to the table along with some double sided tape.

                     

Then, she set to work sticking tape on a piece of paper and sprinkling the lavender on top. I was very impressed with her spontaneity and imagination. I love it when children use their imagination to create something special. Sometimes we can learn a lot from our children.

Check out these posts to find out how we learnt about the sense of taste, touch, sight and hearing.






                                                   

Learning about the senses - Touch

             

We have been learning about the senses recently and I have already written about how we learnt about the sense of sight, hearing, touch and taste. The next sense we learnt about was the sense of touch. As before, we read one of Sally Hewitt's books, this time it was 'Touch that', all about the sense of touch.

         

Next, we played a guessing game. I got together 10 items that felt different, and placed them in a bag.

                

The children had to put their hand into the bag and feel an item and try and guess what it was they were feeling. They absolutely loved this game and we had to play it over and over again! I tried to make sure they closed their eyes while handling the objects to really make them use their sense of touch to think about the objects and what they could be. R found keeping his eyes shut extremely difficult. He would open his eyes after only a few seconds!

               

Then, I asked the children to describe what each of the items felt like and I wrote this down.

       

Finally, we made some cardboard feely hands! I got some cardboard and drew round the children's hands. Then, I cut them out and gave them to the children along with a bag full of fabric. We searched for different textures of fabric to use to stick on the cardboard hands. The children loved being able to explore the different fabrics. As they explored, I asked them to describe how the fabrics felt.

Next we will be exploring the sense of smell!

Learning about teeth

         

One day D stated that she would like to learn about teeth! I was surprised but it is not the first time she has surprised me with her unusual (is it unusual or is it just me?) requests. Maybe it was the activities we did last week about the sense of taste when we learnt about the tongue that sparked this interest, who knows? But, as a firm believer in following the child's lead, I began to put together some learning activities based on this topic.

                     

The first activity we did was some finger painting! This is always good fun for young children as it is quite easy for them to do successfully. I cut a mouth out of red paper, then put some white paint in a pot for the children to use to paint the teeth.

                     

I think it looked quite effective!

                     

This is R's attempt, a good try.

         

Whilst the paint was out, I thought of another painting craft. I cut a paper plate in half and told D to paint some red lips round the edge. Then, she drew some teeth inside.

                   

Next, I asked D to think of some adjectives that describe teeth. Here are the words she thought of. 

         

She wrote them down herself. She loves writing.

                     

Next, we talked about ways we could look after our teeth. D had become a bit tired of writing by this stage so I wrote down what she said.

                   

Whilst we were doing the writing activities, R had some colouring in to do.

                      

Here's what he got up to.

Glass pebble number activity

          

I found mathematics quite boring as a child so I really want to make it more fun for my children. We have done a few creative maths activities before such as this one but I'm always trying to think of new ideas. Glass pebbles are a great resource. They are cheap and the children find them fun to play with. They are very versatile and can be used in many play activities in different ways.

This activity is simple to set up and uses few supplies. First, I cut 10 small rectangles out of card and wrote a number from 1 to 10 on each one. Next, I placed a tub of glass pebbles on the table next to an A4 piece of paper. I placed one of the number cards down and asked D to make the shape of the number with the pebbles on the paper. You can ask your child to chose the next number once they've finished the first one.

                       

Here they are getting stuck in to this activity.

                  

D creates a number 2.

                 

I gave R the number 1 to try and create as I thought it would be easy for him to copy a straight line.

             

Not entirely sure what R was trying to make here!




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