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?

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. 

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. 

Nature journaling at Bowood Woodland

I have been reading a lot about nature journaling recently. It is a lovey way to study nature using art and observation. By sketching or painting, it allows you to slow down and analyse something in great detail and you may spot things which you otherwise might miss. Look at the colours, the shapes, the textures in detail and experiment with techniques in your artwork. Nature journaling is a great way to learn skills, document your observations and gain knowledge about the natural world around us.

Pom pom sight words

             

We have been doing more literacy activities recently as D has just turned 5. She is very interested in writing but not so interested in reading yet. Therefore, I have to come up with some fun ideas to try and get her excited about words. 

Pom poms are a favourite with the children. We often use them in fun activities like this one here but we had not used them in literacy yet. I filled up a bowl with pom poms and placed it on the table with some large tweezers. R immediately started trying the tweezers out. He practiced using his pincer grip to pick up the pom poms with the tweezers. An excellent way to develop this fine motor skill.

              


I wrote some sight words on sheets of A4 paper and placed them next to the pom poms. I asked D if she could try placing the pom poms on the letters using the tweezers. We spoke about the shapes of the letters and the letter sounds. I asked her what words she was spelling out. It took quite a while for her to cover each word but I think this was good as she spent a lot of time looking at each word and practicing it. D has a good attention span now so this was not a problem for her.

You could make this activity more difficult by asking children to spell out the words using the pom poms on plain paper rather than them having to copy the words. You could make it easier by writing single letters on paper and practicing the letter sounds. If tweezers are too difficult, ask your child to use their fingers instead. 

Make this a bilingual activity by practicing words from another language. We will be trying this with turkish words soon!

Numeracy with buttons

                 

My children have developed a love for buttons. They love to sort through them and look at all the different shapes, sizes and colours. Sometimes they stow a few away - for safe keeping I'm sure. They place them in pockets and tell me they are treasure! It's a wonder they can find such excitement in playing with such a simple object!

                 

First we tried a sorting activity. I placed a dish with compartments on a tray and placed a bowl of buttons next to it. I purchased this mixed bag of buttons from Hobby craft for just £1 and the kids have had so much fun with the buttons. This activity was set up for R, who is 2.5 years old, as it's more for his age group, but D came over to look at the buttons too. It is a great activity for toddlers and preschoolers but remember to watch them carefully if they are still at the stage of putting everything in their mouth. 

               

Sorting is a good way of developing early maths skills. It will encourage a child to think about the different properties of objects and learn to distinguish between objects that are the same or different. It can teach children to separate things into different groups by size, colour, shape etc. 

               

Next, I got D involved and asked the children to count the buttons in each group. We spoke about the groups; which group is biggest, which group is smallest, are any of the groups the same size? Then the groups were sorted in order from biggest to smallest. 

                         

You could even do this with a group of buttons, as we did, if you have a mixed bag like these. Ask your child to take all the blue buttons for example and line them up in order from biggest to smallest. 

            

We spoke about the holes in the buttons. How many holes does each one have - one, two, three or four? Who would have thought there would be so many possibilities with just a simple bag of buttons?!

Learning about the senses - Hearing

               

The next sense we learnt about in our discovery of the senses was the sense of hearing. This was such a great sense to explore. We were able to do a lot of fun activities about this topic. First we read the book 'Hear this!'. It is the next book in our senses series and had a lot of good activity ideas in it. We learnt about how we hear and about how sound waves travel through the air from the object making the sound to your ear where the sound is heard. D was fascinated by this and has been going around telling people about the sound waves in the air. 

                     

This is the book we read. After this I asked the children to close their eyes and see if they could work out where I was when I walked around the room. I walked, then stopped and asked if they could point to me by listening to where the sound of my voice was coming from. They thought this activity was great fun and after they had had a few attempts at listening D said it was my turn to listen! So I sat down and tried to work out where she was from listening to the direction her voice was coming from.

                       

We spoke about which sounds we can hear outside.

                        

And which sounds we can hear inside.

               

We spoke about different pitches of sound, how some sound high pitched and some sound low pitched. I set up this activity for the children to explore pitch. Simply fill some glasses with different amounts of water, get a metal spoon, hit the glasses and listen to the sounds. I asked the children to listen to the sounds carefully and tell me which sounded high and which sounded low.

               

They really enjoyed this homemade musical instrument!

                        

We talked about different volumes and D told me things that sound loud and things that sound quiet. She started to write the words down herself but quickly got bored of writing so I finished the writing for her.

                 

Next, we moved onto vibrations and learnt how sound waves vibrate to produce sound. I followed the guidelines in the book to set up this activity. Take a bowl and place some clingfilm very tightly over the top. Then scatter some rice on top of the clingfilm. Use the wooden spoon to bang the sandwich tin close to the bowl but not touching it. You should be able to see the rice jump around due to the vibrations. 

                 

We started off with quite a lot of rice on top but discovered it didn't work too well. So, we took some off and it worked much better. Wowever, it still was not moving too much so I decided to try something else; salt.

                 

The salt is much lighter so jumped about much more easily. The children loved watching this. They loved to make the salt 'dance'!

                 

                         

Afterwards we spoke about the sound waves and how they vibrate. We filled in this worksheet.

             

The final activity we did was perhaps the favourite. I got some musical instruments and placed them on the floor. Next, I covered the instruments with a blanket. I played one instrument at a time and , after playing, I took the blanket away and asked the children which instrument I had just played. This is a really great activity to get your child practising their listening skills. It also involves sound discrimination which is a vital skill for speech development. You need to be able to distinguish between sounds in order to be able to produce them correctly as well as being able to distinguish between different words that you hear.

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

Bilingual snowballs

       

   

I have written before about the importance of bilingualism and how you can nurture bilingualism in your children. It is something I am really passionate about. There are so many advantages to being able to communicate in more than one language, especially if you are part of a multilingual family. After all, it's important to be able to communicate with your family members or the wider community when you travel abroad. 

Bilingualism is something I try to promote in my own family. My husband speaks four languages and the majority of his family members cannot speak English, so it is really important that our children learn to communicate with them. When you know another language it can open your eyes to a whole other culture which will also give you a better understanding of each other. 

Getting your child to learn another language is always a worry for bilingual families. How can you go about facilitating that? One way is to incorporate bilingualism into play, crafts or other fun activities. When children are having fun they won't even realise they are learning. Also, when learning is enjoyable, they are more likely to take it in and remember it. 

              

This activity was very simple to do. We took some paper plates and wrote words to decsribe snowballs on them. D was able to think of both adjectives and verbs that we use when talking about snowballs. It is a great activity to develop literacy skills and the different kinds of words we use; adjectives, nouns,verbs, adverbs etc. Then she stuck cotton wool around the edge of the plate to make it look more like a snowball.

              

As we thought of the words we wrote them down in both English and Turkish. So afterwards one plate had all the English words on one plate and another plate had the same words in Turkish written on it. They are now proudly displayed on the wall to remind us all of the words.

We concentrated on adjectives and verbs only but if you have an older child you could ask them to write sentences down, or how about asking them to write a poem about the snow? Afterwards ask them to translate it into the other language.  

Additional articles of interest

How to supplement your child's language classes at home

Bilingual language activity - autumn

Bilingual language activity - learning colours with play dough

Bilingual language activity - finger painting wildlife

Bilingual language activity - my family

Learning Arabic on the beach

Sign up to receive FREE tips and resources!

Mosaic salt tray

                     

I saw this activitiy on the imagination tree blog and immediately knew I had to try this with the children. I love how the coloured mosaic pieces stand out on the blanket of white salt. You can really create something spectacular with a bit of imagination.

Salt is a useful medium for a lot of play activities. It can be used to make play dough and salt dough for some modelling fun. It can be used as it is or coloured for a different sensory experience. On it's own it is a great base for mark or pattern making.

                   

I set up this activity by pouring salt on the base or a glass dish. I placed the coloured mosaic tiles in a bowl next to the dish of salt. Then I invited the children to play

                 

D got stuck in doing some mark making. She used her finger to swirl the salt around creating some lovely patterns. She also had a go at writing her name in the salt. A salt tray alone can turn into a great literacy activity.

                  

Following on with the literacy theme, D had a go at spelling out some simple words with the tiles. She said the salt looked like snow.

                  

Then the children began to make pictures and patterns in the salt with the tiles. This is R's creation.

                  

D made a beautiful butterfly.


You can get the mosaic tiles from amazon here:



This post contains amazon affiliate links.

Gingerbread men number activity

                   

The gingerbread man is a favourite story of ours. The children love me to read it to them and they join in with the familiar phrases. We also enjoy making our own homemade gingerbread men biscuits to eat. They are absolutely delicious. I will share the pictures next time we make them.

I decided to set up a numeracy activity for the children with the gingerbread man theme in mind. I cut out some gingerbread man shapes from some brown paper envelopes and asked D to help me draw the faces on them. As you can see below, she loves drawing long eye lashes on her pictures at the moment!

Then, I wrote numbers on rectangles of white paper and gave the children a bowl filled with buttons. They spent a long time exploring the buttons before moving onto the activity.

                              

D chose a number and picked out the correct number of buttons. Then she placed them on her gingerbread man. This is a great activity for children to learn to associate the written number with an amount of objects. They can practice counting as they go. 

                             

R, being a bit younger, did not match the written numbers and buttons. Instead, he placed the buttons on his gingerbread man in patterns. He did try counting in his own little way as he went.