Musings: Countdown to Half Term

We’ve had a good couple of weeks, and Esther’s doing great but we’re both pretty much ready for half term here! It’s hard to keep the pace going into week 6, but we’ll push on so we can enjoy our break.

Last week we finished up place value for now and moved on to addition strategies and fact families. There’s a wonderful website I’ve discovered called TeachersPayTeachers, where you can buy, or download for free, worksheets and activities created by teachers. It’s great for games, and useful if you need a different (and pretty!) way of explaining something. I found this Fact Family French Fry activity there, and posters for addition strategies. We’ve focussed on learning the numbers which add up to ten this week, through her workbook and games. We used old water bottles as manipulatives yesterday. Esther enjoys using bigger objects for maths - I think because it gives her more opportunity for gross motor movements.

We started learning about Israel last week in history & geography. I’ve been trying to use the internet more when our book choices don’t seem captivating enough. A couple of our books on Israel look like they’re aimed at older kids, so we’ll probably only spend 3 weeks instead of 4 on Israel. One of the books we read (Zvuvi’s Israel) mentioned a lot of tourist sites, and anytime we read about something we were interested in seeing, we made a note of it, and then researched them on youtube. We learnt about how silk and honey are made, watched a Tortoise Olympics at a Jerusalem zoo, saw a Hanukkah torch parade, watched people zipline down Manara Cliffs and learned about Dona Gracia. It was really fun! I need to remember youtube for future weeks! Granny and Grandpa are in Israel right now, so we had fun looking at their photos of Jerusalem. Another fun thing Esther got into was making a little model Sukkah in a cardboard box, as it was the festival of Sukkot.

Inside the sukkah

In science we’ve started learning about brains this week. We’ve got some good books for this topic, and a few times Esther’s mentioned something we read out of school time (always a good sign!). I had planned to do a sheep’s brain dissection with her, but I lost my courage at the butcher’s this week... Maybe next week!

There was a lot of other activity going on this week, which has made school suffer a bit. Sid was away for 3 days at the start of the week, we’ve had power outages nearly every day meaning a lot of generator noise around us and not much good sleep, and there’s been a lot of rain and a storm or two. Also our househelp was off sick one day. So I’ve been winging it a little with school this week, but hoping to get back on an even keel over the next week and finish strong J Today Esther asked for a day off schoolwork, so for a couple of hours we read a biography of Clara Barton, which she loved and is finishing by herself as I write this. We didn’t do Wacky Wednesday this week, because I just plain forgot... But last week’s wacky idea was that every question either of us asked had to be sung theatrically with a scarf around our necks! The penalty for forgetting was a maths question, and there was a prize for whoever put the most energy into their questions. It was fun to start with, but got to be hugely annoying as we realised just how much of our day is spent in asking each other questions! I guess we got a lot of maths practice, and Esther won a logic puzzle book for her
show(wo)manship.

Roll on the weekend!