Saturday, February 25, 2012

IEW First Writing Assignment

Big Brother is using the Institute for Excellence in Writing programme.  This is his first writing assignment for the year - a retelling of "Belling the Cat".

He wrote and edited his work himself, making sure he used interesting verbs, and then I typed it up for him.  His illustrations may not reflect the effort he put into the writing, lol, all in good time!

<<<please note the purple mouse with a skipping rope on the path ;)






Saturday, February 18, 2012

Have I mentioned lately...

how much I love these guys?





Grubby faces and all.  

I've found my happy place. 

Monday, February 13, 2012

Such a Boy

Big Brother has been very excited about molecules since making them with marshmallows last week.  He's been playing with the PhET simulations and discovering new molecules.  Today he was playing on PhET and came running down to ask if he could have one large and four small marshmallows because he'd discovered a new molecule he wanted to build.  He duly made it, then took it to Little Sister and offered it to her.  She ate it and he cracked up laughing.

"You just ate a FART... that was methane"

<sigh>

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Quest Club

While following links on the endlessly distracting world wide web I came across:




After some email exchanges with the creator of Quest Clubs we've become the first members in New Zealand... yay!

Big Brother is VERY excited to start working on his badges.  At the moment he's completing the preschool (3-5 year old) Life Skills Award which requires him to do things such as learning to use utensils to eat his meals, count to 20 (ROTFL) and remember instructions.  He completed his ABC Badge this evening by writing an ABC story for his final requirement... here it is:


Much giggling was had over this one.  He also completed the Chess Award by sitting on my lap reading the requirements and fulfilling them there and then... gotta have some easy ones!  

There are nine areas in which badges can be earned; Agriculture, Art, Character, Health and Fitness, Home, Outdoors, Science and Technology, and World.

We've decided to choose one from each area to work on at a time (in addition to the life skills award).  The ones underway at the moment are: 

Agriculture: Vegetables
Art: Colour
Character: Honesty
Health and Fitness: Water Safety
Home: Child Care
Knowledge: Titanic
Outdoors: Snow (yes, I know it's summer)
Science and Technology: Chemistry
Discover the World: World Peace

We'll replace each one as the current one is completed.  

After a lot of consideration we've decided that he will only work on level one badges at this point.  There are several that he could earn level two or beyond on right now, but it seems sensible to stick to the level one badges so he has something to work on as he gets older.  Grandma has plans for manufacturing a display hanger for his badges, as soon as I manage to buy some materials for it.  I'll look forward to sharing our progress as we learn more in our "Quests"



Friday, February 10, 2012

Time Goes By

We're getting into the swing of this homeschooling thing, having fun and learning heaps.  Big Brother likes logic. maths and geography best.

We've been learning about chemistry and atoms and such like.  This week we made marshmallow molecules.
 

BB really loved this and caught on fast, moving on to modeling all sorts of reactions.  He was having so much fun we went looking for some online modeling options and found

Build a Molecule






Click to Run

which, along with the other simulations there has given him hours of fun, and led to all sorts of questions, some of which I could answer.


Little Sister has discovered that she loves puzzles

















And drawing:

And all in all they're both pretty lovely just now.  Loud... but lovely!

We've started work on our renovations and extensions so I'm looking forward anxiously to showing you our new play/school room when it's all done!