Chinese New Year - Year of the Horse

To join in on the celebrations of the Chinese New Year we embarked on a contemporary approach.

A great time to introduce the kids to some contemporary Art, although I strongly suspect that it completely went over their heads, but never the less I enjoyed the gallery and they enjoyed making the mess.


We ventured to the Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester for the New Year - Horse Workshop, where they made some horses cut out of paper.



The gallery was a fantastic place and the kids left their very own piece of contemprary art for everyone to admire.

The Gallery was an amazing space the staff where very friendly and took pleasure in explaining the installations.

The kids found them interesting, they where mesmerised with one particular contraption and spent more than 20 minutes gazing into the abyss with some fellow home ed friends.

Oliver found the TV's somewhat confusing and just looked puzzled.

They even managed to bag a lantern from the streets of Manchester which was being lined with them, thanks to a nice workman who agreed to let us have one 'as soon as his boss disappeared'.                                                                                                                                                                    As Manchester is a cultural city I decided to expand on the contemporary theme and we went through the centre to look at the different contemporary art themes going on.

 To compliment our trip to the Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art we watched a youtube video on the story of the Chinese Zodiac

 In addition to all that we did some maths worksheets in the horse theme, played snap with some home made animal card, worked out a horse themed maze and lots of other things which all ended up in our Chinese New Year of the Horse work book.

This was all going to be topped of with a trip to the Chinese New Year  Parade in Manchester China Town but the weather was so awful we decided to stay at home warm and dry and make the Parade a priority for next year.

All in all we had lots of fun for the Chinese New Year of the Horse.

So all is left to say is

 

And so it begins!..

Lots has been happening in the past 6 months of me being here last, and I have improved as I have got to six months before posting instead of a full year.

Our autonomous journey has taken a change to the more structured route. I know a lot of people prefer the autonomous rout but it seems my love of paper and books has rubbed off on the kids in the same way it does me, we can see what we are achieving.

They both have their own files for maths and English and it's great to look back on some of their work, the improvements in their handwriting and their accuracy at the task in hand can all be seen and a clear improvement is lovely to see and look back on.

These books are conduced in conjunction with Maths Seeds and Reading Eggs which they both find challenging and they enjoy doing.

Both of the kids ask for 'paper work' as they call it, mainly because they see me doing paperwork for my work and also when I am studying.


They both love doing lap books, our favourite lap book so far has been the Harry Potter lap book.
It contains lots of fun and games, including a recipe section which  we have done some great cooking exercises and can expand on, telling the time, snakes and ladders for number work, chess which was a bit ambitious but it will come in handy in the future and lots of other goodies in there to come back to.
We even created our own card game of snap with letters with some great rules that we devised.  Our word search went down well Oliver was very keen on this and has done quite a few more since.


 We even ended the lap book project with a visit to the Harry potter Studio Tour.

 Another Lap book we created was to accompany our visit to the 

Halle Orchestra Rumble in the Jungle

Our study area is looking like a study area now with our shelves containing all our bits and pieces for aiding in their learning journey.

My favourite buy for educational purposes has got to be the shower curtain

Oliver can pick out where we live on the map and we have many a discussion in the bathroom about the world we live in.


There is oodles more we have been up to but yet again too much to share here in this one post, so I guess this means I really should keep on top of this blog and try to get on here more often.. Maybe I can make it before 6 months is up...