This years new academic year started of with a lesson about death. Our beloved 14 year old Chihuahua passed away early hours of 3rd September, at home peacefully, with us all around to say goodbye.
Our subjects beyond death this academic term will be quite an eclectic mix as I have bought a load of new resources we have never used before and I am sure I will of course collect more as we go along but some of the things we have looked at this week are.
Science - Learning about the periodic table and its elements- we have purchased a book all about the periodic table (which you can find here Dorling Kinersley Periodic Table) We have found some great sites to investigate, so far we have kicked off with Gold and have looked at how and where gold is found and we have discovered about some of the mining of gold such as the gold rush of Australia and the largest gold mine in South Africa and the human cost of Gold. We also looked at the Gold kept at the Bank of England and The Federal Reserve. This is of course quite cross curricular so we have broached history and sociology along with our science. We also have a Celfie science box coming quarterly which should include some biology, physics and chemistry. Continuing on our theme of recycling we have booked on the Daresbury Lab Science Lectures on 19th September which is talking about how refugees hand materials to scientists and engineers who then come up with things from generating electricity to making a school bus.
Mathematics - We have never been very structured with maths so we have started off with some revision of the things we have learned over the years to reinforce some concepts, we are really getting to grips with our times tables and learning some handy easy concepts to make the process more meaningful than learning by rote. We have a new subscription for DoodleMaths and are also using Skoolbo, Khan Academy and a few workbooks and we have been playing PLYT which is a multiplication board game and you can buy that here.
Coding - We have been playing with Code combat which is a great way to learn coding by creating and playing gamesand we have been dipping into code academy.
History - A lot of what we do incorporates history but this week we have purchased EpicEra which has a number of brief history videos, we have also used Kids Know It website which also has lots of other subjects, which is handy.
Languages - The twins have decided they wants to learn Russian so have been using Duolingo.
Music - All of us have been learning to play the guitar .
The kids of course are keeping up with Chess and Badgers (St Johns Ambulance) and they have decided they want to join the local Break/Street Dance Club, Olivia is talking about rejoining hockey.
English - Skoolbo is our go to for English at the moment along with some workbooks and plenty of reading, we will be attending the into film festival which we booked onto this week so we can follow some curriculum materials alongside some films, we are also learning some Latin that we believe will help us with our English. We are working on our handwriting skills and more on punctuation and story telling creative writing. We aim to be able to enter some stories into a writing competition or two and we have been playing junior scrabble which you can buy here and
Art is a very eclectic mish mash of allsorts of things, both are learning to make cartoon characters and will still be attending the creative workshop once a month, they have their own camera and spend a lot of time videoing and making their own little series of documentaries and films that they enjoy playing with in editing suites, they are continuously collecting rubbish around my house and creating something new, but we will be using the sewing machine more now they are old enough not to stick each other with a needle in a needle fight!
Art is a very eclectic mish mash of allsorts of things, both are learning to make cartoon characters and will still be attending the creative workshop once a month, they have their own camera and spend a lot of time videoing and making their own little series of documentaries and films that they enjoy playing with in editing suites, they are continuously collecting rubbish around my house and creating something new, but we will be using the sewing machine more now they are old enough not to stick each other with a needle in a needle fight!
We have numerous other resources at our hands so there is not much time to be sitting around doing nothing, lots of things to learn and do.
I thought I would end this post with a tribute to Mr Majika by posting this song that Olivia recorded just days before he passed away, Majika always lent Olivia his ears, he was her No 1 fan.
I thought I would end this post with a tribute to Mr Majika by posting this song that Olivia recorded just days before he passed away, Majika always lent Olivia his ears, he was her No 1 fan.
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