Hiding Mr Ten...

As we seem to have been slipping into a more autonomous way of Home Ed I decided we needed to get back on track today. Tbh the girls have been playing so lovely together it seemed a shame to break up the many role play games they've been having, but they've had an unofficial break so back to work.

We started with some maths (and some groans). Fortunately Hettie pulled out her Singapore maths books and mainly got on with it herself. I say fortunately because Issy's maths is not quite up to the level school had suggested. She's also on 1b but was really struggling with understanding addition when the units add up to more than 10. So we used Base 10's and I explained and explained, and then explained some more. May have been bad teaching on my part but she just wasn't getting it. So I pulled out the blackboard (if we use the white board side we all get high on pen fumes) and taught old fashioned column addition. And we played hiding Mr Ten. Issy loved hiding him in the sum after the units kicked him out of their column and we made a little progress - hooray!

Language arts, english or literacy or whatever you want to call it went well for Hettie today. I was dumbfounded when she correctly named a compound sentence and tbh I didn't know that's what you called them myself. So heaven knows where she learnt that from. We read 3 chapters of Charlotte's Web while they made collages and both did their reading.

Piano was cancelled until tomorrow so we ploughed on (it was now mid afternoon) with some science. I'm fairly disappointed with Sonlight Science. Its bitty, weeks and weeks about birds, and so I'm now swapping it all about. So we watched the dvd and read the experiments which were all about skin and I found the pages in Usbourne Book of Knowledge to read. Then we did the experiments:

They painted caterpillars on their arms to demonstrate how skin stretches.

We took our fingerprints.

Now the good thing about Sonlight Science is the kit had all the bits we needed that I didn't have indoors so we could actually do it, without dashing to the shops. The girls loved the Usbourne book and they even liked the dvd, which is slightly odd! The magnifying glass was really great, shame the schedule is messy and to be quite honest boring. So I'll rearrange it.

They worked from 10.30 til 4.30 - Wow. Bet tomorrow they gang up on me!