Properties…

At 5pm, we quickly squeezed in a science lesson before rushing off to my daughter’s weekly wing chun lesson on Tuesday. At 5pm, children are normally exhausted from ‘normal’ school and the last thing they want to do is learn. I find that my daughter wants to learn all the time because her education is not fixed to a 9-3 schedule. Anyhow, it was quite fun doing science so late in the afternoon/early evening. We are working on Properties of Materials at the moment (and yes you can teach that to a 3 1/2 year old!)

 There were two other pages of the book, but I can’t seem to upload the pic. For the other two pages, I used wooden pegs to describe something that is hard as well as a prickly glittery piece of string-wire to describe something that is prickly.

All we did was pick things from around the house and discuss their simple properties. We then made a little book recording our results. I shall be sticking it up on my daughter’s wall. She adamantly asked that I stick it on her wall in a low position so that every day she can run her fingers over the objects and tell me ‘how they feel’. I was so happy (alhamdulillah) that she is interested in still referring to work that she has already done.

One content homeschooling ummi!

What about sports? Welcome Wing Chun…

 Whilst our homeschooling timetable is quite full: reading, maths, writing, Islam/Arabic, science, art…a sister kindly pointed out to me ‘What about sports?’ So, aside from riding the bike in the park, I really needed to think about some ways in which my daughter could exercise. We used to go swimming at an early evening session arranged by a Muslim Association. However, they close during the winter season.

 So, I then found out about Wing Chun…a form of martial arts which teaches self-defence and discipline. What is excellent about these classes is that the class is run by a brother and sister. My daughter has had been to two sessions so far and she is sooo in to it. At the age of almost 3 and a half, she is the youngest in the class but is enthusiastic and is picking up the steps very quickly…masha’Allah.

 The classes take place in North London and cost £20 for the month. We purchased her martial arts outfit yesterday and she felt so proud to be dressed like the rest of the children in the class. She has already expressed her desire to have a different coloured belt. The children are graded and receive the next coloured belt as they progress. Do check out their site. I really want my daughter to do a lot of extra curricular activities before she reaches the stage of being balig.

http://www.thewingchunschool.com/

A few other ideas…

The first idea is again simple to make and fun to do. I simply used my daughter’s coloured markers and wrote the upper and lower case letters on 26 seperate pieces of paper. I then laminated each A4 piece of paper. What I tend to do with these resources is the following:

1. Either allow my daughter to trace the letter with her finger.

2. Mix the letters up and ask her what the letters are. Or alternatively, use my alphabet frieze and ask her to find the corresponding letter on the cards.

3. With the letter / phonic we are learning that day, I produce the card. My daughter places the card on the floor and then we race around the house finding objects that begin with that letter. My daughter squeals with laughter each time. She runs around the house to each room looking for objects that begin with that letter. She then brings them to the living room floor and places them on the laminated card/mat. Who would have thought you could have mixed a sports lesson and a reading lesson in a home environment!

 

So, in this case my daughter produced keys for ‘k’, two cups for ‘c’, a gate  for ‘g’ and olive oil and an orange for ‘o’!

For each number that my daughter is learning, we always do our potato numbers (see my other post) or a number buddy from dltk-teach.com. I print out the number buddy in colour, cut out all the pieces, lay them out with a fresh piece of card and my daughter makes her number buddy by sticking all the pieces together. Here are Mr Number 1 and Mr Number 2. She tells me their life stories as she makes them. And I must say they lead very interesting pious muslim lives…masha’Allah!

The link is: http://www.dltk-teach.com/numbers/index.html Go to ‘Number buddies’ and click on the number buddy you would like to make!

How on earth do you make writing fun?!

 

A dear friend of mine who is a teacher advised me that the only way my daughter will learn to write, is simply to practice. Practice practice practice! Now, alhamdulillah I have a daughter who in a strange way, absolutely loves writing practice and penmanship. www.donnayoung.org is a site that I am indebted to for keeping my little one busy for hours on end, drawing lines and circles and lines and circles!

 However, I have found a way to make writing fun. It is simple and cheap! Whenever I teach my daughter how to write a new letter or number, I show her either on the whiteboard or on paper. She then writes over the letter from her WH Smith card (see my post called ‘A Reading lesson in detail’). We then do the fun bit. I have a tray which I fill with one of the following mediums: paint, shaving foam, rice, sand. We then roll up our sleeves and write the letter with our fingers. It normally ends with a nose that is green or a mini-foam fight (!), but it is so much fun. Above is an ‘i’ that my daughter and I prepared earlier. A very simple idea – but seems to be effective with my little one.

A link from talibiddeenjr.com

Assalamu Alaikum All,

 The dear sister who runs http://www.talibiddeenjr.com shared this with me and I thought I would post it here for all to benefit. If you haven’t visited this site already, you really really really need to. There are huge amounts of fantastic ideas on there. I cannot homeschool without it. The link for reading lessons is:

http://www.talibiddeenjr.com/la_sampledailyplan.htm#A._Alphabet

Enjoy insha’Allah!

A reading lesson in detail.

Here is one of our reading lessons that I have already taught to my daughter. I thought I would go through it in detail, so as to give other mothers some ideas:

TUESDAY

1.   15 mins review: set 1 letters (s, a, t, p) with flags and alphabet frieze. Words on WH Smith cards, emphasizing the first letter of the words.

2.   15 mins teach: I,i,N,n: colour jolly phonics sheet and go through the sign to recognise the action that goes with the sound of the letter. WH Smith card: teaching the name of the letter, its sound and the difference between the upper and lower case letters.

3.   Resource 1: 3 reading worksheets of my choice – trying to link them to the letters being taught.

4.   Resource 2: What’s in the box game?

5.   Activity: Words containing sets 1 and 2 letters hidden in sand and bubbles in water.

6.   Primer: 1 lesson.

EXPLANATION:

The above format is always the format I use in reading lessons: 15 mins review, 15 mins teach, Resource 1: 3 sheets, Resource 2, Activity, Primer.

15 mins review: This is where we review letters or words already taught. This is important in teaching. You cannot simply move on to a fresh idea without always reviewing what you have already taught. Children need to be reminded and so I always include a quick 15 minute review of what she should have learnt. This allows me to check whether she has understood and learnt what I wanted to teach her. In this review, we used her alphabet frieze and her wand. See one of my other posts for a picture of the alphabet frieze that we made. The WH Smith cards are an excellent buy. Here they are:

 There is a card for each letter and the whole pack comes with three wipeable pens and a cloth. The cards can be resused again and again. I use thes cards for both reading and writing. When I post a ‘Writing lesson in detail’, I’ll insha’Allah discuss the writing side. But what I tend to do with them in the reading lessons is produce the card and ask the following questions: What is the name of this letter? What sound does it make? Point to the big S. Point to the little s. We then turn the card over, and my daughter says the sound sss, sss, sss, snake – whilst pointing to the picture. This is to emphasise the first letter of each word.

15 mins teach: I use the jolly phonics handbook http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=blended&field-keywords=jolly%20phonics%20handbook&results-process=default&dispatch=search/ref=pd_sl_aw_tops-2_aps-books-uk_200619395_2&results-process=default and the WH Smith cards to teach a new letter. The jolly phonics handbook is fantastic as it has many photocopiable resources that you can use to teach your child to read. For teaching letters, there is a page for each letter with a picture for your child to colour as well as an indication for the ‘teacher/parent’ as to how to teach the sign that goes with that letter. For example, the child would put their arms outstretched as if they were an aeroplane and make the nnnn sound for the letter n. And that is how they remember the phonic sound for that letter. So, whenever we use a jolly phonic sheet, we colour the sheet, teach the action and sound and I ask her for words that begin with that letter as she is colouring. The same questions that are used in the review with the WH Smith cards are used in this section of our lesson, except that more emphasis is probably needed if it is a letter they have never come across.

Resource 1: My resource 1 section is always worksheets. There are may worksheet books that you can buy online or in shops. However, a few websites that I use with examples are as follows:

http://www.tlsbooks.com/letterconcepts.pdf

http://www.lib01.com/aaa00027.htm

http://www.dltk-teach.com/

What I have done with the worksheets for all the subject in school is I have created an individual ringbinder. All the sheets that I print from the internet go in there, in addition to worksheet books that I have bought. I don’t really allow my daughter to write on the worksheet books, I photocopy the pages and then put them in the ringbinder. That way, she can repeat the pages at later dates and it saves me money as I can use the books again with her or with future children insha’Allah.

Resource 2: Now, this goes back to your planning for homeschooling. When planning lessons, as I always keep to this format , all I have to do is fill in the blanks. So, a list of resources per subject is essential. This could be resources you have made (www.childcareland.com is excellent for this), or resources you have bought, or ideas you have found on the internet. When planning this section of your lesson, look at what you are teaching in the 15 mins teach section, and choose a resource that will link to what you are teaching. So, in this instance, I used ‘What’s in the box?’ from the standards website. My whole reading strategy is taken from this method of teaching how to read. In my opinion, it is excellent and structured. I keep to the sets of letters in order that should be taught, but my lesson format is my own. Here is ‘What’s in the box?’ (go to page 14):

http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/letters_sounds/pns_ls_0028107_2.pdf

I had to make the word cards and picture cards for this teaching aid. Very easy. Write the words on card, laminate if you wish. And the pictures can be easily found in the image section of google.com. Alhamdulillah for google!

Activity: The activity section in our reading lessons is always left towards the end as it is normally a bit messy and requires a lot of ‘hands-on’ work. With this activity, all I did was laminate words that can be made from sets 1 and 2 letters which are s a t p i n m d. So for example, pin, sat, sad, mat, map. These words can be found at the back of the above link – page 24. Or there is an excellent book called The word book from the jolly phonics series. So, I hide the laminated words in sand or bubbles and my daughter pulls them out and says each sound of each letter in the word first. She then proceeds to try and blend the letters and read the word. For example, pin: She would point to each letter p: ppp, i: iii, n:nnn and then ppiinn. She loves this activity. You can make it more interesting by your child picking out a word and having to read it as above but then placing it next to a picture corresponding to that word. The Jolly Phonics handbook is excellent as it has a list of words and pictures already made for you. All you have to do is photocopy, stick on card and laminate. Alhamdulillah.

Primer: We always do one lesson from this primer at the end of each lesson. After all the above fun, my daughter does not want to sit down and do her daily primer, but I tend to Islamically bribe her (!) and we get it done in the end. There are many primers out there, but after lots of research, I have found that a really good one is: http://www.startreading.com/

And that my dear homeeducating mummies is a reading lesson in detail. I pray that it is of benefit to you all. Ameen.

Maths…a different way!

A few other activities we have been getting up to this week:

 

Very similar to our glitter objects, except this time with numbers and with paint. Similar procedure: I cut out the numbers out of card and then set up the paint and the paint brush. Daughter paints the back of the numbers and then prints, prints, prints. We sometimes sing some number nursery rhymes as she completes the number of the day.

This picture was made out of different coloured felt, shiny paper and stickers. I drew the outline of the masjid, taking care to use different shapes and symmetry as this is what I wanted to teach her. I used a ruler as it was then easy to cut out the shapes from the felt and the shiny paper afterwards. So, once I had drawn the entire picture on the piece of paper, I then drew and cut out all the shapes – rectangles, ovals, semi-circles etc. When we came to do this activity in Maths, it was very nice to see that my daughter could figure out that all the pieces fit somewhere on the picture. She picked up piece by piece placed it over the picture to see if it was meant for that part of the picture, once she was sure she took out her beloved pritt stick, stuck the back and carefully placed it over the shape on the piece of paper. She felt very happy when ‘her’ masjid was finished. During this whole process, I taught her the names of shapes she did not know as well as the concept of symmetry. Alhamdulillah – one fascinated almost 3 1/2 year old!

Sparkly reading fun…

All little ones love glitter! My daughter gets so excited when she sees her glitter tubes ready for her to use on the table. It is great fun but can also be very messy, which shouldn’t matter when it comes to schooling our children.

Before becoming a mother, I used to be extremely particular about mess, and to some extent I still am. However, I have learnt that children tend to learn when they are free to stick, glue and cut as they please without a manic adult watching over their every move.

Anyway, this is an idea that we have implemented and I think I will insha’Allah continue with the other letters in the sets as per the foundation curriculum. Very easy to make: cut shapes of objects that begin with a letter. So, for example TREE begins with a T, a STAR begins with an S etc. Once you have cut out the desired object, get a thick paintbrush, dip it in PVA glue and spread it over a foam letter shape (I got all my numbers and letters in a neat pack for £1 from the good ol’ £1 shop). After spreading the glue on the shape, print it onto the object cut out of card in different places, and then use different coloured glitter and sprinkle over the glue. Shake off the excess and let it dry. Simple! The objectives of this activity is to emphasise the idea that everything begins with a letter and to stress what objects begin with what letter. And here are a few my daughter and I made earlier…