Month: May 2013
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Preschool Adventure Box: BFIAR Blueberries for Sal
Theme: Blueberries    For more book themed ideas see: Trays: These tray activities were a huge hit! The tennis in particular: The smashing of the blueberries was ,well, a smashing success (sorry, couldn’t help myself!). I had attached a silicone cupcake holder to a wooden building block to give the little girls a […]
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Ancient China: Qin dynasty and the Chinese Currency
This week I wanted to introduce the children to taking notes from three different sources and putting them into a spider diagram or key word outline, in preparation for writing an essay. This is a useful in three ways: The children learn to read different accounts, written in different ways, with an emphasis on different aspects […]
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Reflections: 2012-2013 Academic Year – Older Children
Whilst this year has been difficult for many reasons, academically it has definitely been our best yet.  We have seen huge growth in the older ones. They are maturing, and whilst issues crop up regularly, these we can discuss and the children listen, take on board and try to change. I can see this especially with T11 who […]
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Any Scottish Homeschoolers out there?
I only ask, because a blogging friend of mine may soon be moving from South Africa to Scotland and she would like to touch base with any other home schoolers living in the fairly nearby vicinity. Liezel sent me an email and gave me permission to copy it:  …….something pretty exciting has come up in Scotland. […]
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Nature Study: Our One Year Pond Study Week 12: Our Spring Night Time Pond Visit
Welcome to week 12 of our one year pond study. For the rest of the posts in this series please see here. I took the children up to the pond one evening and it was so quiet and peaceful apart from the geese who stole away the show with their chatting and antics. Here is the […]
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Preschool Adventure Box: B4FIAR Play with Me
THEME:Ponds Read aloud go along books  Read aloud non fiction books   Pretend play I made some pond animal puppets, which they enjoyed playing with. Trays Pond play with foam shapes: Learning about the life cycle of a frog: A number fishing game: Games or group activities Gathering tadpoles to raise We took […]
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Reflections: 2012-2013 Academic Year – Littles
As we are drawing to a close on our academic year (just 5 full weeks left to go), I find myself in my usual reflective mood. What did we do well? What was a failure? And what do we change to make next year our best ever? What worked well? Including B2 in school Having […]
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Ancient China: Zhou Dynasty and Chinese Religions
We have been slowly moving our way through the Chinese dynasties at one per week, learning about the unique features of each and any of their well-known inventions. This week we looked at the Zhou (pronounced Joe) dynasty. The older children weren’t well with the same infection the younger ones had earlier in the week, […]
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Young Scientists at Play: Polymer Play with Water Beads
Continuing our fun with polymers, I thought I would introduce the little ones to a very different type of polymer – the water bead. These are basically polymers which when in their dried state will absorb copious amounts of water and swell from the size of a tiny bead to the size of a marble. I […]