Sunday, February 14, 2010

Our week of learning - 14th Feb - Movie time!


This was a fairly interrupted week - we were still away on holidays on Monday and Pete came home from a trip on Wednesday. We just seemed to be all over the place. We pretty much ambled along for most of the week but seemed to gain a bit more enthusiasm by the end of it.

Current Readaloud: Five on a Treasure Island

Five on a Treasure Island (Famous Five)

Audio books: Just Crazy by Andy Griffiths (very boy-oriented!); Beware of the Gingerbread House by Emily Rodda

Independent Reading: He finished reading Jack Stalwart: The Theft of the Samurai Sword. I looked up the information for the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge last night and realised he can start reading books towards it even though he can't register til March. I'm going to register him in the Yr 3-4 level (even though he's only 'officially' in Yr 2) which means he has to independently read 20 books from the approved reading list. Jack Stalwart will be his first!

Jack Stalwart: The Theft of the Samurai Sword - Japan


English: He researched some facts about Baden Powell (the founder of Scouts) and wrote an information sheet as part of his Promise Challenge for Joeys. He was quite disgusted to be told he had to hand-write it, not type it (by the leaders, not by me), but he did it without any complaining!


Maths: We did some logic practice by playing a game of Cluedo Jr - he's starting to get the hang of the strategy of it. We watched an episode of Cyberchase, he weighed some fruit at the grocery shop and tried to work out approximately how much it would cost and I gave him an introductory 'lesson' on binary numbers as part of our robots investigation. I didn't know how well he'd understand, but he got the hang of how the numbers worked quite quickly and was asking some good questions.

Science & Technology: While he was moving stuff around in his cubby (sorry, I have to call it a clubhouse now!), he uncovered some little lizard eggs & some newborn lizards so we investigated those and looked them up on the internet to confirm what we were looking at.




We also watched the evolution videos on Risa's blog in honour of Charles Darwin's b'day - he particularly liked the Simpson's one :)

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): He played the Pink Panther Passport to Peril CD again which teaches about different countries as the Pink Panther visits each one.

He made his own Chinese New Year Dragon for Chinese New Year (it appears to be a mythical white dragon!), and we cooked Chinese tonight to celebrate (sweet & sour pork - delicious! & fried rice).



Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class. He's also been having a 'Mr Bean fest' and watching the episodes over and over. It's provoked many discussions on the way Roman Atkinson uses visual humour with Billy predicting what would happen a few times.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Little Dragons martial arts class, an obstacle course at Joeys.

Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): He begged me to make fresh pasta last night, so we did. He had fun using the pasta machine to flatten it out and then made up his own shapes. I stuck with fettucine :)

School shows: Not on yet.

Other fun stuff:
Pete came home after 10 days away in the US. We also got 'Up' out of the DVD shop and watched it again - twice!

4 comments:

Kylie said...

Thanks to the links for the Darwin video's they will be fabulous as we progress with our history work.

Butterfly said...

Wise choice with the pasta :)

I'm not surprised Billy picked up Binary quickly ... he seems to be wired to understand all things computer. Good on you for thinking to do that.

My kids love Mr Bean too. I used to not like him (history with a too-enthusiastic Bean fan), but laughing along with the kids is contagious!

greendraggon said...

I found your blog through a search on Prenier's reading challenge and homeschool as I can't find any info on their site on doing it as a homeschooler. How did you go about it?

Kez said...

Hi greendraggon,

I'm not sure if its too late to sign up for this year - I think it finishes at the end of August. They were pretty cool about homeschoolers though - if you go to the login page, you'll see some info about 'non-government' schools. Down the bottom it talks about new homeschoolers - we have to email them to get an application form. It was a pretty simple process when I did it a few years ago.

Have fun :)