Books Glorious books

I don't know if you will remember but in the middle of A week K came up with the idea of us reading a letter themed book each week to go along with the theme of the week. As it was K's idea I left it up to him to choose the stories he thought would go along with what we were learning - so long as it had the specific letter of the week in the title I wasn't too fussed what he choose as reading the same book everyday would be beneficial for them regardless. I really should have mentioned which stories we read in the round up days but forgot so heres the B, C and D week stories we read each day. I have to say I think K picked well, even Lil B with her wriggly legs and baby attention span sat through them most days... I don't know if any of you have come across this story but it really is delightful, lovely illustrations and easy for the younger kiddies to follow, we had initially borrowed this from the library but loved it so much we bought our own copy.

A classic even from my childhood I'd be very surprised if you haven't heard of this one! We had lots of fun trying to remember all the foods the caterpillar eats and talking about whether we liked them or not,we also played the very hungry caterpillar game which K got last Christmas - I don't think i mentioned that before :)

A nice relatively short story. Good for imagination building, it got my older 2 thinking about would happen if dinosaurs did live with us, (I'm sure K is convinced they still do live on an island somewhere far away, he's prob right!) and what they would do if they had a pet dinosaur.

I'm excited to see which book he picks for E week, as I'm sure are you!

Prehistoric Puppet Show

D week well and truly became Dinosaur week. Although we did discuss a few things unrelated to dinosaurs - they were the hot topic!

So day 3 was a day filled with firstly making a set of dinosaur puppets. We used a template from the DLTK site, basically just a printed sheet of dino body parts that we then attached to a toilet paper tube. The main characters for the show were Sara and Little Foot from 'The Land Before Time' movie - a huge like in this house!

After we made the puppets we went about writing a wee play for them to perform to Daddy when he got home from work. K & F came up with the story themselves and practised by doing a show for me and Lil B. It was all about how it was their friends birthday and they had to go on an adventure to find all the things they needed for the party, including ingredients for the cake, leaves, bugs and chocolate for dinosaur cake of course!

We then decided to learn some fun facts about 'Sara' and 'Little Foot' ie The Triceratops and The Apatosaurus. K & F also drew some pictures of them too - budding Dali & Picasso here you know! ;)

I also found some fun dino themed online quizzes and games, sites like 'kidsdinos'. Part of the 'kids know it network' was a particular favourite with games such as make your own dinosaur,dinosaur memory and dinosaur match.

I also took prehistoric times to the dinner table, I made them chicken on the bone with extra not so prehistoric bits like salad (although I'm sure cave mumas watched their weight and ate a bit of green now and again) and let them eat like caveboys n cavegirls - with their hands! shock!! lol

They really enjoyed that and were even pretending Bboy (the dog) was their pet dinosaur - forget the Flintstones when you've got us!

Dough Nutty

After the fun we had at Satrosphere we decided to make our own 'fossils'. We made up a batch of salt dough & found a few different tools (including tooth picks and dog biscuits!) and set to work.

If you don't know how to make salt dough its really easy -

2 cups of plain flour

1 cup of salt

1 cup of water

Once you are finished making whatever it is you are making you pop it in the oven at around 100c for 3-4 hours,but keep an eye on your makes as temp and time can depend on thickness of what you have made. You can then paint your makes if you so wish :)

K decided he wanted to make a dinosaur head, I have to say i was quite impressed with the end result. Because we made them out of salt dough I think it really did look like old crumbly bone!

F wanted to make hers like a skeleton, so she used a toothpick to make Bone shapes, bless her.

Mummy also had a clever idea to use the build a Dino skeleton which we put together the previous day to make indentations in the salt dough, so we had mini dinosaur imprints!

Lil B wanted in on the action too - so we let her make a salt dough imprint of her just turned 1 hand and foot, nice little keep sake :)

The winkles really enjoyed this activity,although they did get frustrated at the drying time. However this gave as plenty time to enjoy doing other activities including their workbooks and some fun worksheets i had printed off including a Dinosaur colour by numbers and dot-to-dot.

P.S You will see their creations at the top of the page, well one tray of them at least! You can see Lil B's imprints, K's Dino head and K and one of F's bones. The picture was taken before they were baked :)

Fossils & Funny Bones

D WEEK :D

Aren't we lucky, our local science centre - Satrosphere - has a 'travelling exhibit' on at the moment all about fossils - perfect for a fun and interactive introduction to a little bit of dinosaur magic!

The kids got to dress up as different kinds of dinosaurs, dig for fossils, make fossil rubbings and listen to a story.

There was also magnetic jigsaws where you could make up your very own Dino chums and plenty of space to run around making scary Dino noises!

We also made sure to take a look at the exhibits that are always there, including a skeleton that can ride a bicycle and a sheep with visible insides!

The highlight for our troop though was the lecture we caught on homemade experiments, this was where one of the staff put on a lecture on a few experiments you can try at home with things you probably have laying around. K was the star of the show getting so my answers correct the woman hosting thought he had been before! lol

Needless to say both K & F are determined to make a mess of my kitchen recreating these experiments at home - cant wait! :)

The great thing about satrosphere was we spent a little over 2 hours there and the kids didnt

want to leave which is great as im hopefull they will have plenty more 'travelling exhibits' that will tie in with what we are into learning.

When we got home the winkles wanted to as much as they could to do with dinosaurs, so we read some books and drew some pictures with mummy plotting more dino fun for the next day!

K and his Camera...

...A walk along the beach

The Dolphin - they like to feed him stones...
A view of some of the town

A boat sculpture

The clock tower

The blue sky

K's Camera

Above you will see the results of K's first trip out with his brand new shiny red 7.1 mp camera, we looked at all those special kid tough type ones but the mp on them was rubbish. So for half the price we got alot more mp!

We only got a few pictures as even though it looked lovely and sunny there was an icy cold wind and the girls were upset at being so cold. Hopefully now that winter seems to be on its way out we will get out more and get some lovely pictures of different things around our town :)

Cheesy Crowns and Chameleons

I'm going to cheat on week C since we are still no closer to finding the missing cable...I think this calls for a new camera ;0

I did not 'loose it on purpose' Mr G before you ask!

So C week was lots of fun too - I'm just going to do a basic round up of each day all in the one post and hopefully will get something sorted in terms of posting all B and C week pics together and then getting back on track with D week...and my new camera ;) ???

Mon - We started off C week with an easy day of baking Cookies, which didn't last long at all and where finished before daddy could even try one when he got home from work! I have since been asked daily when we can make them again - I shall do a separate post with pictures and recipe. We then made Castles. Firstly we drew out what we would like our castles to look like then got out the blocks and tried to build it just like our picture. This proved hard for me in particular...how do you build cone shaped roofs with cubes?! lol The kids had fun with it though and this led to an afternoon of playing knights and princesses and dragons!

Tues - To carry on from the success in interest of castles and knights we decided we should make some Crowns! Nothing super fancy just card and lots of sparkles and glitter and furry bits! Once the crowns had been made all they wanted to do was play their game again, so they did that till lunchtime :D After lunch we took to learning all about the 'coolest creature ever' (or so K thinks) the Chameleon. We looked up different species and found out where they lived etc then we got onto the -interactive part. We coloured in around 10 chameleons and cut them out then went about sticking them to different things in the house that were the same colour as they were coloured. We took turns being the hiders and the seeker of the chameleons. Lots of fun!

Wed - I had plans for other things today however this ended up falling through as I'm sure this will happen many times. But the kids still had C fun and did get up to some mischief with my camera. This has resulted in me ordering K his very first proper camera and we will do something bigger and better along the camera lines once it arrives. He has taken a real shine to photography and i don't think it would b fair not to follow this through as he is actually very good! We also looked into comics, as just now they both are very much into superheros, this lead to K deciding he wanted to write his own comic, The adventures of Super Dude! K has also told us he plans to write enough comics to enable him to buy one of every toy in the world for his sister's 3rd birthday! Really could you get any cuter!....£2 a copy in case you were wondering ;)

Thurs - This was a very exciting day as it was the Cheese Challenge day. We went to the shops and picked up 6 different cheeses, mummy making sure they all had relatively different tastes and textures so we had something to talk about ;) So we basically did the same thing as we did for our Apple taste test - see previous post, an apple a day... - We scored each cheese out of 5 and drew a picture of the cheese. K also wrote out the name of the cheese on his score sheets. Unsurprisingly F like all the cheeses & K only disliked 1...I live in a house full of mice! lol

Fri - Our usual roundup day, going over what we had learned, writing practise and making up our C boards.


I should really make a wee note here, we also do workbooks now and again and other sorts of games and activities that aren't really connected with our Letter of the week 'programme' which we are following just now. The more we get into the letter of the week the more i realise we really work better as we were, on the autonomous way of learning. However as the children are still enjoying the letter 'weeks' we will stick with it as long as they are happy, knowing that it might take us longer than a week to 'study a letter' as we go off on a tangent whenever something takes our fancy!