All about me
It’s half term, time for a week (or so!) of just playing and
exploring. The youngest is becoming a confident reader, the older two have
really improved their handwriting and we have just finished another topic - ‘all
about me’,
We created a wall display with some self portraits and they looked
at what made them unique, their likes and dislikes. They did an experiment on
taste and smell likes and dislikes, blind testing of various things – the
chocolate buttons were popular, the olives created some very amusing faces! We
also put together Andrew’s baby book (I know you’d think that by the age of 4
we’d have done more than just collect bits loose in an album but somehow it was
never a job that got quite high enough up the to do list). It was an
interesting journey through the first year of his life looking at scan photos,
baby pictures and the like. The album itself was a gift from a friend (thanks Sharon) and very
appropriately is decorated with shells on the front. Whilst we arranged and
stuck we talked about all the boys as babies and the older two wrote out time
lines of their first experiences – when and where they were born, when their
brothers were born, when they met particular friends, where they went to pre
school and school - it was a very pleasant morning down memory lane.
We then expanded out to their bodies. We looked at teeth and
how to look after them in detail, practising cleaning teeth on some we made out
of building blocks and created some interesting posters, they have been very
fastidious at cleaning their teeth since seeing some gory photos of decay! They
did an experiment on the effect of exercise on the heart and lungs – possibly
quite amusing for anyone watching them running around the car park for 2
minutes and looked at how some systems worked,
like the heart, lungs and the digestive system with the help of books
like the chewy, gooey, rumble, plop book.
For the final section of this topic we took the opportunity of
Grandparents coming to visit to create and look at the family tree. Seeing
names – such as George - come through the family was interesting as were
stories of relatives and their connections. We also looked into who could
tongue roll, what jobs run through the family and the older two had a brief
look at genetics. It was interesting to imagine the differences which would
have been experienced by the 8 nurses over four generations and the shopkeepers
of their great grandparents generation compared to the retail managers of the
current one.
We finished the topic by looking at the definition of a
living thing (animal, vegetable, mineral grouping for the youngest) and spent a
morning on the beach looking for creatures, plants and other materials to
decide which group/kingdom they belonged in.
We’re finding that generally mornings are better for school
work but it’s great to be finished by lunch so we can go off to explore. Having
had a couple of sets of visitors we decided to do less work for a couple of
weeks but to keep a few things on the go using Grandparents as ‘expert tutors’.
Individual art lessons were popular as were museum trips.
The boys have asked to do some first aid which fits so
nicely with having looked at how their bodies work that it seems silly not to.
I have picked out suitable topics and will teach them a basic first aid
syllabus over a couple of mornings to get the new half term started next week –
I’m quite happy to have more people able to help me if I’m injured! The next
topic is the sea, I’m sure I can find some resources for that somewhere…..
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