Saturday, March 28, 2015

Weeks 7 & 8

The past two weeks have been all about sleeping and resting with the two girls both sick and feeling miserable.  The Snork Maiden stayed home from school for two days with a bad cold and fever, and once she was well enough to go back to school Moomintroll's cold took off and has ended up having a mild case of tonsilitis.  Happily now she's on antibiotics and is improving daily which is wonderful seeing as we leave for overseas tomorrow!  We're finally off on our long awaited Indonesian Adventure. Sniff and Hazel have gone off to their holiday homes and we're ready to go. One more sleep!

Despite all the sickness in the house we did manage to do some work. Moomintroll still has a thing for poems and is loving part of The Wind in the Willows which we call Toad's Song. It's the bit where Toad has just escaped from jail, stolen and sold a horse and is feeling very full of himself. Moomintroll can recite it by heart and now is carefully writing it out in her english book.
Our science theme for the week was deserts so we watched TMS All Dried Up and Eyewitness Desert which led to watching 'the making of' and then Eyewitness Arctic/Antarctic because, you know, the Antarctic is the world's largest desert as Moomintroll reminded me. Other desert related work included word searches, research on 3 desert animals, a desert poster, making a cacti garden and a trip to the zoo to see the gila monster and other beautiful desert dwelling reptiles.

cactus garden

a happy little desert dweller

science and maths work for the week
To finish off our term of maths Moomintroll did some word problems about the exploits of some fierce ninjas and a librarian with a pile of books, and did a little times table test which she handled very well.  She then went on to demonstrate her understanding of arrays by building an amazing underground house with interconnecting rooms in Minecraft.

By the end of the week both girls were feeling fit enough for their Just Brass end of term concert where they performed a duet together of Bengawan Solo (the same piece we played at Opa's 80th party). At the concert Dr Jim accompanied them on the piano.


Monday, March 16, 2015

Weeks 5&6

The Labour Day long weekend was so lovely and relaxing that I forgot to do my usual Sunday night wrap up of the week. Then yesterday P and I were in Bendigo for the day with band, sharing the spotlight with the local schools band in an afternoon concert.  It went pretty well despite the poor turnout. A band concert just can't compete with a sunny Sunday afternoon Collingwood vs Carlton clash at the nearby footy oval.

Week 5:
After a morning doing our usual maths, science and english, Moomintroll and I had our travel vaccinations, which led to another science lesson on vaccines and how they work.  All went well with no side effects, just tender arms for a day or so.
Our English work this week was learning antonyms and synonyms using various sheets from Education.com.
The rainforest was our science theme. Moomintroll made a comic called Into the Rainforest. Instead of finding pictures of animals on the web she decided to dress up as the animals herself and I took pictures of her climbing trees and eating frogs.
impersonating a coatimundi climbing a tree
  She also did word searches, word scrambles, and watched our Eyewitness episode on Jungles/Rainforests. After that episode she watched the 'making of 'episode and got quite interested in that. We may have to find an online computer animation course for her soon.
Maths continued as always with tables practice using various games and songs. I introduced the concept of factors to her. It took a little while to understand but she's slowly getting it. It's great to see when a connection is made; those "Aaah!" moments are priceless.  We use Loot the Pirate Ship and various worksheets to practice factors.
Art was fun this week. We made Before and After pictures using collage, painting and pastels techniques. I found the Before pictures at Dover Samplers.


She also used the same techniques to make birthday cards for K and cousin H.

To finish off the week's work we combined English, Geography and Science by writing a report on our visit to The Rainforest Gallery near Warburton.





Week 6:
A shorter week than usual due to the Labour Day holiday. We spent the afternoon at the wave pool where we all practiced swimming laps and riding the waves.
Coincidentally our science theme this week was water based - Coral reefs and Tidal zones. We watched TMS Takes a Dive and TMS goes to Mussel Beach. We reminisced about our holiday on Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, searched for images of plankton and barnacles, watched Eyewitness Oceans and other plankton videos.
 barnacle pop up page 

pretty plankton
She also did  many word searches on different habitats and made her own wordsearches using a blank grid.
I gave Moomintroll her first spelling test based on science words we've learnt over the weeks. She got 11/15 - a great result considering I didn't give her any time to revise!
We took a lovely walk at Wombat Bend along the river. Unfortunately the camera battery died so we didn't get any pictures but we saw many birds - cockatoos, magpies, lorikeets, kookaburras, fairy wrens and many others we couldn't see but heard.
Maths consisted of practical shopping maths; she wrote down on paper everything we put in the trolley then added it all up. She's getting the hang of carrying the tens now.
A swimming lesson and Club with K topped off a fun week before we all succumbed to the dreaded lurgy - sore ears, coughs, runny noses and headaches.  Right now the Snork Maiden is missing school for the first time this term, feeling miserable and achy. Poor Dr P soldiered on to school this morning - hopefully he's managing a bit better today.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Week 4 - Bed School

Most of this week was spent doing Bed School, after Moomintroll was stung on the ankle by a bee. Usually when she gets stung it's sore for a few hours and nothing more, but this time her body began building up an immunity to bee stings. For almost 5 days she was in real pain with a hot, itchy swollen ankle. It reminded me of my swollen ankles in the last months of pregnancy!  Hopefully the next time she gets stung (and she will - she always does!) the reaction will be minimal. Well, that's what this article says anyway and it seems like the author knows what they are talking about.

Anyway, Bed School was quite fun. We arranged ourselves on Moomin's bed with pillows and blankets and worked our way through some reading comprehension sheets following the story of Jason and his appearance on a tv game show, grammar sheets and some maths sheets on arrays.  Our multiplication facts method is showing some good results now. By the end of this week Moomintroll was able to fill in another multiplication grid without too many hesitations and without using the red pen (meaning that none of the facts were considered 'sticky' anymore. Yay!). She even survived a grilling from her Auntie with a smile on her face :)
Multiplication.com continues to be our favourite site. The short stories and mnemonics work very well for Moomintroll's visual/aural style of learning.

The Magic Schoolbus episode this week wasn't as engaging as previous weeks. The topic was Urban Wildlife. She watched the episode twice, filled in the sheet and found some short videos on Splash and that was as far as we took it.  

We finally finished Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy. It happened as we sat nestled on the couch out on the deck during a rainstorm. Very atmospheric and really added to the excitement of the book's ending. We're sad it's come to an end.  Moomintroll spent most of the week thinking about a design for a book related T shirt and on Friday this is what she came up with.
Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy T shirt
A swimming lesson, 'Club' with best friend K, a spontaneous trip to the Eureka Skydeck, a successful school swimming sports for The Snork Maiden, a family BBQ at school, dinner out at an Indonesian restaurant and a lovely 80th birthday celebration for our dear Opa finished off another whirlwind week!
view of St Paul's from Skydeck

Flinders Street Station