Just an update on what's been going on here.

The Titanic lapbooks are filling up fast with pockets, crafts and bits and bobs. I'll post some photos when it's completely finished. We're reading, discussing and working on the final hours of the liner. Katie and Ben had fun learing more about morse code and producing lots of weird and wonderful messages to the sounds of beep and extended beep!

On the maths front, both have finished their current work books and we've decided to use the Heinman book that I got from the library recently to continue learning and recapping on all the basics. Although it's an older style course book, it is easy to follow with nice pictures and simple step by step instructions (making it much easier for me). Today we hit a page that was alittle out of Ben's league, so he recapped on what he'd already learnt, but it's brilliant for Katie and we all seem to be doing fine with it. We've started with multiplication and division using decimals as well as the times/divide by 10, 100, 1000 rule (it's taking an age to drum this into them, I even made up an annoying song earlier in the year to help it sink in, they remember the song, they just don't put the words into practise!). Today we moved on to multiplication for two digits, 11 - 19 and for Katie, multiples of 10 (for which she worked out her own, extremely simple, method to correctly complete the sums - most impressed).

For those that use workbooks for their learning, a friend from our HE group mentioned last week that St. Ivel Advance Fresh Milk with Omega 3 are giving away free Letts study books (to a total of 20,000) in exchange for a bar code number on the purchase of the milk (one per family).
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For literacy we are still writing poems for Autumn. Last week they did lovely Haiku for the brief spell of warm, sunny weather. I'm also encouraging Ben to write more small stories as he finds this quite hard. He has lots of ideas and uses lovely language (and I don't mean swearing) when telling me stories, but he's not good at writing them down. The BBC RaW booklet that he recently finished suggested continuing with the story in several ways, so he wrote a lovely little story about two of the characters in the book where Baked Bean is given a new potion (of fire) from Bamrod. So, in Ben's words:

When the potion was finished, Bamrod gave it to Baked Bean in a weird shaped glass. The glass had a bumpy stand and bumpy sides and a spikey top. The potion tasted like hot water, so there was no chance of liking it! So, Baked Bean took a sip, then strang(e)ly anuf (enough) Baked Bean had smoke coming out (of) his ears! Then sud(d)enly, Boom!! Baked Bean blew up like a fire work!! Baked Bean asked, when smoke was spitting out his ears, "what's in this potion?" The potion had wood and lit matches and fire work chemicals in it. Baked Bean survived the blow (some how), he was just pitch black!
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We have been collecting a few postcards to put up on our UK map to help us learn about the history of our own country (and the whereabouts of places!). When we get around to doing the map reading we'll look at their coordinates too. One of the places Katie was working on today was Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. I couldn't help break into the warbling the Wombles song and we ended up tracking it down on You Tube!
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We have started to use the mobile library that comes to our village every fortnight. We've never used one before as a family and we were mighty impressed. Katie had reserved some books which were waiting for us on the van and she was thrilled to find lots of "her kind of books" (i.e. horse stories) on the fully stocked shelves. Ben was excited about finding a Star Wars comic style book, which he finished reading in lightening speed, and he was allowed to take one of the many 1000 piece puzzles home with him to try out. I've never seen him so engrossed - he worked on the puzzle most of that afternoon and now he and P are completing it together.

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Katie decided she wanted to set up an alarm to stop Ben getting into her room, so we dug out Ben's electronic set that he got for Christmas. It's from the Science Museum range and more advanced than the simple John Adams Junior Electronics set which we've all used and continue to enjoy using. We have managed to set up the initial board and are now ready to start wiring up to make a burglar alarm. All seems very clever but one gripe, it tells you to follow the pictures for wiring up, but doesn't really explain in simple terms (even though it's for 8 years +) why you're doing what you're doing. The John Adams set was very thorough in making sure you understood the reasoning behind each circuit you'd produced.

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Finally, we had a group session last Friday on Harvest and we all took in various yummies to share over lunch. During the session Katie made this lovely picture of a horse using dried beans and lentils and Ben did some colourful veggie printing. We've added them to our Autumn poster.



Here's a new tag Katie's designed especially for me.