Letter F: F is for Frog: Magnet Page

Download the file from here

Science Sunday: Hyacinths

One of the problems with teaching children about growing plants is that it takes so long that they have lost interest way before anything appears.  I think this is why you get the ubiquitous cress seeds on cotton wool in every preschool in the world.

This time of year the shops near us are full of bulbs and so we invested in a hyacinth bulb in a hyacinth jar so that we could do something a little different.  In just four days it went from no roots at all to this:

A is in charge of his "little beauty" and checks it about 100 times a day. Now all we need is the flower to appear.

Nocturnal Animals Word search

I created this to use with one of the books we are looking at for stART which is about light and dark.  Since A is doing this topic at school I made this word search for him and R to do.

you can download the pdf for yourself from here

Letter B: b is for BIG: Magnifying Glass Matching Game

B found one of our magnifying glasses this week and has been constantly wandering around with it glued to one eye.  I wanted something for our "big and little" theme so when I found this cute matching game via this post at Attached Mama that used a magnfying glass I knew it was the one for me.
The idea is pretty self explanatory - examine the little pictures with the magnifying glass and match to the bigger pictures.  There are basically three themes covered, animals, transport and fruit so you could separate them into themes and make three separate file folder games if you wanted to.
Needless to say B loved it!

Spelling Game: Roll-Write-Keep

This game is an adaptation of the spelling activity used by most schools (at least all the ones we have attended in the UK and elsewhere) called "Look,Say,Cover,Write,Check"  The student is given a book with columns in; in the first column is the word they are learning to spell; they look at it, spell it out loud, cover it up again, spell it from memory, uncover the original and compare (usually this is done several times for each word).  As a method for teaching spelling this is quite effective.  As a method for teaching spelling to A this is just another thing that does not engage him for more than 30 seconds if you are lucky.
Whilst pondering how we could get him to engage with spelling I came across this game to teach younger children to read sight words.  It's called Roll Say Keep.  The players roll a dice , pick the corresponding word from a gameboard, say it, if they say it correctly they get to keep the card, player with the most cards at the end is the winner.  I thought it could be adapted to solve our problem.
So here is our blend of the two things to teach spelling; and best of all you can endlessly adapt it to the words YOU want to learn.

Number of players: 2 or more

You will need:
1 die
1 gameboard
Words for spelling written on pieces of cardstock
Pencil and paper for each player

How to play:
All players roll the die, highest number goes first, play continues clockwise round the table.
Place one word card face down on each space on the gameboard.  Place the remainder of the word cards face down to one side.
The player rolls the die and turns over the corresponding card. They then have to read the word and spell it out loud.  The card is then turned face down again and the player tries to spell it on their paper.  The card is turned back to check the spelling.  If it is right they keep the card; otherwise the card is turned face down again and remains on the board.
Fill any gap on the board with the next word card, face down of course.
Next players go.
Continue until all the words are used up.
Highest number of cards is the winner.

VARIATION: for children in different years (like me!) have a gameboard and a set of words each, take turns as before but they will each be learning words chosen for their ability.

BTW if you are puzzling over which words to include and your child is following the National Curriculum either at home or at school (i.e. the UK curriculum) this leaflet by the National Literacy Strategy outlines what kind of words will be encountered year by year based on the Programmes of Study up to Year 6.

Science Sunday: Bubbling Volcanoes

Not very original I know but R is doing about Earthquakes/Volcanoes etc again and needed a model of a volcano for her homework so we dragged out the old papier mache volcano with the bicarbonate of soda/vinegar larva.
To make the volcano itself we took the side of a large cardboard box as a base.  In the middle of this we stuck an upside down yogurt pot and then another pot on top (this will hold our bicarbonate of soda etc later).
At this point cue the scrunched up newspaper and masking tape to build it up into a volcano shape around the pots.
Next comes the boring messy bit.  Layers of newspaper and glue.  Although there are recipes for making your own flour and paper glue (just use Google you will get hundreds) I prefer to use a watered down PVA glue.  You can buy two litre containers from building merchants where it is sold for sealing bare plaster walls before decorating - the last container I bought was when A was born and he is now 7!  To use add roughly equal amounts of water and glue so that it looks like milk.  This saves a whole lot of faffing about boiling/mixing/cooling and if you need to spend several days making your model (and lets face it it is not the most interesting thing in the world to do all day) it doesn't start to stink!
Once all the paper was dry R painted the model.

To make the bubbling larva.  Put some bicarbonate of soda  (also known as baking soda and has the formula NaHCO3) into the yogurt pot. Carefully pour in vinegar (with a little washing up liquid) that has been tinted with red/orange food colouring.  You should get a bubbly mixture that goes down the side of the volcano.  Of course since R wanted to do this at school we had a trial run first before she had to do it in front of her classmates with an identical sized pot to see how it would go.  Just a note don't use baking powder for this experiment -although it contains bicarbonate of soda as an active ingredient it doesn't work so well as the pure thing.
For those interested in the chemistry part vinegar and bicarbonate of soda is an acid:base reaction.  The bubbles of gas are carbon dioxide.

Cooking for Kids: Gruffalo Cake

Since B didn't have a "proper" cake for his birthday, just some brownies, it was felt generally that he was owed one. A and I found this recipe for a Gruffalo Cake on the official Gruffalo website.
Here is our version:

Unfortunately the intended recipient although he loves the Gruffalo story and the Gruffalo's Child even more thought it was "scary" and wanted it in any other room than the one he was in :(