Hayati Homeschool: April 2016

The start of every school day begins with play dough. We make it new each school term using natural colouring like turmeric. This time we added glitter to make sparkly fun play dough.

A seaside inspired play dough scene

After snack and playground fun we do a little work in our activity books. Instead of just doing worksheets the children cut and glue the tasks into their books. They enjoy this process much more as they engage physically with the work, practicing their skill with scissors and deciding independently where to fix objects into their books.

Most of our numeracy and literacy activities are hands on. Obstacle courses, games and sorting, and here threading beads to match the numbers on the pipe cleaners:

Phonics obstacle course - matching letters with objects: S for snake, B for bear, C for cake

We did a body anatomy topic this year where the kids learned about the heart, lungs, brain, skeleton and stomach. We put noodles in a pair of tights to demonstrate what a brain feels like, we made a model of how lungs work using balloons and we did an experiment using a plastic bag and lemon juice to mimic stomach acid to show how digestion works. The children each got a stethoscope to listen to their heart beats after resting and after doing different activities, like jumping on the trampoline and running. The children learned to identify the different organs and what role they played in the body. They really enjoyed finding out more about their bodies and how they worked. We related this to our numeracy and phonics activities too.

After the anatomy topic we started focusing on feelings. We explored different expressions and what emotions they communicated. We talked about why people might feel different things and how people can behave when they feel sad, happy, angry or excited.

Pasta faces showing different emotions

Emo Dolls - twisting the dolls around shows different emotions.
These were great for role play games we played to demonstrate why people feel different emotions.

We read a lot of books everyday and have dedicated story time after lunch as well as a story before home time. One of the children's favourite books is Michael Rosen's 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt', we act out the book in the tent and go on a bear hunt around the garden. We decided to an art project focused on different scenes from the book. The children each chose their favourite scene and we recreated it using paint, felt and paper and put their pictures into the scene.

One of our other topics was the days of the week. We started introducing the days of the week by making weather reports and daily schedules. Every morning we spoke about the day, the weather, how we felt and what we were going to do.

The children also made salt ornaments with their names carved in them, as they became more familiar with the Arabic alphabet.

Spring Baskets with Rabbit Cookies to celebrate the beginning of Spring

Cooking and eating are a big part of our day. The children love making cakes, muffins, biscuits, lasagnas, pesto, breads and pies - we love to try new recipes. Here are a few of our creations: