Happy New Year 2016!

The wonderful chaos of the festive period is winding down and I found some time to finally update the blog with all the lovely photos I took from our Autumn Term (Sept-Dec 2015). We've had some new faces join us, the start of French days with our lovely new teacher Melanie, lots of amazing art projects, a trip to visit bee hives and taste different kinds of honey, plus lots of cooking, dance performances and lots of playing - the heart of Hayati Homeschool days! Last term we introduced different topics including healthy eating, bees & honey, animal habitats and conservation.

Enjoy our photos!

The children cook something everyday:

Spinach, lentil & feta filo pie

Breton animal biscuits in French Class

Date, nut & cocoa bliss balls rolled in coconut

The beginnings of a plum tart 

 We do an art project everyday:

Apple printing

Stenciling and collage

Watermelon with shaving foam paint

H is for Hive & for Hexagon & for Honey!

Appreciating the honey bee

The letter 'Q' is for 'Queen Bee'

  

Counting & number recognition with flower petal art - bending the card into petal shapes great for fine motor development too!

More art for number understanding - finger painting caterpillar legs!

Finger painting bats 'chauve-souris' for Halloween

Standing Zebras

J is for jellyfish!

Learning about the letter 'V' and endangered animals

Seasons greetings cards for the festive period!

The most important part of the day is play, the key to learning:

 

Looking forward to more learning adventures in 2016!

Year Round Up

It has been a busy year! We had a new addition to our family which is why this blog has been so quiet. She conveniently joined us in the Spring Holiday a few days before the new term began.

We had a wonderful cover teacher for the English days and the children benefitted from interacting with a new person with new creative ideas! The next few months the children were introduced to both the English and Arabic alphabets, did lots of name art to familiarise them with the letters of their names, made family trees, experimented growing plants from seeds, learned about the life cycle of frogs, practiced making their own art based on Jackson Pollock's work and Matisse and continued number work - treasure hunts were very effective and fun building their confidence with counting and helping with the concept of addition. As part of learning about plants and growing the children also helped to pick the apricots and peaches which were later turned into delicious peach and apricot jams and pies... Enjoy our photos!

The children also collected tadpoles from a pond and watched them change into frogs observing the different stages of development. 

More photos to come as we prepare for the new 2015/2016 year!

Autumn Term Round Up

Happy 2015! School has started again after the holidays and thought I would share some of our art creations we made last term:

We have embraced strawberry and banana season:

And took part in the olive harvest in October:

New adventures begin this month! Our learning topics are the body, introducing alphabet sounds and comparisons & opposites. 

What we've been up to

Every morning we get creative with play dough. It's our favourite warm up activity, the kids gets so excited when they see the play dough pots out and dive right into making cakes, bird's nests, moustaches, snails and anything else they fancy. It's a great way to practice those developing fine motor skills and for the kids to get used to the group dynamic again and melt away any early morning shyness.

Beautiful 'cakes' ready to go in the play oven

Around 10am we usually do some 'real' cooking. The promise of making dough, stirring cake mixture or breaking eggs pulls them away from the play dough table as they become fascinated with measuring out our ingredients of the day. The children always make something everyday which is part of their school menu. 

Enjoying their pizza - they measured out the flour, water, salt and olive oil for the dough. They watched the dough rise and then rolled it out themselves and then spread on the homemade tomato sauce and cheese and then they watched the pizzas go in the oven.

Raspberry and pomegranate fool - the kids mixed the yoghurt and cream together with a beater and then layered the  cream, raspberry mixture and pomegranate seeds to create these beautiful deserts they had for their afternoon snack. Although my daughter preferred to mix hers altogether and was excited to see the vibrant pink colour that was the result.

After lunch we have story time followed by quiet time. The children can have a nap on one of the mattresses or play, read or colour quietly. I find this time really restorative for all of us as they become focused on having some individual time (as opposed to the high octane fun of playing in the playground or singing and dancing as a group) and getting some rest. After quiet time everyone is ready to focus on doing something creative and colourful.

Following on with our caterpillar to butterfly theme we made butterflies decorated with crepe paper that could be carried around on sticks. Earlier in the week we made cocoons from papier-mâché, decorated with sequins of course!

It was Eid in Morocco last week so the kids made cards celebrating this big national holiday to give to their families. Inside the Arabic teacher had written 'Eid Mubarak'.