Diwali

Last week we looked at the Hindu festival of Diwali and watched the Tweenies episode in which they tell the story and then watched some you tube clips on getting ready for Diwali and firework display. We used paper plates to make lamps this year.

They decorated some paper plates after looking at some pictures of all the decorated elephants online.

Then out into the garden to make some rangoli patterns using chalks,

and one very pleased 3 year old who has learnt to draw triangles.

Out came our Maps book and spent some time looking at all the illustrations in India, finding the mountains and rivers too. Very interested in the peacocks, as earlier in the year we had had a day out and had seen some peacocks.

They had great fun trying to recreate peacock feathers using out chalk pastels.

L made a peacock.

Spider Webs and Pumpkins

Halloween today and we have been looking at spiders and their webs, they have had a go at weaving a spiders web using a paper plate. Lovely video of a spider spinning a web.

We haven't carved any pumpkins but do have a lot that we harvested from the allotment, which I need to do some cooking with! As they enjoyed the chalk pastels so much last week, I thought we would have them out again today, children range from 3yrs to 13 yrs.

The picture below is the pumpkin's flowers and seeds.

Science Sunday

I love doing science experiments with the children, whatever their age, they enjoy watching and taking part. So was really excited when I came across Mel Chemistry and decided we would try their first pack and see what it was like. Well we weren't disappointed, the first pack comes with all the basic equipment that you need, including a burner, safety glasses and 2 experiments that you can repeat more than once. So today we used the sugar snake one, using sugar and bicarbonate of soda, Mel Chemistry have a you tube video of their sugar snake.

It takes a little while to get growing and the your sugar snake slowly starts to appear.

Also discovered this lovely you tuber with lots of home science experiments to try, including the sugar snake.

Ferdie

I thought I would surprise my little ones the other week and create a small word scene for them so we could retell the story using props. It went down very well, they loved pretending to be the wind and trying to blow the leaves of the tree,

 getting the hedgehog to scurry around collecting all the leaves up to make somewhere warm to hibernate.

 The tray was used so many times through out the week, sometimes retelling the story and other times, adding in new characters and events.

Horses came to explore the tray and the trees disappeared to create a meadow that they could run around.

Painting of Ferdie and his tree.

Ferdie with his family and friends.

Hedgehogs

We have enjoyed lots of walks to different woods and parks near us, the children love to watch the squirrels scampering about, they loved the story of the The Very Helpful hedgehog and we have added some hedgehogs to out display. These foam hedgehogs came from Baker Ross and were a nice simple craft for the children to enjoy.

They were really fascinated and had lots of questions about hedgehogs and I thought it would be nice to make a lapbook with them, with all the info in that they have found out. The printables for the lapbook are from Home school Share, I think we might add some bits from The Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle but we see what they say next week. I know lapbooks are in many ways very adult intensive activity at this age but they have loved the process and looking at how L has wanted to share her book with everyone, it was worth it.

We've looked at how hedgehogs are nocturnal, that they hibernate, roll into a ball when scared, compared their footprints to other animals and what they eat.

Our Autumn display so far.

Autumn

So last Monday saw us reading lots of stories including Ferdie and The Falling Leaves, which led on to a discussion about why leaves change colour and fall of the tree. We talked about how plants and trees can make their own food in their leaves by using the water that the roots suck up like a straw and the sunlight, the children were very impressed with this and thought trees were very clever to make their own food. Didn't actually get round to the initial question of why leaves fall of the trees as the making it's own food really interested them but sure we will get round to answering it at some point over the next couple of weeks. Did managed to find a nice diagram in one of my books for them to look at. After that we had some crafts out, I had printed out some of these autumn tree printable for them to use with tissue paper and various stickers I had. We talked about the different colours they might see at this time of year and they chose the colours to match.

 

They enjoyed themselves and asked me to print of some more sheets for them, which I did and a colouring in sheet, which they added stickers too

 Lots of time spent in the garden playing with the baby dolls and food, followed by some pattern making. We used lollipop sticks and to start with they had to try and copy the pattern from the book, which wasn't as easy as they thought, then of to make their own patterns and pictures.

Tuesday we spent the morning building lots of towers, reading stories and doing some puzzles, we spent the afternoon in the park, meeting up with friends, finding some conkers on the way home. Wednesday we put together an Autumn display, which they have enjoyed playing with and then a walk through park land, looking at how tall some of the trees were, the different shapes, had some running races to different trees. Found some trees that had branches cut of them this year and compared them to those that had been cut of years ago and talked about how the tree continues growing over the cut of part. Then spotted moss and lichen growing too, then they saw some holes in one tree and started telling stories about who lived there.

 M and I set about making some window stars in autumn colours and I made another transparency to go with them, they have made our patio door look rather lovely. Really want to try and find the time to make some more, M is making more stars to go around our Autumn wall display. I put together a tutorial for these window stars last year, if you want to try and make them yourself.