Remembrance

I spent time with my own children talking about Remembrance Day and the service that we attend and why we do so. We watched CBeebies Remembrance film and then I read Where The Poppies Now Grow which is good but I always find it hard not to get emotional as I read it. So remembering those who gave their lives in the hope of a better futures, hoping and praying that one day we will have peace.

 The children made some remembrance pictures, using apple printing to create the poppies and I used the poem Poppy, poppy what do you say? As I love the words and they are a good talking point for the older children.

Martinmas

We enjoyed the story of St Martin, how he cut is cloak in half and gave it to a poor man to protect from the cold night air. We talked about caring for people who aren't as fortunate as us and what we could do to help them. We then talked about the importance of light in the dark, how it lights our way, makes us feel safe, we then made some lanterns, took them into the garden, along with some glow sticks to light our way. My girls love trying to see what patterns they can make with the glow sticks in the dark.

St. Martin, St. Martin, St. Martin
Rode through snow and wind,
On his horse, which carried him quickly away.
St. Martin rode with a light heart,
His cloak kept him good and warm.

In the snow sat, in the snow sat,
In the snow, there sat a poor man,
He didn't have clothes, he wore only rags:
"Oh help me in my distress,
Otherwise the bitter Frost will be my death!"

St. Martin, St. Martin, St. Martin pulls upon the reins,
His horse stands still near the poor man,
Without delay, with his sword St. Martin
Cuts the warm cloak in half.

St. Martin, St. Martin, St. Martin quietly gives up half,
The beggar's intention was to thank him,
St. Martin however was riding away in haste
With half his cloak.

St. Martin lies down quietly to rest,
In a dream the Lord appears.
He says: "Thank you, horseman,
For what you did to me."

Fireworks

I would say all my children love the fireworks but there are a couple who love the patterns in the sky but hate the noise but what they all do love is creating firework pictures. We spent a fair bit of one day making firework pictures and talking about them, the glitter season has started and we will be finding glitter probably until the middle if not the end of January. We have experimented with glue and salt for one of firework pictures, they were fascinated with how the paint moved through the salt pictures.

Our first pictures were glue and lot and lots of glitter.

 For the second lot I wanted to try something different that I had seen, involving glue, salt and water colours, have been told it works as well with food colouring but have yet to try it.

So step one is use glue to create you firework scene.

Sprinkle wet glue with salt and then shake of spare salt.

Then dab the salt/glue mixture with the water colour paint and watch the paint spread out.

The finished work.

I asked if they wanted to have a go painting with the remaining water colour paint, which they did, one loved just seeing the paint merge together and then mixing it to make lots of different shades of brown.

Bonfire pictures.

Spider Webs and Making The Most of Autumn

Following on from weaving spiders webs, watching some clips on how spiders spin their webs and a nature hunt for spiders webs, I thought I would make some templates for stain glass windows. I spent last night drawing and then cutting out black card, rather relieved I only had 3 to make.

The children explored the different coloured paper, deciding on colours and shapes they wanted to use, love the finish result, at the rate we're going I am going to need more windows to display the transparencies, window stars etc that we are making.

Enjoying the most of Autumn, we are lucky to live near a variety of woods and very near us is lovely oak tree and every year the children thoroughly enjoy playing in the leaves, scooping them up into piles and jumping in them, throwing the leaves in the air and seeing what happens, making patterns, as well as collecting some to take home, hours of fun are had under this one tree.

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.

Autumn Planning

The children really do love Autumn and all the changes the new season brings, the older minded children and L are already noticing the changes in the world around them and are commenting. They are linking these changes to Autumn, spotting the changes in leaves, the first conkers, the pumpkins that are nearly ripening well. So I am using one of our favourite Autumn stories, Ferdie and the Falling Leaves to base our Autumn planning on. I have noticed the book has been re-released as Fletcher and the Falling Leaves rather than Ferdie, just in case you go hunting for  new copy of the book

Some of our Autumn stories ready for tomorrow.

Remembrance Day

Today we attended the remembrance service, when we came home we read some poems together including Poppy Poppy What Do You say by T'Prang, which sums up our hope for peace.

As apple printing worked so well last year for poppies, we used them again, to make poppy wreaths with paper plates.

Then still using the apples they printed some pictures.