Sunday, January 18, 2009

Back to school!

We started back with our school work this week - just because we could lol! It'd been a while since we'd done anything formal - with our November trip and then the lead up to Xmas, we'd gotten pretty relaxed with things.

I'm working on doing about an hour's "formal" work each day - the rest is learning from life. Our focus in Term 1 will be:

  • English - Billy still writes mainly with capital lessons - or a combination - and while his writing is ok, it's not going to win any neatness awards! I'm planning to spend a lesson each week going through a handwriting book I have and getting him to do the exercises - he was quite excited to be awarded with stickers when we did it this week :) On the reading side, he's doing the library reading challenge at the moment, and the usual reading each night - us reading more advanced books so he gets a feel for better sentence structure and grammar, and him reading smaller books to us.
  • Maths - we're working through the Year 1 Leap into Maths book - 1 unit each week.
  • Science & Tech - we still have a couple of things to do to finish off the Weather unit from last term, and then we'll be doing a Push / Pull unit - basically forces in air & water & gravity.
  • HSIE - Prehistoric man and early civilizations
  • Creative & Practical Arts - Drama classes, playing musical instruments at home
  • PDHPE - (Physical Education) - He's starting a circus class learning basic circus skills!
This week we did:

  • English - Worked on lower case 'a' in handwriting, lots of reading.
  • Maths - Year 1 Leap into Maths Unit 15.
  • Science & Tech - tried to make crystals using a crystal kit he got for Xmas - it looks like a dismal failure atm!
  • HSIE - He made a dinosaur lapbook - this was our first ever lapbook and I can see the attraction now! I just had to put aside my perfectionism and my ideas of how I thought it should look!
Front of the lapbook

Inside the egg is a baby dinosaur printout

Inside the lapbook - the top left printout shows where dinosaurs used to live. The right hand side has print outs showing how big dinosaurs were in comparison with other dinosaurs & man. The top right one shows how they defended themselves with armour, spikes etc

The middle books open out to show information about carnivores and herbivores - the front page has Billy's definition of each, and then subsequent pages have printouts of various dinos of that type.

On the left hand side, the blue book opens out to show the 3 periods of dinosaurs - triassic, jurassic and cretaceous, and when they were.

The yellow booklet has information about how they died, and then subsequent pages show fossils and footprints. I took pity on him and typed those as he dictated - otherwise we'd still be there next year!


Ta da - our first lapbook! It was a great way to summarise our learnings - we hadn't studied dinosaurs out of the text-book as such, but had read lots of books about them, and did activities at a couple of dinosaur exhibits. I was pleasantly suprised at how much he had retained.

5 comments:

Louise said...

What a great lapbook!

Leanne said...

Hi
Hay have you ever looked into Five in a row? We used it when kids were little & loved it.

Love Leanne

Bel said...

Great lapbook! We've never, ever made one here.

We're also easing our way back into 'school' to make up for the couple of weeks we'll be away in February.

Kez said...

Hi Leanne,

I have looked into Five in a Row and it looked good. I couldn't spend the money on the books though and our local libraries didn't have many of them :(

Kerrie

Anonymous said...

I love me some lapbooks!

I'm glad you typed out some pages for him! My kids write probably 2 or 3 grade levels (whatever THAT is, lol) above what they can actually write, so I think it lets them express themselves without getting frustrated. He dictated some great stuff!

Nice lapbook!