Sunday, February 28, 2010

Our week of learning - 28th Feb - M&Ms


A deliberately slower week this week!

Current Readaloud: The Adventurous Four by Enid Blyton

The Adventurous Four: Shipwrecked! (The adventurous four)

Audio books: Robot Riot by Andy Griffiths; Two weeks with the Queen by Morris Gleitzmann

Independent Reading: The Mystery of Banshee Towers by Enid Blyton

The Mystery of Banshee Towers (Five Find-outers & Dog S.)

English: This hangman (hang mouse!) game that I found on someone's blog - but now I can't remember who, sorry!

Maths: I threw a packet of M&Ms into the trolley while we were shopping the other day - Eagle Eyes noticed and wanted to know what they were for. "To do some maths with" was my reply... I wouldn't tell him what we were doing though, and the suspense was killing him! "Can we do it straight after lunch today???!" lol, love it!

So we did! We made an Eratosthenes' Sieve to find prime numbers up to 120. First we put an M&M on all the multiples of 2, then 3, 5, and 7. He was able to see the patterns in some of the numbers and we both learnt a trick of finding whether or not a number can be divided by 3 (if its digits add up to a multiple of 3). And yes, then we got to eat the M&Ms! (not all of them at once though!)


He also watched a couple of episodes of Cyberchase online - one of the episodes was showing how to draw a circle with a pencil & a piece of string, so I pulled out the compass and let him experiment to his heart's content.

Science & Technology:
The slime kit got another workout this week.

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): We went and did the month's Waterwatch testing again, and picked up rubbish along the river bank.

Hundreds of flying foxes (fruit bats) have taken up residence in a street in our town - we saw them at dusk a week or so ago, all out flying looking for a feed. It was quite spectacular! Our local paper had an article about them which identified where they were, so we took a drive to have a look. They were very noisy but kind of cute :)



Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Little Dragons martial arts class, exercising each morning with Pete, and the area's homeschool swimming carnival (attended by over 100 kids).



Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): General tidying plus he made 'rocky road' biscuits with marshmallows and M&Ms.

School shows: BTN, Our Earth (about fossils), Count Us In.

Other fun stuff: He attended
the Regional Show with his grandparents & had a sleep over at their house for the night.

8 comments:

Caz said...

hehe M&M math is the BEST kind of math!

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

I love everything you did this week - what fun! And, great picture of the bats, though I'm not sure I'd call them cute :)

Butterfly said...

Your new blog looks fresh and bright!

I love when kids beg to do maths!! Good on you for building the suspense. I think I'd better check out Cyberspace one of these days.

Magic and Mayhem said...

Those bats are wild! LOL We have bats here (they live under the eaves) but they're tiny little things that we only really see at dusk as they emerge from under the roof and swoop around devouring mosquitoes. I would rather have bats than bloodsucking mosquitoes, so I don't mind them at all, and the kids love to watch them. Your bats are huge though! Very cool, though it must be a little bit creepy to have them just hanging there! :)

Your week looks like such fun, as always, and I love the new look too.

Caz said...

LOL ok how did I miss that you went time traveling as well as doing M&M math!?!? ;)

an almost unschooling mom, we actually have fruitbat stuffed toys that are hilariously cute!

Kez said...

lol, I had to read your comment a heap of times thinking 'time travelling - what is she on about?!' lol. About to fix it!

Jon said...

Personally, after looking at your pics in the homeschooling section... I think you've got it all together.

I like the one with the smarties!

Great work!

Kez said...

Thanks for the lovely comment Jon!