I hate practicing Spelling and Handwriting!

We were asked this week to practice both these things. Mr I hates both of them so we tried a few of these...

Handwriting

Spelling

Lego Maths

Mr I's teachers have sent detail and easy to follow planners throughout the first week of remote learning. We haven't got through everything but to keep him engaged I have adapted some of his lessons. I found this excellent website of ideas for using Lego to teach Mathematics. They have some good ideas for our kinder children too.

Make the first half of a pattern and have your child complete it. Maths is full of patterns. 

Speaking of patterns. Write skip counting patterns on Lego blocks and have children break them apart and put them back together in the correct order.

The same activity can be done with the numbers 1 to 20 for younger children.

Any activity the requires a number line such as working out addition and subtraction equations can be done on this number line.

Lastly, place value is a really tricky concept. We used Lego. When you get to 10 blocks, you join them and move the tower to the tens column. Then record the number of 10s and 1s.

More activities can be found at

Lego Maths

 Catering For The Little One

Someone pointed out to me that you need heaps of activities with little ones as each activity only lasts 5 minutes max! Which is a shame when they take 10 minutes to set up and 30 minutes to clean up!

I attached paper clips to picture cards for Miss A to fish for and match with the letter of the alphabet that the picture starts with. My little man enjoyed fishing for the cards too. They actually worked very well for vocabulary development. 

We stuck stickers on paper and stamped paint with potato stamps. The stickers were great for mine motor development as pealing the backing of the sticker took a while. It was a great activity as it wasn't messy at all.

Unlike the potato stamping! Messy but fun!

Family Time!

Well! We normally talk about our day at dinner but at the moment we all know each other did and our days aren't that exciting! So I thought i would make and try some Conversation Cards at dinner tomorrow. Please change, add to or just print and use. Happy chatting! We are going to try and take turns to speak and also not interrupt each other. These are skills that would normally be practiced at school, kinder and playgroup!

Conversation Cards

Alphabet Antics

Miss A still thinks LMNO is one letter so we are working on the names of letters and alphabetical order. She matched the letters I wrote on the pegs with the letters on the back of the cards. Then we worked on putting the letters in order!

Writing And Maths

I know it is the holidays but if we don't do a little learning now it will be really hard for Mr I to go from doing nothing academic to sitting down and learning with me for some of the day. I'm not anxious about the teaching element of home learning but I am anxious about having time to spend with both the older ones as well as working, maintaining some kind of routine for Mr L and running the house. Anyway I know I'm not unique and will get through it just like everyone else! 

We did dome writing today. Miss A can write her name in capitals but isn't great with lower case. Her task was to glue objects onto her name and start to learn the shape of the lower case letters in her name. 

Mr I and I attempted a very simple narrative. Oh gee! I don't think coffee will be enough today! I knew it would be hard so we made a dinosaur world and acted out a story so when it came to writing the story the ideas were already there.

We also worked on reading, writing, making and for Mr I subtracting numbers.

Miss A rolled the virtual dice, represented the number with Lego and then wrote the number. While Mr I roiled 2 dice, built a Lego tower of the larger number and subtracted the smaller number. He recorded the equation,  

Just Because!

I have had these glasses of coloured water set up for a few days now and Miss A keeps going back to them and asking for Google to play different songs to accompany her. Apologies to all the musicians listening. I think singing and acting lessons are required.