This afternoon I played some phonics games with the boys. I got the idea (and gameboard) for the first game here. We used a dice with 1-2-3-1-2-3 rather than the cards, and we adapted the rules slightly to even things up: Gareth needed only to say the sound the letter(s) made, whereas Daegan and I [...]
After spending a couple hours in the hot sunshine at the bug class, we slowly headed back to the car. En route, I saw some interesting birds, like this spotted sandpiper: When we got back to the hotel, we went for a swim. This was our first time staying at this hotel in Edmonton (the [...]
The boys play several computer games, some more explicitly “educational” than others. As Daegan’s computer skills have steadily increased, he is now able to find and play his own games. It’s amazing how quickly this generation learns how to google! Here’s some of their favourite dinosaur-related games: Online Games (mainly found by Daegan): BBC’s Skeleton [...]
Yesterday the boys and I left the workbooks, and did some activities around negative numbers as Daegan has been asking to learn about them. I adapted ideas I found on two very helpful blogs, here and here. I began by writing a problem of the day on our board, leaving Daegan to mull it over: [...]
Just a quick post tonight as tomorrow is a very full day. Gareth starts a new ocean-themed playschool class, Daegan has an orthodontist appointment, and then we’ve got our year end meeting with our homeschool facilitator. But I wanted to share something the boys and I have been having fun with lately. A few weeks [...]
I saw this fun grammar idea here a few weeks back, and we finally got around to trying it out. First, Daegan created 6 sentences which I wrote out on construction paper. I wrote the subject part of the sentences on pink paper, and the predicates on yellow. Here’s our sentences: We talked briefly about [...]
I got the kernel of this idea from this blog, and after playing around with it a bit myself realized it connected very well with the bar graph activity Jim and Daegan did with dice last month. I began by laying out the domino parking spots, using some cards from a number / number word [...]
After playing the popsicle stick creativity game, I recalled a game I had seen on Alicia’s amazing blog about using coloured-on-one-side beans to practice math facts. I used a marker to colour one side of some popsicle sticks—5 sticks (red) for Gareth, and 10 sticks (blue) for Daegan. I then demonstrated dropping the sticks and [...]
Do you remember playing with magic squares as a kid? I loved them, and I thought Daegan might too—and that they’d be another way to practice his addition facts. The classic magic square is a 3-by-3 grid that uses each integer from 1 to 9 only once, and where the sum of each row, column, [...]
We played a couple games with popsicle (craft) sticks last night. I got the first game idea from a blog post about making shapes (triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) using sticks, but added a little twist of my own to make the game broader. I began giving each boy 1 stick. “What can you make?” [...]