Saturday 31 July 2010

Our next lapbook

On finishing our World Cup lapbook I started wondering what to do next with Iona. To begin with, I thought of Bastille Day coming up and planned to do a bit about France. However, nearly everything I found would have been a bit above her level. Then I found 15th July was St. Swithin's Day, so thought of a unit on weather. This was a bit more promising, and I started working on teaching her different types of weather. However, we still weren't inspired. A few days later, though, Iona seemed suddenly very interested in owls, so I asked her if she wanted to do a project on them. She agreed, so I checked up online, and there was much more on owl lapbooks than on either France or weather.

The first thing we did was make a collage out of dried peas, lentils, etc. This tied in with a craft activity at our local children's centre - they were doing the collage on plain paper, so I drew an owl on it and encouraged Iona to fill that in with the pea and lentil mix:

Another thing we did was to make 3 little pine cone owls, using the method we found here: http://thecraftyclassroom.com/CraftBirdOwlPinecone.html. This was very successful, although Iona still enjoys trying to tear them apart!
We made 3 in a nest to tie in with the book "Owl Babies", by Martin Waddell. We've read it before, a year or more ago, and I thought it would be ideal for this unit. We got hold of a copy, as well as a book about nocturnal animals (a hedgehog visited our garden for a couple of nights last week, so we could tie that in). I was quite impressed, on reading "Owl Babies", that Iona knew what an owl's house was called, and she had some idea, when we made the pine cone owls, what the nest was made from. She has also been saying, over the last few days, that owls and hedgehogs come out at night, so she's certainly learning something.

Today we tried playing the Counting Owls game that I found at Homeschool Share: http://www.homeschoolshare.com/owl_babies.php. I thought that, at 27 months, Iona might be a bit young for it, still, but that it was worth a try. However, it went really well. Iona didn't really have the idea of playing a board game, but accepted, without too much complaint, that we had to take turns and that she couldn't have all the owl counters but only as many as were shown on the die. It's a great way of reinforcing the idea of 1:1 correspondence when counting, and with only 9 squares to fill with a die labelled 1-3 (twice) it lasted just long enough to maintain her interest. I look forward to playing it again, if I'm able to round up all the miniature owls (Iona's been enjoying giving them swings on her rocking horse's stirrups!).

Saturday 17 July 2010

World Cup lapbook

At last, we've finished our World Cup lapbook. I'm not at all interested in football, like the rest of my family, but my husband enjoys it, and it seems that Iona is taking after him. She's always been interested when football comes on the TV, so I decided that a project on it was a good way to introduce her to the idea of other countries. Firstly I got her a World Cup sticker album, and she's really enjoyed helping to put stickers in it, although not as much, unfortunately, as pulling them back out. By now, though, she's much more interested in what the photos represent, and which ones she's got and hasn't got. She's also fascinated with the flags of the countries, often asking for her "football book" and asking whose all the flags on the front are. She particularly likes the England flag, and the way she's been seeing it around the streets and in our neighbour's garden.
Next we made a big map to show where all the countries playing in the World Cup are. I printed off a map from a website (which I've forgotten and can't now find) and when each team played their first game (in theory; in practice it was often later!) I showed Iona where their country was on the map and labelled it:
Unfortunately, she's a bit too keen to add some lines herself, as can be seen, so it can't be kept anywhere she can get hold of it (also because of a regrettable tendency to tear things into shreds if she has them in her room at night).

For the bulk of the lapbook we made minibooks which we found at Teacher's Planet: http://www.worksheets4teachers.com/world_cup_worksheets.php. Iona began to lose interest in them after a while, so Mummy coloured the last few.

We also used Teacher Planet to make a cardboard footballer: http://www.teacherplanet.com/links/redirect.php?url=http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/themes/worldcup/. Iona enjoyed playing with that, so I don't have a copy of it. I printed the design on card, Iona coloured it, then I cut it out and secured it with split pins.

On the back of the lapbook we put a sort of strip book, but instead of being fastened along one side it is only fastened at the corner by a split pin. It introduces Iona to football vocabulary, as well as reading: http://www.teacherplanet.com/links/redirect.php?url=http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/themes/worldcup/.
We also found via Teacher Planet a Spanish worksheet for counting footballing objects, and finished it off with a couple of photos of Iona's mock vuvuzela and England hat, with a note about the vuvuzela (which will hopefully be forgotten after this World Cup!).