Scissor Skills and Latin

E loves any excuse to use scissors. Here's a heart she cut out when she learnt the Latin word 'Amo':

 

We've taken a break from working through our 'learn Latin' book and are just picking up new words from songs like this for now. This one is still our favourite.

 

As I said, E loves to use scissors. She's still getting the hang of cutting well, so I bought her a book called "More Cutting Skills". The Mr photocopied all the pages for us. She has only done the first two exercises as yet, but is having great fun with it.

 

Vale, for now.

 

-Polly

Ukulele Song

E and her dad went shopping and came home with a ukulele. E then spent the evening strumming along to made-up songs, like this one:

 

"We went to the ukulele shop

To buy a pink ukulele

They didn't have a pink ukulele

They had a blue one

 

We bought a blue ukulele

I've got the ukulele blues

Not the ukulele pinks

The ukulele blues!"

 

-Polly

Making a Hat

The other day E wanted to make a crown. It had to be purple and it had to be sparkly.

 

I found some purple card and measured it to the size of E's head. The only sparkly things I found were one pipe-cleaner (which I bent into a bow shape) and a little loose tinsel. E got to work decorating her crown using markers and stickers, pasting on coloured paper shapes, and using coloured tape to attach the sparkly things. She sang the "Making a Hat" song from Play School as she worked. When it was done, I stapled it together for her. I think she was quite proud of her creation.

The next day the crown became a boat for E's Jemima doll, with a wooden spatula for the mast and an empty playing-card box for the sail.

-Polly

Back in the Garden

We finally got a cloudy day this week and decided to spend it out in the garden. Our garden had been a little neglected with all the hot weather, but mostly kept alive thanks to the reticulation. There were plenty of weeds to pull and veggie beds to prepare. It is officially Autumn after all. We still have a few veggies that we can use and we picked a zucchini and a bunch of beetroot. We still have chillies and parsley that we pick as we need them.

The flowers that we planted make the garden look nice and bright and they attract a lot of bugs.

E was singing one of her favourite songs this morning (The Itsy Bitsy Spider) and so we went outside again to look at some real spiders and their webs. There have been a couple of decent-sized spiders living in one of the veggie beds for some time now. I would have pulled all the celery already if it weren't for them. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of baby spiders now, too, but they are way too small to photograph with our current equipment.

Sorry for the weirdly focussed pictures. I'm still getting used to my new phone-camera, but it does take higher quality photos than my last one.

-Polly

Australian Animals

As part of our "Australia" theme over the last week, we did a lot of animal themed activities. Australia does have a lot of unique animals.

E has a block-puzzle that has pictures of different Australian animals and we had fun putting the pictures together. E also likes to stack the blocks and find all the pieces with animal heads on them.

We did some arts and crafts, including a dot painting of a gecko:

and a paper-plate kangaroo with a joey:

I found some animal songs on youtube. This exercise song would have been better if the video showed children doing the actions instead of just pictures of the animals. Don Spencer sings many classic Australian animal songs. I used to listen to the "Feathers, Fur or Fins" album when I was young. The only ones I could find online were this video which includes "Please Don't Call Me a Koala Bear" and the Play School version of "Feathers, Fur or Fins".

E had plenty of fun pretending to be different animals. Her favourites were a bouncing kangaroo and a squawking, flying cockatoo.

We read some animal books, too. After reading "Koala Lou" by Mem Fox, E pretended to be a koala using a mask from Wildlife Fun 4 Kids:

Echidnas were made using play-dough and pop-sticks:

I knew that bag of pop-sticks would come in handy one day. :)
-Polly