Our creative butterfly

A great way to engage a child is to ask them what do they want to learn about and basically make the leaning day up around their answer, incorporating the theme in amongst the transferable skills. 

Sophia loved this idea and three days flew by with her choosing her theme in the morning and us working throughout the day on her chosen topic. 

Sophia was so immersed in the learning environment she actually didn't realise she was learning. After a few intense learning days she asked me when she was going to stop playing around and get back to school lessons. She was astonished to recap and realise she has been practicing all her skills every single day whilst having a massive amount of fun. 

Kira joined in sporadically with a few of the activities however it became obvious that our empirical little girl did not gain as much educational information in this format as her more creative sister. This is fair enough. 

During these few days I did extra work with Kira one in one, going through her current workbooks and quizzing her on her subjects, in the similar style of question and answers which she prefers. She is our natural academic daughter, blessed with hyperlexia and an amazing memory for facts, where Sophia is harder to keep attentive and focused and she is our creative butterfly. 

One day Sophia chose the butterfly theme ed book from their farm collection and the lesson plan took flight.

They both took turns reading through the book, sequencing the butterfly cycle together, writing about what they had learnt. 

They also had to create their own butterfly, complete unique design and name them. Sophia created a terrifying new species called the butterfly bat whilst Kira created a Kira butterfly, complete with the letters of he rname etched onto the wings. She also placed her butterfly within a scene. 

They watched visits around butterfly sanctuaries on YouTube, and then Sophia wished to segway into frog cycles and she did a further hour looking into this in detail on YouTube, via Dr Bionics, whilst I worked with Kira on her workbooks. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning From Your Environment

Image
There is so much potential for learning on car journeys. This time Sophia's attention was caught by seeing electricity pylons and wind turbines and she was avidly asking questions about these. I briefly introduced them to her and offered to set up some follow up science educational YouTube videos at a later date. Good old 'Dr Binocs' came through and the children have been eagerly learning about fossil fuels, renewable energy and electricity. Sophia has started writing down her thoughts and knowledge on electricity in her new science book. It is a great sidestep from their current topic of light, which is being learnt enthusiastically. They have loved their light experiments, as simple as they were, including going into a dark room and shining a torch, seeing how a pencil seems to change when placed in a glass of water, just with a light shining on it. Observing what materials allow light to pass through and which cast shadows, and performing shadow puppet plays on the wall...
Read more

Role playing Is A Serious Business!

Image
The morning period is personally the best time of day for lessons for my girls. They are alert, focused and raring to start lessons, consequently breakfast lessons are an established learning time. I have a captive audience, they are in the kitchen with me anyway learning how to prepare the food, tidy down and set the table. This session can be the best for attention span and concentration out of the entire day, so I have learnt to capitalise on this precious half hour.  This morning we learnt twenty spellings from two word families. They are storming through their word lists, quickly approaching the 200 mark in only a couple of months. I cannot recommend this learning style enough, the girls are retaining their spelling knowledge and are actively using the words in their artwork in their free time. Today they also requested spelling tests to be their handwriting practice, and did further spelling practice on top for another half an hour through choice.  The rest of breakfast ...
Read more

Always be thankful

Image
 It was December 2021 when Miss Jo, The Children's Coach contacted me and offered the girls free places in her January zoom class. This was the tutor who had organised and ran the summer fun project which the girls had been nominated and awarded for bravery. The girls absolutely loved her as a teacher and had immediately bonded with her. They wrote her letters and talked about her every day during this project.  I took her up on this very kind and generous offer and the girls had a regular half an hour zoom class every Thursday on the theme of gratitude. The girls were the youngest ones in the class and they handled it really well.  Sophia wrote the classes on the calender, scheduling in the lessons, for the month. Kira took a postcard written to her by Miss Jo, which she had received the previous year, to bed with her every night until the classes took place. She read it to me as her bedtime story.  The first thing Kira said to Miss Jo on class, was to thank her for...
Read more