Counting on & Square numbers

Z has known how to count up to 100 for a while... I'm not sure where she learnt it - from her sisters probably! And has recently randomly started doing addition on her fingers, e.g. she'll come to me while I'm cooking and say "4 plus 3 is 7!" while holding up her fingers to show me... So I thought I should probably put some effort in too and help her addition skills improve. 😅

Firstly, she hadn't got the hang of counting on when doing addition - i.e. she would count the fingers on one hand from 1 before counting on the fingers from the other hand, rather than just start at 4 and count on from there. So I asked her "What's 7 plus 7?" Of course, she couldn't do it on her fingers because she didn't have 7 fingers on each hand!

So we took out the multilink cubes and she chose two colours - red and black - to represent each number in my questions. She counted out 7 red cubes and 7 black cubes, then (starting from 1 again!) counted them all to 14. I covered the red pile with my hand and told her we know this pile is 7, so we don't need to count it again! And modelled counting on with the black blocks to get to 14.

We did another couple of questions like this with the blocks (e.g. 8 + 4, 6 + 9, so answers between 11-20) and I would cover the larger number with my hand after she'd counted out the blocks so she could count on with the smaller number. Then I would uncover the pile and she could count them all to check her answer was correct.

Then I asked her if she needed to count out the blocks for the bigger number at all, because I was covering the pile anyway! And she said no, but where should she put the number then? I lightly squeezed the top of her head with my hand and said to put the number in there (I found when teaching the twins when they were younger that this physical action helped them!).

I asked her what 8 + 5 was. Which was the bigger number? 8. So where does it go? In your head (*squeeze for emphasis)... Without prompting she then counted out 5 blocks. I touched her head to remind her 8 was in there then she used the blocks to help count on to 13. 😄

Final stage: I asked her if she could do bigger numbers like 15 + 4 then? And could she use her fingers to help in case she didn't have any blocks? She touched her own head (15 in here...) and counted on to 19 using 4 fingers. Last question, 22 + 8? Same method, she worked out it was 30! MashaAllah. 💪 When Papa came home later she was happy to show him she could now do maths with bigger numbers! And I was happy to see she'd retained what I'd taught her earlier. 😂💕

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While I had the blocks out, I decided to use them afterwards for the twins as an introduction to square numbers.

They have a multiplication grid poster in their bedroom and F had asked that morning why the numbers in a diagonal line were coloured differently to the rest. M straightaway answered because they were in a pattern of 1 x 1, 2 x 2, 3 x 3... So we went downstairs and I wrote these out to 5 x 5 on the whiteboard, with the answers, and an array of dots for each one to explain why they were called square numbers.

Fast forward to these blocks again - so several hours later - I asked the twins to use them to make as many square numbers as they could while I put A down for her nap.

MashaAllah they made these (and were also able to tell me they had used 91 blocks because there were 9 left over!) so I thought I'd quickly recap area while here...

E.g. how many cubes are in the square for 6 x 6? 36. So if I had a field and one side of the field was 6m, what would the area of the field be? They quickly answered 36 (and I filled in the m² units for them - I'm not interested in units at the moment so didn't want to dwell on them at this point). I asked similar questions for other square numbers in the context of word problems such as areas of walls, books, rooms, boxes, etc. Then to be sneaky I threw in a question on perimeter. They both fell for it. 😂 But when I repeated the question emphasising the word perimeter they laughed at themselves and were able to give the correct answer. MashaAllah. 😁😁

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While we're on the subject of maths, I'm going to put this here as a nice reminder of how the twins have different personalities and ways of thinking... Some of their answers to a worksheet they did the next day...

F, trying her hardest, but sometimes not seeing the wood for the trees:

M, being calm, laid-back and not making life difficult for herself:

😂👍

Simple Arabic Verb Flashcards

I made these simple flashcards of standard three letter verbs which follow the above pattern, to help the girls with their verb practise in past/present tense and so with their sentence building.

I've not included the dual forms as I just wanted to focus on these for now. I might add them in later inshaAllah when we get to that stage! The plural forms are in the file but we're not learning them atm either.

I printed and cut out the cards then laminated them and cut out again... I find this helps them last longer rather than laminate without cutting individually first as this way ensures you get a laminated border around all the edges.

You can download the file for printing here.

Famous Five storywriting

Thu 7th Nov 2019

After the diary entries we did together, F was feeling inspired and wrote her own mini Famous Five adventure in one of her notebooks. 😍

So I decided to take advantage of this as a learning opportunity. 😂

While the other three were busy playing, I spoke to M by herself to see if she wanted to write a Famous Five story too... We talked about a possible plot: Where could they be? What could the problem be? How do they solve it? Then I gave her some time to write her own story as F started typing hers up on the laptop (the opportunity to type on the laptop if she wrote a story was a good incentive for M!) - Alhamdulillah once she started she got really into it. At this moment, they've both handwritten around 3 A5 sides in the past two days (F's written 6 including her original adventure! She's now doing chapter 2. 😁

The plan is for them to practise typing in MS Word and then practise editing their work. I'll use this opportunity to cover paragraphs, connectives and expanded noun phrases - the only targets they have left from the Year 2 Literacy NC - by going through each concept in turn and giving them the chance to see where they can include each thing in their stories, insha'Allah.

Fri 15th Nov 2019

MashaAllah, their typing has really improved over the last week, both in speed and accuracy. They're only allowed on the laptop in half an hour chunks and maximum of twice a day, so I think keeping the time limited helps to retain the novelty factor and so their motivation.

They're both really into their stories now too, getting their notebooks out and writing in them every chance they get! I'm not at all fussed about story structure at this stage, so the pacing and content isn't entirely there - I'm just happy to see them both loving to write and being able to write continuously for extended periods of time! Their writing style has definitely been influenced (in a good way!) by Enid Blyton's and their sentence structures, punctuation and spelling have naturally improved the more they write, as they reread their work or ask me how to spell something after they've tried and it's not come out looking right.

This week I wanted to recap editing skills and focus on paragraphs. Both girls had typed up a good chunk on the laptop, so I increased the font size and line spacing then printed out what they'd done so far.

First, I asked them to choose a highlighter and to read through their work highlighting any errors (spelling, grammar, punctuation) they may have made.

Next, I talked to them about adding more detail to make their descriptions more interesting. How? Adjectives and adverbs! I had them highlight all the interesting descriptive words they'd used in a different colour. M discovered she hadn't many at all and F thought she should have used more too, so individually I talked to them about where they might add more description in a way that adds to the story (trying not to fall into the trap of writing to tick off boxes, which can lead to awkward sounding phrases which although grammatically correct spoil the story's flow!) and we jotted down words they could insert next to highlighted nouns of their choice.

Finally, we talked about paragraphs again. We reread half a page from the current Famous Five book we're on and discussed where the new paragraphs began - when the topic changed or when someone different started speaking. With a different coloured highlighter, I helped them mark onto their paper where they thought they should start a new line in their writing.

To finish, they took it in turns to edit the highlighted parts onto the laptop. With the rest of their half an hour time slot they were able to continue copy typing the rest of their story - but now they were expected to edit as they typed rather than just copy the mistakes! Most importantly, I wanted them to focus on paragraphs, which is what I would be checking for when I saved their work. MashaAllah they quickly picked up this skill and all their typing since has had new lines in the correct places.

Wed 20th Nov 2019

This week I wanted to focus on expanded noun phrases. Their paragraphs are fine when copy typing - they remember to add them in with no prompting from myself - but when writing in their notebooks they become so absorbed in their ideas that they forget to put them in! At the very least, I've told them I expect to see a new line everytime someone new speaks... So we'll see how that goes InshaAllah!

On the whiteboard I wrote the simple sentence "The sun shone." and had the girls label the noun and verb. I explained to them what a phrase was, highlighting it in a different colour, and what the word expanded means, i.e. to get bigger. So an expanded noun phrase is making the noun phrase bigger. How? By adding more detail? How? By using adjectives!

I had them come up with some suitable adjectives for our simple sentence :

The shining sun shone.
The bright sun shone.
The burning sun shone.

We talked about the effect changing the adjective had on us as the reader and why the first example wasn't very good, even though it made sense. It didn't add anything to the description! So they needed to think about what their adjective adds in helping the reader imagine what you want them to imagine...

The girls then continued to take turns typing their stories (and writing their stories!) and I told them I would be checking to see which interesting adjectives (or maybe adverbs) they would be using to help improve their stories.

Tue 3rd Dec

They've been writing their stories for almost a month now and not showing any signs of stopping! MashaAllah!

The plots are long and convoluted, making sense but not refined, with a lot of random subplots and unresolved ideas throughout... But the point is both stories flow, have been a great vehicle for teaching grammar and sentence level work, and the girls are enjoying themselves doing it!

Yesterday we spent the whole day outside - football in the morning then Thinktank with friends in the afternoon - the latter being a little spur of the moment compared to what I originally had planned to do... So I commented that the girls had spent that day not really doing any "work". But actually, they'd spent the time I was getting dinner ready writing their stories in their notebooks, so I corrected myself to say they'd spent a day playing and the only work they'd done was Literacy - to which M said, no, they hadn't done any work because writing their stories was still playing to them! Well, they do it whenever they feel like it without any prompting from myself so I suppose she's right. 😂

As a result of their story writing, the twins can now write in paragraphs confidently and are familiar with the different grammar patterns of direct speech (at the start of a sentence, end of a sentence, new line new speaker), understand the editing process and are aware of the need to include interesting descriptions to make their writing more compelling.

I think I might look at clauses and subclauses next with them, InshaAllah, as they've used some in their writing naturally so there's no harm in labelling what they are? 🙃

Maps and Scales

Following on from our seerah work on the Isra' and Mi'raaj, I thought now would be a nice time to look at the big atlas (they've only used their junior atlas so far) and introduce them to the concept of scales.

First, we revised which units are used for measuring length/distance and compared them to each other i.e. how many mm in a cm, cm in a m, m in a km. So which unit would be the most sensible for measuring the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem? They chose km. 😁

Then I showed them the atlas and told them we could use it to calculate the actual distance between those two places. Nowadays, we can easily use the internet to find out the answer - but before that technology existed, this is what we would have done instead!

They used the contents page to help them find the right page in the atlas (they knew they needed to look in either Asia or Africa) and then found Makkah and Jerusalem on the map. I asked them to measure the distance - what would they need? A ruler. At first they tried to do it in cm and said "around 6cm", so I told them to use mm - which is another new skill for them today! M said 62mm and F 64mm, so I said we'd go in between and say it's 63mm.

So is the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem 63mm?? M laughed and said her hand was bigger than that! So I pointed out the scale at the bottom of the page and explained this to them: the map was drawn to scale so that every 1cm actually meant 200km in real life!

The next bit of maths I did on the whiteboard and had them help with the arithmetic, but I didn't expect them to follow along with the method... So we calculated that if 1cm = 200km then 1mm = 20km. 1mm x 20 = 20km, so 63mm x 20 = 1260km. So the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem must be around 1260km.

Was it? We typed it into Google to check and found the answer given to be 1486km! Which is pretty close! We'd recently done work on rounding, so I had them round the two answers to the nearest 100km, i.e. 1300km and 1500km, and they agreed these were pretty similar.

Next, I asked them to find the page of the UK so we could calculate some distances between e.g. Birmingham and Ipswich.

M found the page quickly and they enjoyed looking at the map for a few minutes, pointing out familiar places: Birmingham, Ipswich, Felixstowe, Woodbridge, Leicester, Nottingham (where Papa's at work today!), London...

Then they repeated what they did before, in turn, and measured the distance between Birmingham and Ipswich to be 106mm. They both agreed at the same distance this time.

I asked them if Birmingham and Ipswich were further away from each other than Makkah and Jerusalem then, because 106mm was more than 63mm? They both laughed and said no, of course not. 😂 I prompted them by asking if the scale of the maps on both pages was the same or different then and they correctly answered it must be different. 👍

We did some more calculations on the whiteboard (again, not expecting them to follow the method!) and worked out that Ipswich is 265km away from Birmingham. Google came up with 264.2km, which they were very pleased with! 😁😁

Finally, we compared the two distances with each other by rounding... So Makkah to Jerusalem was around 1500km and Birmingham to Ipswich was around 300km... So how many times more is the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem, i.e. how far Prophet Muhammad (SAW) travelled in one night compared to when we go to visit Nani's house? With a bit of prompting (mainly me scaling the numbers down by dividing by 100!) they were happy it was 5 times more.

So if it takes us around 3 hours to get to Nani's house by car, how long would it take us by car to get to Jerusalem from Makkah? F quite quickly understood we needed to multiply 3 hours by 5, so 15 hours. This gave them some kind of tangible idea of how far the Prophet (SAW) travelled and why the disbelievers found it so hard to believe him!

How long did they say it should take? 1 month, i.e. around 30 days by camel. So if we were to travel the distance to Ipswich by camel, as they would have done in those days, how long would it take us? This was a little more difficult but they worked out they would need to divide 30 by 5, since the difference in the journey length was 5 times, i.e. 6 days. Can you imagine taking 6 days to get to Nani's house! But nowadays we can just get in the car and drive in only 2.5-3hrs! 😱

We finished there, but I noticed the two of them poring over the atlas together while I was getting lunch ready, MashaAllah. 😆💕

Light & Dark - Refraction

We read the pages about bending light in the Light and Dark book from the KS1 Science series we have. We did the suggested experiments ("floating" coin and putting a spoon in a glass of water) and talked about how the light was being bent so we didn't see the things as they actually were. When I put the spoon handle in the glass, F noticed that it looked bigger than it was - so we talked about how bending the light in a certain way can make things look bigger than they are.

Vocab revision: F remembered that the word for see-through is transparent and M remembered the word for making bigger is magnify. 👍

I wrote refraction in the centre of the whiteboard and asked the girls what it meant: the left two notes were their answers. Then I asked what the effect of it was/what refraction made us see: the bottom two notes.

I asked them if they could think of any uses of refraction then... Using the knowledge on the board so far, why is refraction useful? Can you think of any objects which use refraction, which make things look bigger or smaller than they are? I wrote their examples around the whiteboard as they said them.

We then read about things looking bigger or smaller in the Sight book from the same KS1 Science series, as well as the pages about glasses.

I had the twins look carefully at the lens of their glasses and to feel both those and the lens of the magnifying glass - could they feel they were curved? Compared to the glass in the window, what was the difference? Does a window refract light? Why? Then I added the pink label at the bottom of the whiteboard.

By this time it was time for A's nap, so I gave their task to the twins - to simply explain the difference between reflection and refraction on a piece of paper. Half the paper for each word, write its meaning and draw examples of objects which reflect or refract light.

I wanted them to do this task as I know the two words are similar and easily confused! And this would also consolidate all we had just discussed on refraction by them drawing example objects.

For the reflection side they just drew pictures of anything, since they understand bouncing light as the reason we can see everything. They also drew pictures of mirrors and we talked a little about how we use the word "reflection" in everyday language just to mean when we can see the same image in a surface (such as a mirror, a puddle, or any other shiny surface), but in scientific terms the word is to do with bouncing light. I told them briefly about why we can see our reflections - the shiny surface is smooth and reflects the light back nicely, whereas for everything else the surface is a little bumpy so the light bounces back everywhere - but I could tell this might become confusing and so we didn't pursue it any further!

For the refraction side, they couldn't think of anything which is designed to make objects look smaller... And neither could I! But we have some toy telescopes and binoculars and they noticed that looking through these things the wrong way did the opposite, i.e. made objects look smaller. Why? They came up with because then the lens was curved in the opposite direction! We didn't go into the detail of concave/convex/double lenses. 😁

Finally, they wrote a sentence at the bottom of each side to summarise what they had drawn. We spoke about it first and they both ended up writing the same sentences, although independently. 😂👍

Seerah timeline (6-8)

Continued from this post...

Open Preaching

Coincidentally, the week we covered this part of the seerah, the Big Life Journal email that week (I recommend signing up to the free emails if you haven't already!) happened to be linked with a similar lesson to do with overcoming challenges: "Trees stand strong despite high winds because their roots are deep. Similarly, we can stand strong despite the challenges in our lives because we have deep roots which support us: loving people, thoughts, beliefs, values, and so on."

So as part of our reflection on this part of the Prophet (SAW)'s life, we completed the week's Big Life Journal activity together and stuck the finished poster in their bedroom, while reminding ourselves of the Muslims at the time going through their challenges (i.e. ridicule, torture, the boycott, etc.) but never giving up their faith.

We coloured a quarter of the poster each, since it printed on to 4 A4 sheets it was simplest to divide up the work this way (myself, the twins and Z) - and this also represented teamwork and the fact we all share the same roots with each other. I took this opportunity to teach the girls about blending and hues by having us all use colouring pencils. I demonstrated applying different pressure using the same pencil and the effect it had on the colour, as well as colouring lightly with two colours on top of each other so the change between two colours isn't so apparent.

Year of Sadness

We talked about why this time of the Prophet (SAW)'s life is known is the Year of Sadness/Sorrow, how he must have been feeling and why he was able to continue his mission despite that.

Continuing the theme of being strong like a tree, we compared this sadness to a huge challenge and Allah's love and Muhammad (SAW)'s strong faith as being his roots.

I Googled some random photos of landscapes to show the children, first "summer day landscape" then "icy landscape" and asked them how the pictures made them feel - what mood did they give and did they make you feel warm or cold? Then we Googled "flower field landscape" and talked about why these photos made us feel warm and happy - what did they have in common? Bright colours... What kinds of colours? Reds, oranges, yellows and they also said bright blues and greens. I Googled "cold colours landscapes" to show the girls and we talked about why these photos made us feel cold... They were mostly blue, purple and grey colours and they were dull not bright. Finally I googled "warm vs cold colours" to show them a diagram to illustrate that, yes, they were right and the red-orange-yellow side of the colour wheel is associated with warmth whereas the green-blue-purple side is cold.

Bringing them back to the main topic, I asked them if we were to paint something to represent this time of the Prophet (SAW)'s life, which kinds of colours would give the right mood? They answered the cold colours.

As we were talking, I was still scrolling through the example pictures on Google and we came across this one:

I really liked how it showed the contrast between the warm/cold colours in one picture. That's when I had the idea to create a similar painting rather than just doing one to convey a sad mood, and to link it to the growth mindset idea of being strong like a tree.

On a piece of A4 card, I demonstrated with Z how to draw round their hand as if it were the roots of a tree, their arm the trunk, and to flip the paper round to draw in the outline of the leaves at the top. This tree represented them and they were going to colour it in with all warm colours to show their strength, whereas outside the tree they were only going to use cold colours to represent the challenges they might come across - just as the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) still had Islam keeping him strong and warm inside despite everything going on outside him (e.g. Abu Talib and Khadijah passing away, being treated even worse by the non-Muslims, being stoned at Taif) which actually wanted to make him feel very sad and cold.

Because A needed her nap just then and I couldn't leave them unsupervised with the paints, the twins and Z agreed to use wax crayons to colour their tree and save the watercolors for the background. I said this was a good idea because the wax crayons would stand out more against the paint. They chose what they thought were the warm coloured crayons from the box, including some pinks and purpley-reds. I didn't correct them as I wanted them to experiment with the colours and see if they gave the desired effect... Once they were done colouring the tree it really did give a warm feeling overall, but once they painted in their backgrounds suddenly the purpley-reds stood out as being cold! We talked about why (the background colours made the purpley-reds look more purple) and they decided to go over these parts of their trees with orange and yellow paint, which helped make their tree feel warm again overall. A mistake which turned into a learning experience, and another thing to illustrate the importance of mistakes in helping us grow!

Isra' & Mi'raaj

I thought there wasn't a much detail in the 365 Days book as I would have liked, so I looked through the other books we had and was pleased to see this part of the seerah covered a little more in book 3 of the Safar series. So I read both the chapter from this book as well as the relevant pages in the 365 Days book for the girls to then write their fact summaries.

Bringing in our work on shiny surfaces and light reflecting, I thought it would be nice to do a collage of the golden dome at al-Aqsa. I read the chapter from Goodnight Stories with the Prophet Muhammad as a recap (we did this the following day) and the girls talked about which materials would be good to create the shiny golden effect of the dome.

We've not done any proper collaging before, so this was a good opportunity to cover another new thing from the art curriculum I shared in a previous post!

I left this page from the book open as inspiration:

We also looked at some photos of Al-Aqsa from Google and talked about how to draw it simply - they came up with a long rectangle with a semi-circle on top; the bottom half of the rectangle was grey/brown colours, the top half was blue/greys, then there was a thin stripe of greeny colours and finally the golden dome.

They decided to use black card for their picture and I demonstrated how to fill the paper with a simple outline on Z's card. Then we talked about how to achieve a starry sky effect and I told them about splatter painting.

First, they tried dipping their paintbrushes in white paint and flicking their wrist to get the paint to splat onto the background... It was a little difficult to get a strong enough flick and to not accidentally touch the paintbrush to the card! Then they tried running their finger through the bristles and found this a lot easier to flick paint onto their picture - but the stars effect was smaller. They also used a small paintbrush to dot stars on too (Z only wanted to dot with the paintbrush!).

While the paint dried, we looked through our scrap paper and old supermarket magazines (free from the till!) to choose materials which matched the colours they wanted. I demonstrated how to rip the pieces into smaller ones (telling them they could cut with scissors if preferred) and laid them out over one of their pictures. We talked about which looked more effective: lots of different smaller different pieces or just one big piece cut to size... They preferred the first option!

After around 1 hour of independent work, the three ended up with these:

(F, M, Z)

Light & Dark - The Sun / Bouncing Light

Working through the suggested targets from the National Curriculum, we discussed the importance of not looking directly into bright lights and why (we took turns to look into each other's eyes while looking in and away from a light to see how the pupil grows and shrinks accordingly) and in particular the sun, then I asked the girls to draw a simple poster to summarise this information.

This is their first time making a poster (they didn't even know what one was!) so we first skimmed through some of their non-fiction books to talk about which layout features made the text inviting and easy to read, so which features did they want to copy for their poster... We came up with the use of pictures, bright colours, boxes and borders and simple sentences. I showed them a piece of A4 paper and asked them which was more effective - to squeeze everything into one corner or to spread it out over the whole page by writing and drawing larger than usual... They answered with the second option! Then I left them to it as A needed a nap.

Tbh I wasn't expecting masterpieces from them since they were doing it for the first time and unsupervised, so I was pleasantly surprised with the results!

The next week we focused on the fact light bounces off everything (revision: which is how we see things) but shiny surfaces seem to reflect more (not getting into the full details at this stage!). We talked about which kinds of materials tend to be shiny (glass or metal, sometimes plastic... Water! e.g. puddles, the sea) and focused in particular on mirrors. How do they work? We can see our reflections because the light bounces off the mirror's shiny surface.

In the 6th Famous Five book, Five on Kirrin Island Again, Julian advises his uncle to use the sun's light and a mirror to signal from far away (we learnt a new word here: heliographing!) so I thought it would be fun for the girls to try and do some heliographing of their own.

We were fortunate with the weather this week in November and headed to the Botanical Gardens where I knew they would have a safe, wide open space in which to have a go! I gave them a mirror each, and a walkie talkie so we wouldn't have to keep shouting to each other, and spread out over the main lawn with one twin at the top of the hill, one at the bottom near the bandstand, and myself, Z and A wandering around in between. It was a little tricky for them to catch the sun's light in a way for their sister to be able to see it, but a great practical experiment into understanding how light travels in straight lines and a subtle introduction to the idea of angles of incidence/reflection. 😁

After a good play around with mirror signals, the girls did some backwards walking through the gardens using the mirrors to see where they were going! And, of course, we ended our day with a trip to the playground. 😀