Friday, 20 December 2019

Seerah Timeline (9-12)

Continued from this post...


This is a bit of a dull post as we didn't do much in terms of extra activities for these final sections of the seerah - just the usual read from the book and summarise on Post-It notes via questions on the whiteboard.

Just posting for completion's sake!

Alhamdulillah the girls really enjoyed the past few months and learning more about the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). I'm pleased, as I think they now have a good foundation to build upon InshaAllah - and I learnt lots during this time too!

I plan to take a short break from the seerah over the next term so we can refocus on Allah's names InshaAllah, then we can come back to their timeline as an art project - revising what they wrote and thinking of a suitable illustration for each section. 🌟

Thursday, 12 December 2019

Light & Dark - Drawing Shadows

Target: Look for and measure shadows, find out how they are formed and what might cause the shadow to change.

We went on a shadow hunt around the house to see where there were shadows and why - what was blocking the light? Where was the light source?

On a piece of A4 white paper, I placed a toy animal on it and we used a lamp to create its shadow. I drew around the shadow (narrating what I was doing, including how difficult it was to not knock over the toy, or to see exactly where the shadow was when my hand's shadow got in the way, and look, I made a mistake here but never mind! - F, in particular, is still working on her growth mindset when it comes to difficult things and getting things wrong...) and coloured it in lightly with a coloured pencil. Then I repeated this process with different figurines and colours, overlaying shadows on purpose, to create this abstract artwork - revising earlier work on colours and blending.


They experimented with where they wanted to place the toy in relation to the light and saw how the shadow changed size or stretched. To make things fair, they kept switching seats so they could take turns being nearer or further away from the light source.





I wasn't expecting Z to write the title on hers, but she did while I wasn't looking and was very pleased with herself!

When they were done, they used their drawings to play a quick game of "guess the animal" with each other. 😄

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We discussed how to make a simple sun dial, recapping their knowledge on space and how the Earth rotates to create day and night. The book on Light and Dark in the KS1 Science series we have has a few pages on the subject which we read through together.

Before we made our sun dial, we recreated the theory behind how a sun dial works using a lamp to show how the shadow changes in quick time, moving across the ground, as the sun "moves across the sky". I had them predict what they thought the shadows would look like in the morning and evening and what time they thought it would be when the shadows are at their shortest (they correctly guessed stretched out and around midday!)

We tried making our own using paper plates with a pencil blu-tacked in the centre, but the weather this time of year was too overcast to see the shadows clearly. We might try again in the summer InshaAllah, but on a positive it was a good discussion point on whether sun dials were effective all year round or in all weathers!

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We drew some simple 3D shapes and learnt about shading to create a 3D effect. We started with a sphere, then a cone and finally a cube. We talked about where the shadow would be in relation to the light source in the picture. We also tried doodling other pictures, e.g. a tree, and I showed the girls how to draw simple prisms (recapping that a prism has the same 2D shape at each end!).

I bought some 3B pencils for this purpose and the girls discussed how the lead felt softer than their HB writing pencils and why it was easier to draw with the 3B pencil. They experimented with using different pressures to create lighter and darker effects.





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Finally, we watched The Gruffalo's Child (which happened to be on Amazon Prime) and talked about why the shadow was so large even though the mouse was so small! To help reinforce the point, we took out the torches again and played around with making shadows on the wall. 😁

Tuesday, 10 December 2019

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:


😂👍

Saturday, 7 December 2019

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.

Tuesday, 3 December 2019

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? 🙃