Thinking creatively about creative writing

I was looking for ways to engage Chipman in creative writing and stumbled upon the TES website. It is full of resources uploaded by teachers and is free to access. Some of the activities need tweaking for one to one home educating. I found a fantastic powerpoint on the website which I turned into a workbook. Here is how I did it......

Firstly you will need to down load the resource from TES, this requires signing up to their site. It's free to join and well worth it for the treasure trove of resources you will find!

Next I printed off the power point slides, 3 to a page with notes, this option is available on the print screen.

I then cut them into individual strips.

 The next step was to get creative and make a front and back cover out of card. I made mine out of card which I cut just a bit bigger than my pages. I used a sharpie, gold pen and some card decorating stickers for mine, but this is where you can let your creativity go wild!

Lastly you can make your book by laying your back cover on the bottom, then laying your paper on top and finally your cover. The amount of pages you can include may well be limited to the number of pages you can fit in your stapler! I used 15 pages and then stapled it. I put the left over strips in an envelope ready to make another once A has completed this one.

For Chipman who is a reluctant writer the short amount of lines make the task achievable (although he does have to option to carry onto the other side of the page). It has really helped him start thinking about things imaginatively and is in good size chunks that don't overwhelm him.

Let me know what you think. Have you got any good ideas to get reluctant writers putting pen to paper or getting them to think creatively? If so please share them below.

Earthquakes at home and learning together

We did it! 5 morning's getting Beebie into school without any fuss and 3 nights of going to bed well! She is very happy with her bubble sword as a reward! As for Chipman and homeschool, all is going brilliantly. This week we looked at the effect of earthquakes on buildings with a hands on Lego experiment. It was great fun and both Chipman and Beebie enjoyed it. We have come to the end of our Japan topic and on Chipman's request are now moving onto Egypt. Again we will be lapbooking and will post photo's as we go.

This week there have been doubts. The main one of these for me is am I teaching him enough? From other blogs I have read I know I am not alone. I have been reassuring myself that no matter how much Chipman writes down on paper he is learning 24/7 and enjoying doing it. I have loved getting to know Chipman better and spending quality time with him during our learning. It is amazing to see his thirst for knowledge and how he will persevere. I am still being flexible and we are definitely learning as we go along together.

 Chipman has also enjoyed meeting up with his home educated friends at group and at the park. It's great to see him making new friends and also good support for me. I would recommend to anyone home educating or considering it to join a group, you can find lists of these groups on Education Otherwise. It has lots of information about home educating and is worth a visit. 

I am feeling so at home with being a stay at home mum and am very thankful to God for giving me this opportunity and peace in my heart. My prayer this week will be for calm in our home and hearts that want to listen to God and to each other.

Sleepwalking our way through the day

The reward chart is working! 6 year old P is now going into to school and coming home without any problem's, although I am writing this before the morning school run so anything could happen today! The next hurdle with P is sleep, or lack of it for everyone because she just doesn't want to go to bed. We think it's for attention so tonight we start a "ignore the bad behaviour" operation, I will let you know how it goes!

As for A he is getting stuck into his school work. We have finished our samaurai and general information on Japan and are now moving onto the exciting world of earthquakes and volcanoes. We had great fun making baking powder and coloured vinegar volcanoes. We put baking powder in an old yogurt pot and in a seperate cup we mixed vinegar and some food colouring to give it a more dramatic effect! When we mixed the two we had a volcano and a very happy 12 year old who if we had more baking powder would have made them all day!

I am still struggling with the maths side of things, I just don't like it! However A loves it so I have been trying to make it more interesting by playing games and activities. Yesterday we played prime number snap, needless to say A knew his prime numbers by heart and was a lot quicker than me and won! A has also enjoyed learning about the digestive and excretory systems - boys and anything to do with poo and wee seems to be a winner!

This week our aim is to get more sleep and have more fun! As well as feeling sleep deprived I am also feeling incredibly blessed that God is taking us on this journey. Let's see what the rest of the week brings!

Stepping into a new week

I am preparing for another week of home school, the rigid plan that I had first thought I would use has been scrapped and now I am going with topics. Topics with lots of ideas to do and we will just see what we get done this week. This is my test to see what A can do and how long it will take.

This week is bringing a whole new set of challenges, Chipman has a younger sister, Beebie who is 6 and is still in school. We decided that it would be best to keep her in school, but of course this has caused rivalry between the 2 of them. I can completely understand why she would be a little jealous and want to stay home but for Beebie school is best for her learning. The problem is getting her through the door in the morning, once she is in school she is loving her time there. Friday ended with Beebie saying she didn't want to go to school and Chipman saying he would go back to school to make his sister happy! So this week we are going to be rewarding, rewarding good behaviour. Beebie will get a star for every time she goes into school, comes home and goes to bed nicely. She has a possible 15 boxes on her chart to fill but to start with we are aiming for 10. Chipman also has chart to do kind things. I will let you know how it goes later in the week!

 

As I go into a new week my prayer is for happy children, children that love to learn and feel loved and blessed by their heavenly Father.

Lightbulbs and lapbooking along the way....

What a day! My plan after a good day yesterday was to blog all about Chipman's japan lapbook but after today that will have to wait. Chipman was extremely tired today, he didn't want to do much work and was zoning out very quickly from tasks. When my husband and I made the decision to home educate Chipman we knew my love of planning and sticking to it could be a problem. Today was a day that my inflexibility was put to the test! 

My plan was to cover multiples and fractions, it didn't fill me with much joy either, and it was met with rolled eyes. I realised that today would be a day of compromise, maths was not going away but we could look at regular polygons instead and come back to the other stuff another day. Still very little enthusiasm  from Chipman, then I had a light bulb moment. We could lapbook maths! That site I had found with blank lapbooking templates was about to come in very useful! All of a sudden Chipman was ready to go, getting his ruler and pens out and on the fly we started lapbooking shapes. Of course this took longer than I had planned, so tomorrow we will continue it, with enthusiasm and no rolled eyes. That's the plan at least but I'm ready to be flexible!