Education by Accident!

Watercolours

A calm, slow morning playing with new paint colours. This was a beetle wrapped in a blanket, apparently!

Education by accident

The Board game cafe was a really cool experience! I’d never heard of the idea until a couple of weeks ago, but it’s genius. Incidentally, a great way to get the kids out of the house and actively learning on a rainy day without breaking the bank. And it doesn’t even feel like learning! Even better. The five of us (both of my older boys came along, too.) had a blast playing all sorts of games. Big has been asking to play Ludo for ages, so this was the perfect opportunity to do some number bonds with Small with the dice rolls.

We also had some fun with a film quiz, and then worked on our literacy skills with the games Articulate for kids and “In one word“, which we actually preferred to Articulate, and the kids really got into. Teamwork. In one word is really good for word recognition, association and understanding – exploring Synonyms and Homophones in trying to guess the right word! Education by accident! we threw in a good amount of mime to boot, getting our bodies involved.

Heath Robinson, the UK Rube Goldberg

When we got home, Big asked if I could print off some kind of Rube Goldberg worksheet for her to do while I cooked. However, while I was trying to find the sort of thing she was looking for we came across Heath Robinson. Health Robinson was an English cartoonist coming up with wacky contraptions a few years before his more famous US counterpart. We found out that there’s actually a Heath Robinson Museum in London – and have planned to try and visit the next time we are in London to see Dandad and Bibi. (Bibi is the Swahili word for Grandma, as our Bibi is from Tanzania, so there’s another language we explore occasionally.)