Life skills and lazy days!

Gaming Geography

This one turned out to be a tad beyond the poorly 6-year-old. Although she did enjoy joining in where she could! This game consists of trying to guess which Landmark/City/Country you are – more than a few of which don’t even exist! This employs a surprising amount of skill in Geography, Literacy, World Knowledge and the verbal and critical thinking ability to process clues. One of the kids picked this game up (The Where am I? Game) while we were in the Works at some point this week and begged. Which I wouldn’t ususally succumb to, but considering our current aim is Home-educating, I agreed – to much glee!

A great educational take on what I’ve always known as “The Rizla game” which probably tells you more than I’d like!

Spinning

Having had a bag of fleece knocking about for a few days the girls have been begging for a spinning lesson- so this was the perfect moment. And didn’t require Small getting dressed! They had a brilliant time learning how the treadle interacted with the whole mechanism, mostly by practising until they could do it so fast that the lever kept coming off! While Small got a little frustrated with the string coming off, Big was more than capable of rethreading the whole wheel when it did, and adjusting the tension to correct a feeding issue.

Not quite having the dexterity to handle the fleece and the treadle simultaneously, they still managed to produce some pretty good reels. It’s hard to tell which was more exciting- carding the fleece, or spinning the yarn. Next week I will introduce them to plying, and then they can wash and dye their yarn ready for a crochet lesson! Which of course leads into a whole range of other skills – plant identification, chemistry, fine motor skills, pattern recognition, colour mixing…..

Family tree research project

We accidentally got into a huge family tree session in the afternoon using Canva to create a family tree from all of the information that you can find using technology to contact family members, trawling photo albums and other sources to find a photograph of each person, utilising Ancestry.com to find out information and links that we weren’t already aware of. We got nowhere near finishing-but it was a great exercise that will definitely be returned to again and again when we can.