ALL QUIET..........

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

THURSDAY 18TH APRIL 2013

   Today was a fairly quiet day as all three girls worked well throughout the day and concentrated on their work to be done.

Louise

   Today Louise was concentrating on her maths. Firstly she finished off MEP Unit 8-7 she she had been working on Tuesday. Unit 8-7 chapters 7.4 Linear Conversion and 7.5 Inverse Proportion. When this unit was completed she started MEP Unit 8-9 Fractions and Percentages. She worked her way through the worksheets needing regular help to answer the questions and progress. The units covered today were 9.1  Revision of Operations with Fractions and 9.2 Fractions in Context. Worked well with steady progress made.

Katie

   Katie today completed the unit she started on Tuesday, EzyMath Unit 5.1 Addition and Subtraction 1. After this was completed she commenced  EzyMath Unit 5.2 Addition and Subtraction 2. She progressed well with repeated help and encouragement and engaged with work excellently and showed a really good grasp of the methods needed to be used to solve the problems from the start of the session today.

Lily

     There was no stopping Lily today! She powered through her work so much so that we had to start on tomorrow's work because she was wanting to do more! 

   

A DIFFERENT KIND OF DAY........

A DAY OF CONTRASTS.......

WEDNESDAY 17TH APRIL 2013

     Today was a different kind of day. The girls had heard last week about the death of Margaret Thatcher. They had watched some of the news programmes about her death and seen the way in which different people were sad that she had died and that some were glad she had died. This they had a hard job to understand why people were being so mean about an "old lady" who was dead.

     This lead to many conversations about who she was, what she did and why different people look at this in different ways. I explained about her death being "political" and some of the things she had done when she was Prime Minister and how some of the people of our country supported what she decided and how some of the people did not like what she was doing to the country.

     I explained that she was being given a "state funeral" and what this would be. We decided that because of the rarity of the event we would watch the proceedings on tv.

     There was plenty of discussion about what was happening and who was who and about the different traditions that were taking place. Katie also pointed out that the next major funeral we would be likely to witness would be the state funeral of the Queen or Prince Phillip.

     In the afternoon was the girls "recreation" period. This was a lovely trip out to Stanley Park to use all the play equipment and get a good exercise session.

     A really great time was had by all and we got rid of some their energy! 

    

FIRST DAY BACK............

FIRST DAY BACK AFTER EASTER............

TUESDAY 16TH APRIL 2013

      Today was our first day of the new session of home learning after Easter break. We all came back nice and refreshed and maybe a few pounds heavier after our visit from the Easter Bunny!

     Firstly today we took a bit of time before we started our work to explain to Katie and Lily about the horrific events of yesterday (Monday 15th April) during the Boston marathon. We tried to give them an understanding of firstly where Boston is, secondly how big an event it was and the amount of people who were spectators and thirdly, perhaps the hardest part for them to understand is what actually happened and why someone would do such a thing. This will obviously be an ongoing source of questions and comments from them to which hopefully we will be able to eventually provide the answers. We were all united in sending our thoughts and best wishes to those affected by this awful event.

                                     

     


         We then started our work for the day.

      Today Louise is working on the maths unit of Ratio and Proportion. She is making steady progress with the workbooklet and will be carrying on throughout the next few days to complete this unit.

                                       

     Katie had numeracy and literacy to study today.  In literacy today we were looking at the topic of descriptive writing. Katie read about a bengal tiger and then completed the worksheet about the tiger. The questions required Katie to recall the answers from the passage and then answer then descriptively.

     Numeracy today was adding four figure numbers together. Katie worked through the questions at a steady pace with help required throughout.

     

      Lily has started using the maths units from URBRAINY this session. These units are a complete unit designed to last a week. Because Lily can work better now at home we will progress about 2 units a week instead of the one. There are exercises to do and worksheets to complete. Today the worksheets were about adding up and taking away and filling in the correct answers. Lily worked really well and completed more than we had planned for her to do!

      Literacy work today for Lily consisted of reading a passage about "going to visit Grandma". Lily read this well and then answered the questions relating to the story.

     They all worked very well today and finished in time to go to youth club at Blackpool Young Carers. Katie and Lily really enjoyed youth club tonight. Lily played with her "boyfriend" Ashley and Katie had her face painted. They were all given an Easter egg as well. 

Katie the mouse

Lily's boyfriend Ashley

      Following on from youth club Louise went to her first group at FCBI - Fylde  Coast Be Involved at Claremont first steps centre. 

     This is a group that arranges volunteering opportunities for teenagers and young adults in the local area in a wide variety of work environments.  You build up the hours you do and get awards when you reach certain amount of hours achieved  She really enjoyed it and can not wait to start volunteering at places and going to the group every Tuesday evening.

Well done Louise and good luck for the future volunteering! 

    

DURING EASTER BREAK..............

DURING EASTER BREAK...................

TUESDAY 9TH APRIL 2013

    

     Today was to be a special treat day. After Katie and Lily had both had their first session of homeschooling and having tried their very best and settled down to the new routine, we decided to reward them by having a treat day. 

     We chose today because Louise was going out for the day. Her day was to be a girly day at the Trafford Centre in Manchester with the Blackpool Young Carers group. 

     After getting rid of Louise dropping Louise off at her pick up point the "adventure" began.

    To guide us through the day Mum will take over the story........

     Katie, Lily and I started off with a bus ride into the town centre to begin with some retail therapy! After visiting a variety of shops and getting some great bargains it was time for lunch. Burger King here we come!

     On leaving Burger King Lily spotted the one and only CHIPPER across the road. This lead to both Lily and Katie screaming "CHIPPER" and running straight towards him and almost knocking him off his feet!

        After a lot of hugs it was time to say goodbye to Chipper and carry on with the rest of the outing. The next thing we did was to go on the new trams that we have been waiting to go on since they were launched but have just never had the chance to do it.

     We walked to North Pier and waited until our tram came. It was number 007. We got on and found a seat and began our journey to the end of the line at Fleetwood.

          The girls were really excited to be on the tram as they have very rarely been on them before. They were looking at all the places along the way and seeing how different they looked from being in the car like we normally are. We also travelled past some places you can not get to by car.

     When we all arrived in Fleetwood we made our way to the market to continue the well trained art of shopping! Soon the girls had enough of the shopping and were wanting to get back on the tram again to take us back to Bispham. 

      We went to the tram stop and got on number 016 to travel to Red Bank Road. We got off the tram and walked down the road to look in the shops. We all decided this shopping was really thirsty work and that we needed to go to Maddisons for one of their wonderful hot chocolates. 

      As you can see they are huge and topped with whipped cream, malteasers and marshmallows.

     As you can see the girls were amazed by them and how big they were. They had to use a spoon to eat them first before Lily finished hers off by using a straw!

     This was a great way to end a wonderful day. We were finished just in time to pick Louise up after she had returned from her day out shopping.

     It is safe to say that we four Poyner girls definately have the shopping trip down to a fine art! 

WORLD BOOK DAY

WORLD BOOK DAY...........

THURSDAY 7TH MARCH 2013

     The annual event of World Book Day was our first "themed" day that we enjoyed as a new homeschooling family together for the first time. 

                                                  

 The girls all chose which book they were going to use as their "book of the day". 

Louise chose the Jacqueline Wilson Book Jacky Daydream

Katie chose High School Musical

and Lily chose Disney Princess Magic Songs

Louise, Katie and Lily dressed up as characters from their chosen books. They were asked to produce a cover of their favourite book. This was to look like a normal book cover with a picture on the from and a blurb on the back cover and the name on the spine. They all worked really hard to produce their master pieces.

      They all produced a great book cover.

 And of course no celebration would be complete a feast!

Well done girls!

    

BEFORE EASTER BREAK.................

BEFORE EASTER BREAK WE WERE DOING..............

25th February to 22nd March

     Before we finished our scheduled homeschooling for Easter break Katie started studying the continents of the World. This unit stated by looking at all the continents as a whole and briefly where they were and what they were called and some basic facts about each different continent. We then started to look at each individual continents in more depth.

     Katie will start with the continent in which we live, Europe. The module was split into four sections. Each section was studied over the course of a week.  

This allowed for Katie to follow the bases of FOUR main study areas.

• In week one Katie produced a large scale map of the selected continent of Europe showing all the countries and their capital cities. This allowed for research to be carried working with an atlas and maps and also online. Katie completed various worksheets about the continent.
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
• In week two, we selected 10 individual countries from within the continent and produce a "flag and fact sheet" all about them. This included finding out the capital city, traditional food, a fascinating fact and also to draw the flag.
  
  
  
  

  

  
  
  

  
  
  
• Week three saw the selection of four of the countries to research and produce a more detailed analyses and produce a series of worksheets about each.
  
  
  
• Finally, in week four, we chose the country of Great Britain to complete a lapbook about. This included more in depth research about this single country.
  
  
  

  

  
  
  All throughout this module we were also collecting information to produce a lapbook about Europe.
  
  
  
  

  

  
  
• We decided that in future, at the end of studying each continent, we will have an "International Day" where we will celebrate the continent and countries we have studied with different foods, music and dance that we have learnt about.

This will be replicated for the other continents until they have all been studied.

This was a cross curricula module that covered geography and history. It also included literacy  numeracy, art and in the future will include domestic science.

We used a mixture of books, TV and film, maps and online resources to gain research for this topic.