Science: Cooking in the Sun

I know South Africans love to cook-in-the-sun, but this is referred to a 'braai', and not what the Science Lesson was all about. Instead, we were discovering how we can trap the Sun's heat. A bowl was lined with kitchen foil, then a piece of poster tack was pressed down into the bowl, we used three pieces (greedy hey!), then a Marshmallow was put on the end of a cocktail stick while the other end was pushed into the poster tack. The top of the bowl was then covered with clear food wrap, and propped up, outside in the sun, positioned so that the inside was facing the sun, and we waited for 15mins. The marshmallows had started to melt, and were actually quite hot inside......very yummy stuff!

January

On the homefront side of things, we had a great holiday at Sun City, the weather wasn't sunshine all the time, but it was perfect for us, you can get a bit sick of spending every single day at the pool, so we welcomed the dull days, and used them to our advantage by spending time doing other activities which you usually burn out in, when the sun is out in full swing.

Once back, it was as usual a mad rush to get through the pile of washing. I had to make dentist appointments for Aiden and I, and was fortunate to manage to get one fairly quickly, well the day after Aiden's 8th Birthday.

Yes! We had a birthday in January. I let the kids have the day off school, not that we had anything special planned, but Aiden enjoyed just being able to do what she wanted for the day. We still had all the normal actitivities to do in the afternoon; Modern Dancing, Kumon and Swimming.

On the Saturday after Aiden's birthday, we'd planned a picnic at the Botanical Gardens, unfortunately the weather wasn't on our side, so we ended up having it indoors!

On the school front, we started back on the 18th Jan., Blaine couldn't wait to start, he was scared he'd forgotten everything after the long holiday..hahahaha.....

Our 2nd Year

Ok, so by now you have a little background on us, from here on in, this is really where the blogging will begin.

We started this year of home-schooling on the 18th January 2010, and the children and I were excited to get back into the swing of things.

Aiden has been for a Gibson Cognitive Skills Assessment, as I feel she's got a few learning disabilities, so I wanted to know where her weaknesses are so that we can work on them and help her to be the best she can be. The results showed there was a need for intervention so she has started 'brain skills' exercises and we will see if this can help her.

As weeks go by....

We continued to enjoy every minute of every day spent together; Blaine learnt about Pyramids and Mummies, in computers he learnt about different 'toolbars' and how to make a 'new folder', 'saving' and 'printing'. He learnt about the environment in Geography.

Aiden's continued to learn more letter sounds; v, a, n, z, i, p, w, e, r. The cooking lessons were exciting, the art lessons were very creative and the results amazing, the science lessons were informative and the one on 'investigating melting' wsa so much fun because it involved chocolate!

And so the weeks went on with Aiden learning more letter sounds and plurals and verbs, I made some 'letter games' and we sang the alphabet over and over, and working their way through their schedules. Blaine worked very independantly and gets on with whatever is expected of him and enjoyed it all especially the fun stuff like; growing shoots, making sandwiches, investigating reflections, dragging paint, learning about recylcing waste, making bar charts, investigating glue, filling pita bread to name just a few.

By September Blaine and Aiden had both completed their curriculums and started with their next year. Blaine on Year 5 and Aiden on Year 1. It is always so exciting receiving the new books.

In December we broke up for our Summer Holidays.

When it began

Our first home-schooling day started on Monday 5th January 2009 at 9am. We had decided that each day before 'school' we would make it our daily task, to go for a brisk 15min. walk around the block, so in felt like in a way we were actually walking to school and when we arrived back at the house we would go straight to the 'classroom' to begin our school day, we did the same thing at the end of our school day, only in the opposite direction.

Blaine, my son, started our home-schooling journey with Year 4 British Curriculum, if he'd continued with 'formal schooling' he'd have started Grade4.

Aiden, my daughter, started our home-schooling journey with Foundation Phase British Curriculum, if she'd continued with 'formal schooling' she'd have started Grade 1 which is the first year of primary school in South Africa. However, in the UK you are expected to know how to read and write when starting your first year of Primary School and this is at the age of 5, so here in South Africa, we are 2 years behind as Aiden would only started learing to read/write in Grade 1 and a child only goes to Grade 1 the year you turn 7, so that is why I felt the need to keep her back a year and re-do Foundation Phase British Curriculum, so that we could begin reading and writing and not have any 'gaps' in her education.

We found we were racing through the daily schedules, apart from Aiden starting to read and write, everything else was familiar and simple enough, both Blaine and Aiden managed to tackle two days work in one day (3hrs).

In the first week, Aiden learnt the letter sounds for c, a, t, d, o, g, f, and x and was surprised at the amount of words she could make with just those 8 letters, and her handwriting was practised daily. There was been cooking lessons for Aiden - icing biscuits - which looked like so much fun that Blaine joined in too. The Science lessons was "Investigating Dissolving" and the Art Lesson was having fun with tissue paper, the Music Lesson was movement and songs.

Our first week over and we wish we'd started home-schooling years ago!!! So so much fun and love spending so much time with each other.