Duplo | Pyjama School

Catch up

March 18, 2014 by Sarah Leave a Comment

Spring has arrived since my last post in February and it feels especially good after such a wet winter. We’ve been making a conscious effort to go out somewhere as a family every Saturday. After viewing a house in Torrington, we decided to explore the Torrington Commons as we’d never really done that before.

We spent another Saturday with Colin’s parents, who live in a village above Peppercombe beach. The light was beautiful and I spent the afternoon snapping photos as the children roamed freely.

Last Saturday we drove out to Wistlandpound reservoir on Exmoor. When we go out, I often pack investigative tools such as a map, compass, binoculars, magnifying glass, pocket microscope, identification guide and walkie talkies.

We spent this morning at the allotment, digging over a new rhubarb bed. Tabitha played with worms and was delighted to find a group of ladybirds on an upturned chair. I’m looking forward to spending lots of time here over the next few months.

We’ve been busy indoors too. The Duplo was very popular for a couple of weeks and Minecraft has made its way back into our lives. Aaron’s enthusiasm for reading has really taken off since I bought a set of Biff Chip and Kipper books for him, and Tabitha has started to sound out CVC words with help. I’ve done loads of decluttering and the house, with the exception of our bedroom, is now back to normal. It makes such a difference not having bags and boxes of stuff everywhere!

A few things we’ve been doing this month

November 27, 2013 by Sarah Leave a Comment

We explored loose parts on a large acrylic mirror.

Playing with the light panel is a lovely way to begin these gloomy winter mornings.

Aaron drew this fire engine for a friend’s birthday card.

We danced and sang “Hokey cokey” over and over again.

We had a week full of Duplo creativity. This was a castle with moat, drawbridge and playground.

The Duplo people went surfing at the beach.

Apparently this one was a fire station, complete with a fireman’s pole.

Daddy takes Duplo to a whole new level!

We got through several rolls of masking tape, parcel tape and string. This was a hinged door leading into a den.

The children experimented with paper and torches.

Aaron made a jack-o’-lantern.

“King Aaron” built a clock tower.

We had a snowball fight with cotton wool balls!

It was fantastic fun, but DON’T do this on carpet unless you want to spend hours hoovering up the fluff!

We went on a colour treasure hunt.

Catch up

July 6, 2013 by Sarah 5 Comments

It seems like a long time since I last posted. I’ve been ill several times and busy with work. I turned down work for the first time a couple of weeks ago, which felt very strange but I know it was the right decision. My own children need time alone with me and to be honest I’m already absolutely exhausted on my days off. Definitely looking forward to the summer holidays in two and a bit weeks!

The children have been doing lots of building with Duplo and Lego. Aaron still likes to use the Duplo for large scale sculptures of things like dinosaurs, ships and space rockets.

Tabitha and the baby had fun with a puffed rice sensory tray.

Painting has been popular.

Aaron painted a space rocket and a bus.

Aaron has been wanting a skateboard for years so when we spotted these mini ones I finally gave in. He soon discovered that it wasn’t as easy as the teenagers make it look!

We’ve always thought that Tabitha may have inherited dyspraxia, so I was expecting her to struggle with the skateboard. However, she did pretty well and is keen to keep practising, so all that time riding a balance bike and scooter must have paid off!

Tabitha loves to turn on a children’s CD and dance around, making up her own actions. Yes, she’s wearing Aaron’s milo vest so I’m knitting her one of her own, which you can just see in the basket on the right.

I had a scan at the hospital yesterday, then went up to the college to pick up all my results for the year. It’s been hard work but I’m really pleased with my marks, just hope I can keep it up for another two years! As part of my course I have to do a 50 hour work-based learning placement with a specific focus. I chose to focus on outdoor provision in my childminding practice, because not having a garden makes it much more challenging. On Tuesday I spent the day observing outdoor play at Two Rivers Outdoor Preschool, which was a great experience.

We have also decided that Aaron and Tabitha will be starting at Two Rivers for one day per week in September. It is a Steiner-inspired kindergarten, accepting children aged 3.5 – 7 years, with lots of home educating families involved. Based in a yurt in the middle of secluded woodlands, the children have fantastic opportunities to play outside for hours every day. I’ve been following the school’s progress since before it opened, but it is a 20 minute drive away so attending hasn’t been an option until now. We haven’t been able to go to our local home-ed group for months due to the hours I work and Aaron really misses his friends there. When he discovered that his beloved friend Rose goes to Two Rivers, I knew that he would love to go too. At first we weren’t sure about sending Tabitha but she insisted that she wants to go with Aaron. She really enjoyed it there on Tuesday, quickly making friends with a little boy and even talking to the teachers by the afternoon, so we’ll see how it goes.

Today I decided to reorganise our craft supplies by colour, inspired by some of the amazing Reggio photos Ali has sent me! Tabitha helped me to sort things into the right jar.

More happy rainbows in my home! Hopefully having lots of different supplies in each jar will help the children to discover things that get forgotten and not used very often.

Colin’s youngest sister has a birthday this week and his middle sister is coming down to visit. For the first time ever, Colin has the week off work and I don’t! The sunshine is back so we’re hoping to enjoy some family outings in the lovely weather.

Moving towards Montessori

February 28, 2013 by Sarah 2 Comments

I had a cold at the beginning of the week, so we had a few lazy days doing nothing much in particular, apart from sharing a birthday lunch with a little friend who has just turned 3. There has been lots of building going on with both Duplo and Lego.

While I was washing up in the kitchen, I could hear Aaron and Tabitha reading a book together about telling the time. Moments like this make up for all the squabbling!

Tabitha has been enjoying her zoology puzzles from Tower High Learning. They are at just the right level for her, hard enough to be challenging but easy enough not to be too frustrating. The bird, butterfly and frog will fit in nicely with our spring/lifecycles topic.

She’s very good at putting them away on the shelf again, which is just as well because my children are hopeless at tidying anything else away!

On a whim I got the number rods out for Tabitha. I only gave her the first five rods to work with, as she isn’t great at counting beyond that with 1:1 correspondence.

She found it easy to build the stairs when I asked her to find the longest rod and then the next longest, which is the way the red rods are initially presented in Montessori. Out of interest I then asked her to do it from the smallest upwards, which I’ve always thought would be more logical but she found it much harder. It seems that Montessori had every tiny little detail covered!

Then the Duplo people came over to test the “stairs” and the daddy shouted instructions to the baby about which stair to stand on. I think I may have to buy or make a set of red rods for Tabitha, as she isn’t really ready for number rods but is definitely ready for some visual discrimination activities.

Aaron and I have been doing quite a lot of maths work over the last few weeks. We covered introduction to decimal quantity a few weeks ago, but I didn’t manage to get any photos of that. Today we worked on formation of numbers, which he is now pretty confident at. In this game, he selects some number cards (no more than one from each column of units, tens, hundreds and thousands), and puts them together with the right edges aligned. Then he has to choose the correct amount of unit/ten/hundred/thousand “beads” that make up the number.

We then check that the beads match the symbols and read out the number. He can now easily name any number up to 1999.

We also play it the reverse way, choosing the beads first and then finding the correct number cards.

We’ve briefly touched on changing, and will be moving onto that properly before covering addition. I do love the way that concrete Montessori materials give young children the power to work with large numbers. At school Aaron would be expected to work with numbers up to 20, which would definitely not satisfy his desire for large numbers!

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while may have noticed an increase in Montessori-style activities recently. Until now we have been very autonomous, but I think Aaron will benefit from a bit more structure. That’s the great thing about home education, it can easily be adapted to meet the child/family’s current needs. We are gradually moving towards a slightly more structured routine and Montessori will definitely be part of that, as it will still allow us to be very much child-led.

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