Showing posts with label Home Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Home Education. Show all posts

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Earth Trip: Russia


Wow what a busy week we've had! As well as squeezing in 3 play dates we also finished up our trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, where we have spent the past three weeks.


Another flag was added to our passports.



We started off our trip by reading the next instalment of the story and finding out what our next missions were. Here are a few of the other things we did during our three week "trip".

  • As usual we sampled the local food, which this time took the form of Russian Honey Cake. The boys made this together which worked really well. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of the finished cake as I completely forgot to take any before we scoffed it.

  • We found Russia on the globe and map, talked about it being the biggest country and how it spans two continents. Next time I think we will review this daily so that it sticks.


  • We read about life in Russia from the Children Like Me book.


  • We filled in our country information sheet and discovered how to say many things in Russian including "hello" We also discovered this wasn't easy! This led to a discussion on how the Russian alphabet is different from ours. We also found how to write our names in Russian here


  • We did our map work sheet and learned where and what the Russian Steppes were, and where we could find Lake Baikal and the Trans Siberian Railway.


  • We used Google Maps to explore St Petersburg and Google Art View to visit some of the sites of the Hermitage Museum, which is part of the Winter Palace.


  • We had a look at three palaces, including the Winter Palace, and all their splendour and then had a go at designing our own palace type structure using dried spaghetti stuck together with marshmallows. This was a lot of fun but very sticky! Can't find the photos though annoyingly.


  • We looked at lots of photos on the National Geographic site and printed some off to add to our travel scrapbook.


  • We read about Baba Yaga


  • Also read about Yuri Gagarin from our library books and did a quiz about him and the space race.



  • We learned about Sergei Prokofiev by listening to Classics For Kids We then read the story of Peter and the Wolf and listened to a recording of it from here. I found various worksheets on the internet to accompany it.


  • We talked about the Russian flag and how it has changed, then made one using Hama beads. We also looked at Russian currency


  • We looked at Animals from Russia and made a book about them


  • We finished up by doing a general knowledge quiz on Russia.


  • Isaac doing a maths division activity



    Tuesday, February 01, 2011

    Well hello again!

    Hello dear, dusty old blog. It's me, I'm back again with more promises to post regularly (which I know I won't keep) but I'm back for a bit at least. We have started a new project which I want to keep a record of so that my son (now 6) will have some proof of the fun things we do in the name of education!

    Big sister (now 10) has started school since we last spoke. She has been attending since last September and is loving it. It has been a great comfort to me to know that although I have never made a concious effort to follow the national curriculum she has coped with the work well. Also, she has really zoomed ahead with her English work. This was always a struggle at home and she hated doing any form of writing; at school however she will go that extra mile to impress her teacher!

    Friday, March 20, 2009

    Ancient Greece

    We have been covering the Ancient Greeks in SOTW1 and I suggested to Millie that she could do a mini project on them before we move on.

    I've put a bunch of links on my Tumblr for her to have a gander at but figured I may as well share them here as they might be of use to others.