The girls decided that they’d really like to do a topic based around Winnie the Pooh (aside from Lotso, he’s been Polly’s love since she was a tiny baby and had a beautiful stuffed Pooh bear given to her by a colleague of mine. She now has a full collection of the characters that sleep in her bed every night).
We actually started this topic during the Easter holidays as the girls find it much easier having some structure to their week, so please don’t think that we worked until midnight each day to fit it in! Aside from the topic we also did some additional easter tasks such as the Maths Easter hunt on Twinkl (the maths mysteries on there are great and the girls really enjoy them) and decorating their bedroom windows for Easter (I really hope those pens come off) as well as a real life Easter hunt after the Easter Bunny abided by the self-distancing rules to create a hunt for them in the garden.
We also carried on with our PE, dancing with Oti and continuing to run laps around the garden to a total distance of 2km each session (a lot of laps!!)
A friend of mine from the local hospital asked if I could sew up some bags for them to wash their scrubs in without having to touch them, and obviously the girls wanted to help, so we also fit that into the Easter holidays.
For maths this term we are using the White Rose maths scheme:
https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/summer-term/
This is really good as it has short video clips explaining each idea before the tasks are carried out, and although I prefer to teach the girls myself, they are great to stick on for one whilst I explain the ideas to the other.
We also love the Maths Factor:
https://www.themathsfactor.com
which is currently free and has some great activities as well as fun games, and a reward system.
The first activity we did during the actual Pooh topic was to create a themed board game. Now, I was envisaging something simple like Snakes and Ladders but with trees and honey-spillage, but no. The girls wanted to do a Hundred-Acre-Wood version of Cluedo where they had to find out who had stolen Pooh’s honey, at what time and what they had to drink. They cleverly named ‘Winnie the Pooh-do’ (to rhyme with Cluedo)! As a result, this activity alone ended up taking pretty much a whole week!
We started by coming up with a list of things we needed to create the game (aim, rules, playing pieces, board etc) before the girls decided on how they’d like it to look. They really wanted to make the moving pieces to look like Pooh characters. Luckily, I had some of the bake-in-the-oven coloured clay buried away in the craft cupboard, so they got to work creating. I was so worried that I’d turn them into black ash when I baked them, but they came out brilliantly with all their bits intact!
The girls then worked on their rules. As they were basing it on the Cluedo game we decided to copy those rules and edit and amend them to suit the new game. This was a really successful task and the girls worked brilliantly together. It also meant that the rules made sense, which could have been an issue otherwise!
Once they’d finished editing the rules Polly typed them up whilst Winnie began making the other cardboard pieces and envelopes. needed to play the game.
They then worked together to design the answer sheets that they would need to tick off during the game to discover who had stolen Pooh’s honey.
Next they created a song to go with the game for when it was advertised on TV (always thinking big!!) They went with the tune of ‘What I’ve Been Looking for’ from High School Musical for some reason, but I really like what they did!
Finally came the biggest task…the actual game board! This ended up being a labour of love as it took much longer than they expected, but credit to them they stuck it out and it ended up looking fabulous. When we came around to trying the game out I was so impressed. It looked and played brilliantly and is now in the box with the actual Cluedo game to play whenever we like.
Week 2 was a bit more Literacy led. We started the week looking at similes and the girls came up with their own similes to described Hundred Acre Wood.
We did some science based around the minibeasts we might find in Hundred Acre Wood, first learning how to use a classification key to categorise unknown minibeasts before doing a minibeast hunt in the garden and discussing how our findings might vary to those in a woodland.
As the weather was so lovely we did some instruction/ position and direction work outside. We placed different character labels around the garden. One girl was blindfolded and the other had to direct them to a chosen character location using oral commands only. We discovered left and right need a bit of work (and I forgot to take photos!), but it was a fun game we will definitely try again.
We then began to look at different characters from the story Winnie the Pooh, discussing them after reading the book. We drew some in art using the YouTube tutorials by Draw so Cute (such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkgCOc4bkaY) which the girls loved.
The girls then chose one character and did some drama based hot-seating work, thinking how they would respond to different questions/ situations. They then created a simple character sketch to give them ideas to use the following day when they were each sent an invitation letter to Tigger’s birthday party which they had to reply to in the style of their character. I really love these.
As we had told Tigger we would go to his party we felt obliged to help him organise it! The girls set up the party games Tigger had mentioned in his letter which were musical bouncing, pin the tail on the Tigger and pass the bouncing ball, and put birthday bunting up in the garden. They baked a cake themselves, weighing all the ingredients and following the recipe (you can’t beat a Bero book sponge cake!) before decorating it with a golden ‘T’ and candles to represent Tigger’s age (he’s apparently 26!!)
After the games the girls had asked for a tea party which we decided to order in from a lovely local restaurant who are doing their best to keep going during this crazy time. It was absolutely delicious, and Tigger apparently said it was the best birthday ever (although he did need help blowing out the candles!)
The final piece of Literacy work was a playscript. We looked at how to set the script out before they created their own independent pieces to act out with their toys later in the day. They loved writing these and spent almost the whole morning on them.
We then spent some time making animations on the Flipaclip app which is great fun. It lets you start by drawing a picture and then allows you to trace your original image just changing one slight thing. You can repeat this process until you are happy with the animation. The results were great, if a little fast (14 stills was their limit!!)
We really enjoyed this topic and the girls created a lot of lovely work. Next week out topic is going to be Mexico (with a strong hint of ‘Coco’) in the lead up to Cinco de Mayo although I’m not sure how Winnie will cope with the Mexican feast after losing 3 teeth in a week. Soft tortillas perhaps?!
Doodle & Peg Do Disney 