A Star Themed Week

This week Tristan's work has been based on the word 'Star'. We are lucky to be involved in the weekly home education book challenge which is run by the lovely Brandi on Facebook. She chose 'How to Catch a Star' by Oliver Jeffers as this weeks book which is where our learning theme came from.

Here are some of the sparkly things we have been up to this week.

It all started with the arrival of the magical stars over Tristan's bed on Sundy night and the adventure continued from there.

I made a little book for Tristan comprised of a few home made Lapbook style flaps and pockets. I found a couple of additional things on 'Homeschoolshare.com' which is an excellent little resource for Lapbook projects. 

I produced 21 stars for Tristan with 11 coloured yellow and 10 coloured Blue. I asked him to write the numbers 0-10 on the yellow stars and 11-20 on the blue stars. (The different colours help him distinguish the teen numbers.) He used the number line from his star book to work out the correct numbers. Once we had done this, we used clear sticky paper to cover them. I don't have a laminator  so I use two sheets of adhesive clear paper and then cut out the shapes. A friend of mine has discovered that you can use laminator sheets, which are relatively inexpensive and iron it onto the 'subject' - you just need a sheet of baking paper between the iron and the laminate. 

He loves his number stars and we have used them all week for counting and doing sums. He also began thinking about which numbers were odd and even.

We have enjoyed learning about space and the solar system. We have looked at books and watched a couple of short films about the planets. Tristan drew planets, cut them out and stuck them onto his solar system. He was really interested in the scale of the planets and this led us to use a variety of different sized household objects and toys to create a solar system on the floor. Everyone enjoyed this activity.

I cut out a variety of shapes, rectangles, triangles and circles and asked him to build a spaceship. We stapled the finished piece into his book. 

Learning about the solar system made him curious about time, about day and night, months, seasons and years. We found a nice wooden calendar in a supermarket which we bought to help him understand these concepts. He has been using it every day and has really grasped the days of the week and months of the year. He understand why we have day and night and has also been able to tell me what else the sun does for us. 

We joined up the stars on some constellations to work out what they looked like. We then went on to play star dot-to-dot which was fun. We all drew stars on paper and then swapped with the next person, joined them up and guessed the shape. It was great fun plus it is a really good idea for helping with Tristan's manual dexterity skills.

In the book 'How to Catch a Star' the boy tries to catch the star in the sea. We used this to find out all about reflections by discussing the concept and creating a quick experiment. We simply filled a bowl of water and held a torch over the bowl. Tristan explained how the light was being reflected. We also looked at refraction with the famous straw in a glass experiment. 

Tristan figured out that the star the boy finally gets in the story is a starfish which made him very curious. We spent much of yesterday researching the topic, drawing starfish and collecting images. He really wanted a starfish of his very own so we made a couple from an old bit of sponge. He has a bath with his lovely new spongy starfish. 

The night sky has been very cloudy and so we have used our planetarium to investigate the constellations. As soon as we get a beautiful clear night we will nip out to look at the stars.  

We have read a number of space themed books this week too. Many are beginner reader books from our local library which have enabled Tristan to read bits of these books for himself. He has been really enthusiastic about reading them because he loves the subject matter so much.

Our space week has been wonderful fun. Theo has been involved with a few tasks as well, although he knows that he will be learning all about space in much more detail in a few months. We are all going to enjoy that topic in our science syllabus very much.