WE ARE STILL HERE...

I have very little time to blog nowadays so this is a bit of a catch up for me. Baby I is almost 18 months and is into everything (mainly my 'classroom' drawers) and baby Z is nearing 5 months inshaaAllaah so its all go here.

We had our home education visit on Friday and alhamdulillaah it seemed to have gone really well. They said they had not expected much work from us this time round as I had just had baby I last time they came and was in early stages of pregnancy with baby Z. They were more than happy with what the children presented to them and as usual the poor ladies sat there while A and L shoved everything under their noses in one go.

We have started a new project, the Titanic! We are working through that slowly and the children love to sit and watch the documentaries from an 8 DVD box set that i managed to pick up on ebay very cheaply maashaaAllaah. I like to use a spider graph theme when we do any project and branch off from it to cover the main subjects such as maths, science and english. The children were learning about different types of putting things in order and had to put a series of events from the making of the Titanic to the actual disaster itself into chronological order. They also used their maths skills to make bar graphs showing the different types of passengers; such as class, age, gender etc. We also done some reading comprehension. I would read a chapter at a time from an usborne book we picked up at amazon and then the children had to draw pictures to represent what I had read and also write a few words to explain the picture.

We have also slowly been working through galore park science book 1. I originally bought this level for L and level 2 for A but we decided to work through them one at a time together. This is the benefit of A and L being pretty much at a similar level. We can work together and i can just give A a little more challenging stuff.  I hope the same happens when I and Z are a little older inshaaAllaah. There is just 13 months between them so i am hoping the ease will continue when it comes to teaching them. We have been working on healthy diet and just recently went on to teeth. InshaaAllaah we will be going to the natural history museum next week where we will spend the whole day in the human body section to go with what we are covering in our lessons at home. We went there a few weeks ago but that was just a general day out, this time it will be more of an educational trip.

The children have been doing bits and pieces in other workbooks. I am not a fan of workbooks but having the two small babies means i sometimes have to give in and allow the children to use them rather than do nothing while my hands are tied elsewhere.

From Monday inshaaAllaah we will be following a new 4 week schedule. We currently cover english, maths, science, history, geography, islamic studies, arabic, other languages and projects. I was struggling to cover it all and often our lessons would spill over in to the weekends which wasn't much fun. So now i have made a new schedule where our lessons change from one week to the next. It gives me the chance over the period of a month to cover all the lessons we need to whilst only doing three days a week. We do Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Then Thursday is what we call a free day. The children can choose to do things such as painting, crafts, clay, crochet, baking, trips to library etc. I am hoping this way of doing things will make it more enjoyable again as home schooling should never feel like a burden. I must admit i am looking forward to knowing that when we finish our last lesson on a Wednesday, i then have a few days to catch up on other chores at home until we pick up again on a Monday. I made myself a planner (yes i know i am a nerd) and without it my whole world collapses lol. I really am one of those people who can only function when everything is planned out and i follow the rules. I was looking at planners online but they can be very expensive and not always suitable for what we need so i decided to have a go at making my own. I can not begin to tell you how much it has made things easy for me maashaaAllaah! Here are just a few of the pages:

I have not had chance to take many photos along the way since i last blogged but here are a few bits from what the children have been working on and some from our day out at the Natural History Museum:

Our Titanic information display

A and L drawings of the Titanic maashaaAllaah

I got this display aaaaaages ago and forgot we had it.
Alhamdulillaah it went nicely with our studying the human body. 

I am going to start taking lots more pics along the way again inshaaAllaah as it is really nice to look back through them and see how much the children have actually covered (especially when i have my ''I cant do this anymoooooooore" days lol)

That's it for now as i have a sink full of washing up that refuses to do itself!!!