For anyone new to this blog, the idea is simple - each day my boys (Joshua - 9 and Archie - 8) choose a stimulus that drives the learning. We hope that you enjoy the blog and can take some inspiration from what we love doing - making learning as engaging as possible!
Trees
I have loved encouraging the boys to engage in nature and when the request came in for us to look at trees, I leapt on it.
Global warming and the environment has been such a hot topic for this generation (excuse the pun). The boys were really keen to investigate trees and their impact on our lives.
We hope you enjoy!
English
Mesostic poetry
Information writing
A mesostic poem is just like an acrostic but the key letters appear within the word rather than at the start. We decided to position the word TREES down the centre to represent the trunk. The lines then spur off the trunk in the form of descriptive or informative sentences. The joy of this is that the end product resembles a tree.
Whilst I modelled a mesostic poem focussed on description, the boys wanted to explore information. The joy of this type of poem is that it suits all styles of writing. The boys then typed them up and chose their fonts and layouts, etc. Here are the end products:
Art
When it comes to art, I have to hand the reigns over to my wife, Laura. These wonderful rainbow trees are the result - stunning!
Maths
Mental arithmetic
Addition / multiplication
For our creative maths, we made number trees. The idea is simple but it can quickly become quite complex. All you need to do is write a list of numbers along the bottom line, say 5 numbers as a start. The next line above can be calculated by adding these numbers together (you can multiply to make it more challenging). On it goes until you end up with one solitary number.
If you want a bigger challenge, you can approach this as a missing number activity. Create a complete tree and then remove certain numbers. The challenge is then to work forwards and backwards to solve the calculation.
Here are the boys creating and solving the addition trees:
Here is the finished product and a challenge exploring multiplication:
If you are enjoying this blog, please do share it and spread the word. Thank you to all of you who have got in touch and shared some of the outcomes from what you have tried - we love to hear from you.
Do tune in tomorrow for:
Curry
My thanks to Pie Corbett, Julia Strong and the Talk for Writing team for inspiring many of the ideas explored in this blog.