This week on the home school web...

 Tying shoe laces - Will needs some help... some ideas here and then here.

I do love the look of  these My First Montessori Books. I have a couple on my wishlist  at the Book depository- I'd like to have a look at the fractions and square numbers ones.

I love the idea of using spinning tops as a fine motor activity. 

101 reasons to homeschool. :-)

Grace and Courtesy is something we could do better at our house.

I want to get both Will and Tama more involved in their own food prep and other self-care stuff. Tama can get himself dressed and Will is capable of making his own breakfast but there's no reason why they can't prepare or help prepare their own lunches with a few modifications to our pantry/fridge set up.

Love these ideas for extentions to the ways we can use our nature table.

♥

Excursion: Swan River, South Perth

Will elected to learn about Birds for his first area of study for home school. So this is the basis for a lot of or work in literacy, science, art, technology in our first block. In particular we're looking at identification, classification, habitat, and features. The boys already had their Nature Tracker Bird Watching books from Tama's birthday in June, as well as their binoculars. Armed with those and 'The Guide to Wildlife of Perth and the South West' by Simon Neville  (which is excellent!) we headed out to the Coode Street Jetty in South Perth which has both the Swan River and a large pond.

Observing a dead seagull.

Quietly and slowly approaching a Pied Cormorant.

Lunch on Swan.

Most of the birds we spotted are photographed below- Will has labelled all but one! 

Willy Wagtail

Pied Cormorant

Rainbow Lorikeet and hard to spot Brown Honeyeater

Red Wattlebird

Sketching the Cormorant and Tern which were not in Volume 1 of their Bird Watching Book.

Caspian Tern

Pied Cormorant

Laughing Dove

Galah

Pacific Black Duck

Shoreline observations

Looking at the layers in the bank.

Jellyfish washed up the river.

Raven

A bit of history.

Australian Shelduck

Corella

Eurasian Coot

Black Swan

Purple Swamphen

Grebe

Ibis

Rainbow Lorikeet

Corellas

From here we'll be thinking about what birds we saw where. How they were behaving. About what their feet looked like and why. We'll also check out a couple of other local bird hangouts for comparison. Then we're planning some feather drawing and bird models from recycled materials.
 ♥

5 Days of Lunches