Number Hop Activity

I've teamed up with education.com to bring you another fun learning activity for your little ones.

This activity great for exercising growing muscles and will also help your child learn their numbers.  Balance and co-ordination will also be put to the test as they make their way from number to number.

As we currently have an Arctic theme in our home ed at the moment I used the idea of hopping from ice burg to ice burg, but you could do the leap from theme that education.com suggested to me.

Here are their instructions for the activity, then I will share with you how I adapted this idea for my own children:

What you need:

• 20 sheets of varying colour of construction paper or white sheets of paper for the ice burg hop.
• 1 black marker.

What you do:

1. Help your child set out the sheets of construction paper on a flat surface.
2. Then, using the black marker, let your child draw a number on each card (the numbers 1-20, one per card).
3. Next, help her place the cards on the ground in a line, about a foot apart. You could do variations such as placing the cards counting up, counting down, even numbers, or odd numbers.
4. To play the game, your child should stand at one end of the number line.
5. Call out, “HOP.”
6. Encourage your child to hop onto the nearest lily pad and call out the number.
7. She wins when she makes it to the end of the line, having successfully called out all of the numbers.

Number Leap Frog is a great way to build a strong math foundation for future learning. Not to mention it's a silly and fun way to get lots of exercise and keep those minds and bodies active! 

We adapted this idea to our Arctic theme by using white sheets of paper as "ice burgs".  We played by rolling a die and Boris had to identify the number on the die, then translate that to the written numbers on the "ice burgs".  He had to hop in random directions, sometimes far, sometimes near to get to the right number.  He then had a go at writing some random numbers of his own onto more sheets of paper then insisted that I do the ice burg hop!

It was a fun activity and great for helping to learn number identification.  I felt like I could have extended the idea by using two dice and getting Boris to add the numbers together.

Let me know if you have a go at this idea, I would love to see how you make it work for your children. 

Distraction Vs Immersion

Well hello 2018, we didn't get off on the right foot did we.  Let's start again!

Let me explain; The house of mama began this year with a two night stay in the high dependency unit of our local hospital for our four year old, beginning on New Years eve 2017 (which I spent alone, cleaning the oven).  It was an incredibly worrying, upsetting and stressful time and I am unspeakably glad it's over.

It was most certainly not the start to the year I had in mind. My plans were for an evening of relaxing, drinking some rose with my husband, and watching Jools Holland.  Followed by a weeks of sorting and tidying the house, clearing out junk, planning our home ed year and filling in my shining life workbook (which is actually just a notebook where I am answering the questions from last years workbook because #onabudget).  The reality was quite different and something I'd sooner forget.  Therefore New Year has officially started this week for me and was precursed by a wonderful "Word of The Year" Workshop run by my lovely friend Vicki from vickiclubleymoore.com.

I've been choosing a word of the year for about five years now, but it's only really properly informed my year since I began the Shining Life programme by Leonie Dawson, because with her workbook I was able to delve deeper into the hows and whys or word-of-the-year.  This will be my third year. I have found it a really useful and inspiring tool to help me focus on how I want my year to unfold, how I want to feel and what I want my year to look like.

When I looked back over the past year I realised I felt like it had gone really really quickly and I had blinked one to many times and missed it.  I feel like the past year has been filled with distraction.  I have constantly distracted myself from real life by looking on social media, rading books or simply hiding away in the kitchen, at every possible moment.  And I don't want to look back over my year, over my life; and think that I wasted it all on Facebook.

I really felt like I wanted next year to be a year of being present, living more in the moment and really immersing myself in life.  Home ed life, home life, family life, spiritual life...  I wanted to feel like I am fully experiencing everything the year has to bring; to touch, taste, smell, hear and feel absolutely everything, so I end the year full of wonderful memories.

For these reasons and more that I won't bore you with I have chosen the word IMMERSE for my word of the year.

(My rather crinkles word-of-the-year art that I did at Vicki's workshop!)

I want to be fully immersed in life in 2018 not distracted from it.

It will be interesting to see how the year goes because right now it feels a bit like wading through mud.  I haven't shaken the feelings of sadness surrounding my little boy's awful hospital stay and I am struggling to find my rhythm. It's difficult as a full time, home educating mama to feel any sense of beginning and end, any sense of a task completed, of a job well done because everything is a constant cycle and I am almost always wanted and needed for the next task.  From laundry to cooking meals to ferrying children to different places and trying to squeeze in house work, my life is not my own at the moment and nothing feels like it's going my way.  Right now my immersion feels more like drowning than the involvement and engrossment I had in mind.

According the Thesaurus.com the antonym to Immersion is Surrender.  This feels particularly poignant at the moment.  Surrendering to life as I know it is all I can do right now.  I have the choice to either surrender to the messy, chaotic majesty of this wonderful life or I can try to fight it and end up drowning, because no amount of fighting or running away is going to change things.  I can only surrender and get on with it. But one thing is for sure, I won't be distracting myself from it any longer because I don't want to miss it.  As hard as it is someday (everyday at the moment) this is my one glorious, cluttered, manic life and I'm diving right in.