Saturday 23 November 2013

Worksheets by moonlight

I love how flexible our life is and how we can do 'work' when Small feels enthusiastic, rather than to a timetable.

Tonight Small is doing his 'sleep is for the weak' routine and shortly before midnight he asked if we could get the project folder out.

The project folder is a ring binder that, every few months, I fill with print outs, crafts ideas and worksheets that I think Small might enjoy. The Nature Detectives website is great for seasonal print outs and I add ideas I have seen in books or online. I also use it to store pictures and work he has done when we change our seasonal display. It's a great way to show far away family members the things we get up to.

Tonight, at around midnight, Small asked to do a food chains worksheet we printed out from Nature Detectives. He had never done food chains before and was really proud of himself when he worked them all out. He even suggested an extra food chain and noticed that the chains seemed to start with plants and of course (most!) plants don't have mouths to eat other creatures, so I explained that plants get their energy from the sun. We finished off by drawing a food web, starting with a tree and looking at how lots of different animals can live on one tree and that one buzzard, for example, might eat several of the smaller animals. It helped him see that not everything is as linear as our initial food chains and that cutting down the tree could take food away from lots of animals, not just the ones who eat the seeds and leaves of that tree.

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