The Ocean, the ocean

I've always loved writing, not so much for work (though I was doing communications and PR work for a telco for almost 4 years and another 3 odd years with an IT company) but just for the joy of it and being able to air out my thoughts and possibly link up with like-minded people to exchange ideas and resources.

I have been toying with the idea for a bit as to how often I am able to sustain the updating of my blog especially when I am a FTWM (full time working mum) and a HS parent. But I will try and see where this lead us. :)

With that, this would be my first official post on homeschooling. :)

I did this theme with the little one quite a while ago and our style has since been improvised along the way but I believed the 2 of us enjoyed this theme a lot and hence, I wanted to share this.

With such a young child, I like the concept of lapbooks as it is thematic. I like that with a theme, it is easy for me to research on materials (easy for googling and for searching for books at the library). I also like that with a bit of creativity and web search, I am able to introduce to Dumpling, the concept of Science and Math.

Signing to whale

Pretend play - fish

Creating our own Ocean scenes from an Evan Moor eBook

Memory card games.

And I placed it all into a lapbook. Some of the books we used for this theme are in the background including a phonics reader from Usborne "Shark in the Park". Ocean is an easy theme and you can get many resources just by googling for it. But you can also locate some printables and craft ideas here and I printed a lot of them here.

What's salt to do with this theme? This is the science bit...

Learning about "sink"...

and "float"!

It seems like a simple exercise but this actually provides the child with good foundation for "Math" as it teaches the child about "differences" and "similarities". With an older child, you can start to encourage the child to think deeper by asking questions such as why things float, the difference between fresh water and sea water, density, etc.

And of course, with most of our homeschooling activities, a field trip!

Enjoy!