More Stone Age Jewellery

What do you do when you aren’t feeling well, and you don’t have the luxury of subbing in a supply teacher? Well, you might declare free choice on the workbooks, so long as your students turn in a sufficient number of pages for marking. Or, you might resign yourself to the fact that a homeschool doesn’t exactly include parenting sick leave and crack on with it. As it so happens, I did both.

The kids were good about doing a fairly random assortment of workbooks. (Well, I did say they could have free choice and they gleefully took full advantage.) By way of thanks, I said we’d do something fun in the afternoon, as they’re quite fond of Art and Design Technology.

We made fake animal bones and teeth, from white air-drying clay*, a few days ago. You just mould the clay into small misshapen lumps (bones), and triangular sausages with slightly curved ends (teeth). Then you use the end of a small paintbrush to push a hole all the way through, to turn it into a bead.

Now that our beads were thoroughly dry, we had fun turning them into necklaces and bracelets. Well, the kids had fun. I struggled slightly, with tying sliding knots for the bracelets. (The necklaces are just boring double knots, as they don’t need to be size adjustable.)

By the time I remembered the spelling words, we’d already finished for the day. However, I wrote up the next dozen Fry Words for their spelling lists, while I was grading the workbooks. They’ll practice their spelling words through the week, and do a spelling test on Friday. Unless they decide they’d like to do it sooner, like last week!