Home learning: creating a family tree

Last week’s theme for our home-learning was ‘Family and Friends’ and one of the activities for this was to make a family tree picture. I remember having to do family trees at school myself – and being part of a big blended family meant that I always found it difficult to fit everyone on my piece of paper! Sophie had a much easier time of it, creating her family tree picture complete with leaves for grandparents, parents, herself and her siblings.

 

 

We started off by using paint pens to create the tree trunk and branches on a big sheet of cardboard.

 

 

We cut out a leaf shape for each family member and stuck a small photo of them to the leaf. Sophie then wrote each person’s name and their relationship to her on the leaf.

 

 

She placed the leaves carefully on the tree – putting the grandparents at the top, then Mummy and Daddy below their parents and finishing off with Jessica, Thomas and herself towards the bottom of the tree. Once we were happy with the positions of all the leaves, Sophie glued them in place.

 

 

While Sophie was gluing the leaves in place, I wrote the French words for each of the family members on pieces of card and cut them out into flower shapes. Sophie then had to match the correct words to each family member.

 

 

I love that this activity was great for combining two different areas of home learning as well as being a fun craft activity to do together. It was a great way of helping Sophie to remember French words for family members too.  It was also lovely to stop and talk about each member of the family as we were sticking the photos to the leaves and putting the leaves on the tree. We got to talk about my dad, who died before Sophie was born and it was so nice to be able to share some of my memories of him with Sophie. It was also lovely to remember Jessica and talk about Sophie’s memories of her.

 

Once we finished making our family tree, Sophie made some paper dolls of the five of us in our family. I loved listening to her chatter away as she coloured each person in – telling me why she was choosing certain colours, or adding particular details. It was another good opportunity for her to share memories of Jessica. Sophie will always include Jessica when talking about our family, and will often briefly mention something about Jessica as we go through the days. She doesn’t often share more in-depth memories though and this activity helped give her the space to do so.