Making Stuff

I haven’t blogged for a while for two reasons.  Firstly, I was studying too and so my evenings were fairly full and secondly I was getting a bit bored with reciting the same old stuff about swimming and maths and all that.

Anyhoo we didn’t stop learning and doing stuff in the interim period – I just stopped talking about it.  I have of course been sneakily teaching them things when they don’t notice, forcing them to read stuff without them realising…

As an example this was part of my latest plan:

This was our Father’s Day present for Daddy. It is a very cool book full of father/son projects (if you want to have a sneaky peek inside try Amazon) I ordered it early and the boys were very excited by it.  I set James the task of reading the introduction and making a list of tools we would need to buy – and he did a brilliant job. I then let them both have a chance to browse and read it before we gave it to Dad so that they could decide on their favourite project.  Funny how reading wasn’t a chore when they were so excited about the different things they could make. This has basically been my strategy.  Worksheets and exercises have not gone down well and to an extent I can understand that.  It all seems a bit pointless.  So instead I find as many ways as I can to get them to read and write in “real life” situations.

This was their favourite.  And it just so happens that we have oodles of cardboard boxes.

And so yesterday afternoon, after a bit more reading we started on our own.  Pics of our progress will follow.

Bank Holiday Fun

I don’t normally blog about our weekends because at the moment we don’t do much “work” as I am usually studying myself.  But this weekend I was out and about a little bit as we had cousins visiting.

On Saturday we completed the teddy bear trail ourselves.  It was such a lovely sunny morning and really good fun looking for all of the teddies.  LG surprised me with her takeaway skills as she could update us on the number of teddies left to find.  A very nice way to spend our morning.

And while we were out Daddy was doing this:

We have grass!

On Sunday we had a very lovely trip to Wallington Hall.  It wasn’t the warmest day but we still had fun!

Picnic, icecream, den building, play park, football, rounders, alpacas…

Glorious weekend.

Cleaning up

Today ended up being a bit of a hotch potch.  The children all slept in so LG didn’t go to playgroup in the end as it took so long to wake up and get ready.  We are expecting visitors this weekend so I needed to give the house a bit of a tidy.  The three children all chipped in for an hour and tidied their playroom – and I must admit they actually did a great job with very little complaining.  I know!  No complaining!

As a reward I let the boys walk to the shop to buy three sherbet dipdabs – one for each of them.  LB1 impressed me a great deal with his maths ability.  He worked out the cost of three sherbet dipdabs and a bottle of diet coke for me.  It would come to £2.75 so I gave him £3.00 just to be sure and said he could keep the change to put in his jar of pennies.

He returned from the shop with a can of coke for me.  It wasn’t until later that I realised that was 54p less and he had pocketed the difference!  That boy will go far ;-)

While I was tidying the kitchen we started reading and talking about Greek Myths.  The conversation had started yesterday when I reminded the of the story of Echo and Narcissus after seeing some Narcissus while we were out.  This reminded me that we had a few books at home on Greek Myths so we got the out and started reading some of the stories together.  Unfortunately the story of Orpheus and Eurydice had LG in tears but we enjoyed some of the others.  We then compared them to some of the stories in the bible and talked about where these stories came from and why people would have tried to explain the world around them in this way.  It was particularly interesting to compare the story of Pandora with that of Eve.  It was a really good afternoons discussion of what was quite a difficult comcept and we will be doing more work next week on Ancient Greece to follow it up.

Art @ Hatton

First thing this morning we had to put our teddy outside.  What do you think?  Doesn’t he look good?  He has to stay outside until Sunday 12th May and if you’d like to take part in the teddy bear trail you can download a map here.

Today was a beautiful day.  At lunchtime we headed to the Hatton gallery for our art session where we made “Art books”.  These were simple books made and decorated on a theme.  As usual the children really enjoyed their time:

Then after art at the Hatton we went to see Nanny and Grandpa.  It was such a nice afternoon we took a walk to see if the frogspawn had hatched – so many tadpoles!

Here are our art books:

LG

LB2

LB1

Apologies I think I have a smudgy lens!

Sunshine

It was another lovely day today (I know – summer is here I think!) so after we had taken LG to playgroup I put a table and chairs outside and let the boys work out there while I did a few jobs.  They worked really hard on their maths.  Then because the weather was so nice we stopped off at the park after picking up LG from playgroup.

Well it would be rude not to!

We took sandwiches with us and headed straight to Enjoy-a-ball from the park.  LG played with her friend while I marked the boys’ maths books then we raced away as quickly as possible to make sure we could get to ballet on time.  A slight change of plan this week meant we were collecting a friend of LGs outside school and taking her to ballet with us.  Unbelievably the sun was still shining when we came out of ballet (the snow storms seem so long ago now) so we went to the park again on the way home.

LB1 and LB2 decided to walk home from the park on their own while I dropped the LGs friend off at home.  It was a bit nerve wracking for Daddy and I wondering if they would be sensible and walk all that way together carefully and without fighting… but we shouldn’t have worried.  They were excellent and very proud of their independence :)

Swimtastic!

LG was at playgroup this morning so the boys and I got back to our routine of swimming on Tuesdays.  LB1 did 20 lengths today!  LB2 is working on improving his stroke and we have been practising swimming underwater.  I bought some new goggles for LG after her last ones broke and have been borrowing them myself and trying to improve my own swimming (I have to keep up you know!)

It was another nice day so there was more chalk work on the drive outside.  LB1 brought his blocks outside and was helping LB2 learning his times tables.  Yeh for summer :)

Back to Life

By Thursday we were pretty much back to normal and picking up where we left off.  As it happened the weather wasn’t bad at all so we took the opportunity to walk to playgroup, go to the park, run around a bit with friends, scoot and even start digging over our front garden (well it was Friday afternoon – LG and I dug while the boys complained a bit!)  We’re hoping to get some turf put down soon so we will have a bit more space to play in and some space for plants – very exciting.

So today we went to the garden centre:

We recapped a bit on the work we did at Gibside about habitats, we read the labels on the plants to understand what conditions they needed to thrive.  Did some maths working out whether the turf at the garden centre was cheaper than the turf at B&Q.  Then we came home and did some out side writing with colourful chalks on our drive.  Unfortunately it rained before I could take a picture!

Then lastly we got inventive.  I don’t want to give you too many clues as we will explain properly when it is all finished – but it involved papier mache and it looks like this: