Wet Wednesday

We are wusses. A bit of rain and we ducked out of camping on top of Filey Brigg. We did however, brave the elements and join some of our HE and non-HE friends on Filey Beach for a fossil hunt.

 

 We were accompanied by two local experts who identified every fossil, rock and bit of beach glass for the children - and adults.
I found a bit of ammonite, a couple of bits of shells fossils and a piece of chalk. The latter made me very happy as it tied in so well with a project we are working on.
The Girl went off to catch crabs with some other children and Boykin was fascinated by a large dead bird he found on the edge of the sea. 

And one of the dads earned everyone's gratitude when he fired up his  Kelly Kettle and brewed us all some tea :)

 After standing in the drizzle for the best part of two hours, we decided it was time to get warm and dry. We waved goodbye to our friends and took my mum to the Filey Museum. It's a very small museum, but it has some interesting exhibits and the chance to handle some real artefacts. The Girl enjoyed tidying the doll's house and they both enjoyed brass rubbing but I think it was the old fashioned working till that really grabbed their attention.

   

 The bloke who was working there that afternoon was very friendly and told us lots of stories about how his grandma did the washing with the posser and dolly tub. It's well worth a visit and only costs £2.50 per adult. Children are free.

We got even wetter when we came out of there as it had started raining more heavily. We walked to the park and down to the front where we realised, by the clock at the RNLI station, it was high tide. We shivered and got splashed by waves and observed how they moved and changed and crashed against and through each other. A great follow up to the work we did on waves when we tested Picture Book Explorers - The Mousehole Cat. I love it when life links into topics, adding to and building on their knowledge :)

We ended the day with fish and chips - as is only right and proper at the seaside. The fish was gorgeous and is caught locally. I think the shop was called CJ's and was just at the top of the road up from the front. We were drip wet through by the time we got back to the car. A good but tiring day. So glad we didn't camp ;)

 Ooh, and we saw newts too :)

 

Let the Children Play

I've been feeling a bit guilty recently, worried that what with the structured mornings and all the out of home activities they do that they have little time left for just being and playing.  For Boykin, play seems to have become synonymous with computers. I was really concerned about the length of time he was spending doing this with his friends, but having sat in a room with three boys on three laptops, all playing Minecraft, his 'play' seems less alien to me even though the language they speak doesn't. The Girl is getting older and the shape of her 'play' is changing. Time to herself often includes a stereo and a book - or nail varnish.
However, when she's in the mood for it, The Girl happily still joins in games with Boykin and is actually VERY good at encouraging him (and his friends) to play something that doesn't involve little pixels. Her ability to instigate imaginative games makes me wonder if it's due to her being 4 years older and always having taken the lead, or is it that her early years of HE involved so much more free play. Boykin started doing sit-down work at a much younger age than she did because he wanted to join us at the table. Don't get me wrong, a lot of his activities involved play and he was never forced to be there but due to his nature and circumstance, he wasn't quite so free-range as she had been.
Currently, the dining room floor is under occupation again. This time by an animal rescue park made from Playmobil and The Girl's beloved Schleich animals.
Yesterday, on being informed which of the trees in the garden had to come down, I was informed that the particularly awkward sycamore was in fact the look out mast for a pirate ship.
Needless to say, the state of my floor and the tree protestations have instilled me with a sense of relief. Phew! My children play =D
Play was much easier to recognise and quantify when they were younger. The style of our Home Eduction was different and most of their learning was happening through play. Their schooled friends came round to play much more often. But as they've got older they have more homework and some have moved away, and my children go to more after school activities giving them fewer opportunities to get together. Play still happens, in one form or another, at the groups they go to, but it happens more and more away from me which is, of course, part of the proper and natural order of things as they move towards independence.
Play still features strongly in our Home Ed lives though. They are still very enthusiastic when it comes to narration - mostly done through acting out and role play. We use maths games in addition to MEP to build skills, helping to keep numbers and maths concepts fun rather than frightening. They are old enough to know that they are learning through these games and I'm lucky enough to know that they love learning and are eager to learn more.
I'm so happy to see that they still have time to play in and amongst the busiest of days. Days when I feel like all I have done is chivvy them on with their writing; forced nagged encouraged them to finish their maths page; have them test activities for the latest Picture Book Explorers; practise their music; extract them from screens; remind them to get on with xyz that they need to do for such-and-such group; do their household jobs and sit in the car while I drive them from one thing to another.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I love the Home Ed life most dearly but, as with everything, it is easy to lose sight of what is important in it all. Having time to play is, and always has been, a VERY important reason for Home Educating as far as I am concerned. Play may change shape and have other names during a person's lifetime, but I believe it is important for all people, young and old. I am grateful that my children are free to play, especially as the sun is shining again :0)

Nature Watching

The weather's been glorious here so we've all been out in the garden a lot more. The grass is finally cut; potatoes for our annual potato growing project are earthed up; peas are staked and beds are weeded. It's always reassuring to know that there is learning happening during these every day life skills projects and The Girl told Boykin all about why potatoes need earthing, saying she knew "because we did it last year" :)
Her own little garden is being very well cared for and today she will be measuring the space for the path that she is making. When the car is fixed (new exhaust backbox and a pair of rear shock absorbers), we'll pop to the garden centre and buy some more bags of gravel to complete it. Luckily, I already have some of that stuff that covers the ground to stop the weeds growing through the gravel. It's been at the top of my cellar head for abut 5 years now 'cos I knew it would come in useful one day ;)
All this gardening has given us plenty of opportunity to watch the wildlife around us. Our next-door neighbours have a varied selection of birdfeeders on their washing line and we are always delighted to see the different birds that feed there. As well as the more usual jackdaws and starlings, we have also seen a woodpecker, a pair siskins, a jackdaw and lots of tits and finches. This is a massive improvement on the limited number of bird species we saw when we first moved in here. We have a couple of robins that bob around our garden and I know there is a thrush's nest too. Boykin really enjoys watching the birds and using his bird book to find out what they are.

He was quite chuffed when we went to  a local NT plant fair and got to see some birds of prey. This is a merlin.

Boykin wasn't very happy earlier this week though, when I pulled back the black plastic covering the old compost heap. He really doesn't like insects and I excitedly called them over to see all the tiny ants hurriedly trying to move the much larger white eggs back into the heap. No photos sadly :(
He was however, very interested in the bee nest that The Girl discovered in the bench where she keeps the stuff for the rabbits. There's a very small pile of hay in one corner and we all spent some time watching an adult bumble bee and two very much smaller bumble bees crawling in and out of the hole they'd made. They totally ignored us and buzzed about quite happily.

The weather has been so good that The Girl even got to do some wild swimming with friends :)

Saturday Snippets...

...on Sunday ;)
I'm joining in with a linky from the Liveotherwise blog, so these are for yesterday, even though I'm posting today :)

Watching: Sweet Charity because we really weren't in the mood for Warhorse. The Girl decided it had a rubbish ending but we all loved the 60s dance sequences especially 'The Rhythm of Life' with Sammy Davis Jr.

Reading: Our Island Story to them because I'm determined to get to the end and Wombling Free to myself whilst watching Sweet Charity (cos I've seen it a few times before and I want to know if the book's worth reading to them).

Cleaning: The tea caddy shelf in the kitchen which has the spice trays under it. Jobs a good 'un :)

Shopping: Mainly at a local table-top sale. I got a fab new bread-maker and managed to restrain myself from buying anything else.

Cooking: Sainsbury's ready-made curries cos it's our Saturday night treat and it means I don't have to wash up on Sunday :)

Feeling: Tired from an exhausting week which started out with a deadline to meet for this, included three separate Home Ed activities on three days running and a day of baking followed by doing a stall at the table-top sale. Proud of my gorgeous and generous children who raised money with some of their friends by organising a cake stall to raise money for Kimbilio, a street children project in the Congo.

Snapshot: The Girl is thinking about what IGCSEs to take and is building up her essay writing skills, slowly but surely. Boykin is full of energy and is delighted with the new trampoline and is forever leaping on and off things. Parkour has really developed his confidence in his physical abilities.

Bradford Cathedral

We went on a Home Ed workshop trip to Bradford Cathedral. It is a beautiful building with a very long history, there's even a fragment of the original Anglo-Saxon cross in the wall.
The staff were lovely, friendly and knowledgeable. The activities were interesting and we all learned lots.

The Girl was interested in the Queen's Maundy Thursday in 1997. This lead to discussions about Maundy money and the difference between a Cathedral and an parish church.
Boykin was most impressed by a hand-carved cross in one of the side chapels, it being the craftsman's first ever piece of carving. He's been telling everyone the story of the little bird on the handlebars of the wheelchair, included by the artist in memory of a member of the congregation who died while the work was in progress.

I was interested to learn that Bradford was 'waste' in the times of the Doomsday Book and that during the Civil War there had been a siege and the tower of the Cathedral had been protected by wrapping it in woolpacks.
There's currently an exhibition on about William Morris windows. The cathedral has one but my camera ran out of battery before I could take a photo so this is from one of the exhibition panels.

It's definitely well-worth a visit.

Felting

I have been feeling that things have been a bit hit and miss here the last week or so learning-wise, mainly because I've been working really hard to get this month's Picture Book Explorers file up for sale. It's been exciting because it's the 10th one and I'm also hosting a giveaway for it on my other blog :)
As I come to write this post I realise that loads of learning has been happening. I know that learning happens all the time as we live our lives anyway, but that can be very personal and hard to see sometimes. I've been working very intensely on the computer to meet my deadline and have felt that my kids have been left to go feral their own devises more so than usual.
Actually, they both did the PBE in question, so there was plenty of learning going on there, now that I come to think of it.....
Little life lessons they have learned are that you need to show your half-fare bus pass to avoid being charged full-fare and that if you empty the contents of the shed all over the garden you need to put said contents back again. They also learned that four women and a trail of children can carry a trampoline with attached net down the middle of the road from one house to another and that our back steps are slippy.
We've slid a bit with the old MEP books, but we'll be back on the case next week now that all the Bank Holidays are out of the way. They're still enjoying Mangahigh though as well as playing plenty of board games that use maths skills and they've been enjoying maths activities from our Friday fun maths book,  Ginn Extension Mathematics: Investigations, Games and Puzzles Level 5. (These are so good, I've got the next level book waiting for them.)
Yesterday we had book group and all the families were there which was lovely :) The older ones discussed their own books and the younger ones discussed Five Children and It which has been very popular in our house. We got the TV series on DVD from Lovefilm and we heard that the new film is a bit rubbish. My children als requested that I read the Jacqueline Wilson book Four Children and It too. Next month's book group read is to be The Phoenix and the Carpet which also has a BBC TV series as well, if I remember rightly :)
Today, we went to a felting workshop in a local Art gallery. It was open to he general public and was attended by four Home Ed families. We've been to different felting workshops over the years and each time we've come away with more skills. Today we worked around a plastic template and made mini T-shirts for the Tour de France. Very enjoyable :)

 

 

We were all three of us very chuffed with our creations :)

Art Appreciation :)

Win a Children's Book & Learning Pack

Over on the BOWblog there is a giveaway to celebrate the publication of the 10th Picture Book Explorers pack.

Written to accompany I Took the Moon for a Walk
Packed with hands-on, fully researched learning activities.
Designed primarily for Home Educators but perfect for all famillies to use with their children

There are 3 prizes to win, and it's open to worldwide entrants.
Be sure to follow the instructions on the Rafflecopter carefully.
And Good Luck!