Just me and my big girl

I was in the very unusual position of having almost a whole afternoon with just K today.  A was off playing cricket as he usually does when weather allows on a Saturday afternoon and M was at a ballet show rehearsal (K decided she didn't want to take part as she doesn't like people looking at her).  We popped to the shops and stopped and chatted with various people, then came home and had lunch in the garden, practising some times tables (5x which she's now pretty good at and 3x, which needs more practice) while we did so.  K had her sewing stuff out first thing this morning making a pirate outfit for a teddy.  It's all made out of really quite small scraps of felt that we've got left from a bundle I bought ages ago.  In the morning she made the eye-patch, belt (there was a buckle in the button box - she hadn't done this in the traditional way, but when I showed her a belt and explained she saw what I meant.  I don't know if she decided to alter it though) and jacket (including a press stud to enable easier taking on and off); the teddy already had a red bow round his neck.  I'll try to get some photos of the individual garments tomorrow and what she made this afternoon.

The morning's work

And some more in the afternoon

She carried on working on that again in the afternoon, while listening to Shakespeare without the Boring Bits (a nice change from the Famous Five!) and K has decided that although she still does not want to read or listen to the tragedies, some of the histories might be acceptable if they're not tragic, so has now listened to Henry V too.

Project progress.

This afternoon we had a look at all of the bits about rainbows in our various reference/non-fiction books, most of which just reinforced what we had already talked about.  We ended reading the whole of My Best Book of Weather which was really interesting and we all learned quite a lot, for example, the different levels of the atmosphere, from the troposphere (where our weather happens) nearest the earth up to the exosphere furthest away.  As well as weather it covered climate, seasons, meteorology, ice ages and interglacial periods, the water cycle, renewable energy and climate change and pollution.  As you can imagine there were various side-shoot conversations as a result, such as the one about smog in Victorian London.

In addition to the reading and discussion K also added some more to her poster (I'm not allowed to see it until it's finished, although I must admit to having a little peek and did see the word 'refracted' on there) and she finished her rainbow picture. It's all done in tissue paper except the little flowers which are drawn on in pen.

The big picture

A close up to show the raindrops



Rainbows and Romania

We have made a bit of progress with the Rainbows project.  K has been continuing with her picture, which seems to be taking rather a long time but it is, I am told, 'nearly finished'.  We also had a look at some pictures of rainbows and moonbows online and talked about how, like in our garden experiment, you don't need rain for a rainbow and, in the case of a moonbow, you don't even need the sun! There are some fantastic photos here that we found of rainbows at Victoria Falls in Zambia (a particular point of interest because Granny and Big Grandad lived in Zambia for a couple of years and visited here).  So we talked about big waterfalls being a good place to see rainbows because of the spray from the waterfall.
K has appropriated the big piece of paper that was going to be 'our' poster and it's now hers.  She's even done a little bit of writing to add to it.  I've challenged her to write a bit more and include the word 'refraction' or 'refracted', we'll see if she takes me up on it.

Romania comes in because we've decided to go along to a fortnightly HE group over in Leicestershire, about half an hour away and try it out.  Having had ups and downs of how many 'things' we've done over the past few years, I think the balance has swung towards not enough at the moment (despite our jam-packed Thursday afternoons!).  So we're going along to the last one before the summer, which is going to be an Olympic Sports Day with an opening ceremony parade.  M has decided she does want to take part (K doesn't) and has been allocated Romania.  She's already made her flag, she found Romania on a wooden puzzle of Europe that we've got and we have been watching quite a few videos on youtube of Nadia Comaneci doing her stuff.  Absolutely mind-blowing!

The latest obsession and a project

As a child I liked what has become the latest obsession, but I did not have the means to subject my mum to it all day every day as K & M are doing to me.  In the olden days (aka when I was a child) there were books and I read them (a lot) and played them either on my own or with friends.  K & M do this too (well K tends to read them rather than M), but they also have, courtesy of the library, cds of books (and indeed tapes - although it must be said the tapes we'd borrowed really are on their last legs).  And what are these books, both paper and audio?  The Famous Five!  In a way I'm finding it rather entertaining listening to them from a very different perspective now (Leaving a child under threat of kidnap with pretty much total strangers?  Of course!  Then leaving this and four other children with just the cook to look after them and allowing them to roam the countryside?  Whyever not?).  It does, however, get a bit much when each of my children is listening to a different tape or cd of sometimes the same, sometimes a different story, in different rooms simultaneously!  We have Playmobil figures (some newly purchased with birthday money by M) that are no longer Swallows and Amazons, but are now characters from The Famous Five.  When playing at being them, M mostly likes to be Timmy the Dog (a role which my little brother was never particularly happy with when we played with certain friends, but then I always had to be Anne, which I wasn't really keen on either) and K is usually George, I usually get to be Aunt Fanny!

In other news, we have decided to do a project.  When I envisaged home educating before embarking on the journey, I think this was what I saw us doing.  My children had other ideas!  Very occasionally it's worked out, we have done one about swans (probably about 3 years ago now!) and one about 'How People Used to Live', which involved questionaires and interviews with all the 'old' people we have in our family (we're very lucky to have both of my mum's parents still with us, as well as a farming family on A's side, with folks in their 70s to ask about that side of things) and neighbours, most of whom were very happy to help out.  We also visited the Black Country Museum and Mr Straw's House among other relevant places.  The project we agreed we'd have a go at is Rainbows.  We've already done some experiments which fit in nicely, so we're going to look at myths and legends relating to them, maybe write a poem or a story or find some, do some rainbow related art (M's already done a picture of me standing at the end of a rainbow with my mouth open gazing at it, and K's started a collage).  Then when we've looked in all our non-fiction books for anything rainbow related, exhausted the library's offering on the subject and found what we can online, we are going to make a poster.  That's the plan anyway - another case of watch this space!

Disaster and illness...lead to outbreak of sewing!

K had a very sad disaster a couple of nights ago.  She managed to burn a hole in Emily, a treasured elephant microwaveable wheatbag, by leaving her too close to (on?) her bedside light.  She didn't want a new one, she wanted Emily.  Emily who stank and had a scorch mark on her back and a hole with very burnt edges.  I said I'd see what we could do and emptied the once pleasantly lavendar-smelling, now distinctly malodourous contents of her body into the bin through the small scorched hole.  This afternoon K took matters into her own hands and cut away the problem areas of her back, stuffed her with some stuffing we happened to have in and added some pretty patches for good measure. 

M's sewing came about due to illness; not hers but a friend's.  She was supposed to go just across the road yesterday while K was at Brownies to play.  The arrangement had been made because M is extremely sad and quite angry because she can't start Brownies until September, even though she is now 7, due to numbers.  When I had a phone call saying that A, her friend, wasn't feeling very well and wasn't up to having a friend to play, M was very disappointed.  Fortunately a trip to the park, just the two of us, cheered her up somewhat.  Today she appeared having made A a present because she'd been poorly, so we delivered it this afternoon along with a 'Baby Herman' (friendship cake starter).  Here's the little dog she made.

Outdoor fizzy science

Today I bought 8 litres of fizzy drinks.  Neither K nor M like fizzy drinks at all, and A and I aren't particularly bothered by them, but since we weren't planning on drinking them that didn't really matter.  It was, once again, back to our Science Experiments book to 'Make a soda shoot'.  We tried it with 4 different drinks, diet cola, cola, orangeade and lemonade.  Here's what the lemonade looked like:

How it works:  The dissolved carbon gas, which is what makes it fizzy, forms bubbles.  The microscopic pits on the surface of the mint that we added provide nucleation sites for the carbon gas bubbles to form much quicker than normal.  All that gas takes up more room than the liquid, so it has to escape out of the bottle - upwards!  Fast!

Daddy's Day and taking recycling to the max

We don't do Fathers' Day in a big way, but that didn't stop M waking me at 5.30am to ask if she could give him his card yet!  M made him a card, but K decided recycling was the way to go...

The very pretty card on the outside

The PS is lots of kisses and hugs, the PPS says 'Sorry about all the crossed out writing'

...it was a card she was given for her First Communion!

M is in the throes of writing birthday thank you letters and emails, which she's not particularly keen on doing, but I do insist on.  One of her presents from a friend who came to her party was a book, Daisy and the Trouble with Life, in which Daisy says 'The trouble with....... is.........' an awful lot.  M had an idea and came to me with what she'd decided she'd write: 'The trubule with presents is you have to rite thank yous!'

Dino-developments.

I'm not allowed to show the finished article, nor am I allowed to tell you who is working on it in the photo below.  But someone has now finished, to their satisfaction, the first version of a Lego dinosaur.  We found that there were a few pieces that had gone astray, and someone decided that she didn't want to do it exactly as the instruction tell you to (which I must admit my mildly OCD side did struggle with a little), but it looked very dinosaury indeed.

More dinosaur making has been happening here too.  K made M a little tyrannosaurus when she was poorly earlier in the week out of little pompoms and sparkly bits.  Before I was even up this morning, I had been presented with the parasaurolophus below and a short time later A had been given the stegosaurus, both of which, I am sure you'll agree, are really rather cute!

In other news K and I have been talking times tables.  She decided a while back she wants to learn them, but whenever I've suggested doing something about it she's chosen something else.  The current plan is to learn the 2, 5, 9, 10 and 11 times first, and we've already been practising the clever finger trick way of doing the 9 times.  Watch this space!

Losing the rhythm.

A fortnight or so ago we seemed to be just getting into a good rhythm and with it being much more productive.  Then along came a Granny, a birthday, a birthday party and a day of much sickness on M's part and things have completely gone to pot.  Ho hum.  We've agreed we're going to try to get back into what we'd found seemed to be working rather nicely.  Wish us luck!
In other news both girls have made/are making dinosaurs.  Instead of a party bag, M gave each of her party guests a dinosaur sewing kit when they left at 5.30pm.  K had finished making hers by bedtime, although she found it necessary to modify it slightly.  The pack said it was a tyrannosaurus, but it had 3 claws on it's arms (which as everybody who has met my children knows, means it couldn't possibly be a tyrannosaur as they had only 2), so rather than rename it an allosaurus she trimmed one of the claws off each arm.

M hasn't started her sewing kit yet, but she was given some Dino Creator Lego for her birthday and has started (having first made a dog, freehand so to speak)  making one of the 3 options, although I haven't been told which yet.  She only started this evening, but it seems to be going well so far.

Shakespeare - with and without the boring bits.

We, that is K & I (M was most emphatically *not* interested), watched Twelfth Night this week.  I re-read the book first, which both girls happily listened to, then M disappeared while K & I snuggled up and watched.  I'm enjoying 'actor spotting' in these BBC versions and it occurred to me that it's seems somehow wrong that for K Felicity Kendall will be Viola and Robert Hardy will be Sir Toby Belch from Twelfth Night instead of Barbara Good and Siegfried Farnon.  Both girls have been enjoying listening to the cd that K found at the library: More Shakespeare without the boring bits, and we'll be asking if they can get the previous one next time we go to the library, as that has Twelfth Night on it.
I'm pretty confident that when we go to the RSC next month, K will be able to follow and enjoy the play, I'm not so sure about M, but we'll see.

A delicious decorating day.

Decorating cakes that is!  I made some fairy cakes at Granny's suggestion and today K, M & Granny got busy decorating them with a mostly red, white and blue theme.

The result of the cake decorating - cakes...

...and children (I don't think it shows up too well but K has a blue speckled chin and M has blue lips!)

Then later on, after some seed sowing and watching a David Attenborough dvd 'Meat Eaters', there was more decorating.  Just M this time.  You may be aware that there is a very special event tomorrow, beside which the Queen's Diamond Jubilee pales into insignificance: M's 7th Birthday.  She decided to decorate her own cake.

The work in progress.

The finished article - a self portrait, wearing a party hat and sticking her tongue out!

Granny and the Jubilee bird watching walk

Granny arrived yesterday for the long weekend but mostly for M's birthday (which is on Jubilee Day).  This afternoon we went for a 'Jubilee bird watching walk' aka a stroll along the canal.  We wondered if we might see a pair of swans with some cygnets.  We didn't see any swans but we plenty of other water birds...


Mostly coots,




and coot chicks,







moorhens,




moorhen chicks,

and a few mallards (but no ducklings).



I think I've got those chicks the right way round!  We were reasonably confident at the time because of the nearby parents, but not 100% sure now.  K & Granny were keeping a tally of how many of each type they saw and M just wanted to make a note of the different types.  Later on I talked to K, after Granny had suggested it, about how you could make charts to show what you'd seen and the different sorts you might use: pie charts, bar graphs and pictographs (and showed her those examples).  She was interested, but I'm not sure yet if she was interested enough to want to do one either for the birds she saw or for something else.  We'll see.