just another morning here

I declared a project day today … the girls both worked on vaguely Greek type activities. We looked at the Greek alphabet, the similarities and differences between it and our alphabet today, and they both wrote their names using the Greek letters. Then we looked at some key patterns and how they repeat, using squared paper. Anna did a couple of extra things too – an introduction to Prime numbers using Eratosthenes’ sieve, and a page about some Greek Gods. Most of this was cobbled together from various books borrowed from the resources centre, I just picked out things that looked fun … and it seemed to go down well!

While the girls were working Josiah sat and looked through a DK History of the World book which I’d given him and challenged him to find the Ancient Greeks in it – which he did! He then went on to look at pictures all through the book, shouting loudly each time he spotted a soldier, armour, or weapons of any description – and in a History book there are plenty of those – it began to get a bit wearing after a while, but lovely to have him with us and excited about reading/looking at things in a book.

Then they went out to the garage and got the paints out, I’d said they could do whatever they wanted, and they proceeded to paint pages full of more key patterns and various greek-related things! I’m still working on the idea of a big papier mache Trojan horse … big enough to put playmobil people inside, perhaps, but that’s my art & craft project …

While the kids were painting Steve and I got through a whole load of filing that had been gathering dust for ages, then we gave the kids the job of shredding the unwanted paperwork for the recycling bin – which they thought was a fab job! It turned out rather well as we decided to cash in some rather crappy life policy things that we’d taken out after we had Anna but before we had a house and other responsibilities … so now that we’ve replaced those with much better provision it seemed a bit pointless to be paying out for them every month. They had minimal cash-in value but it will still be nice to have some unexpected money, should go a bit of a way to paying off the credit card! A loan that we took out three years ago has just finished, too, and rather than enjoying the belt-loosening, Steve has arranged to pay more off the mortgage each month – a goal we are keen to achieve before the due date, iyswim! We had a friend round for lunch which was nice, then Steve had to go back to work – weekend’s over

This afternoon was filled up with playing at home with Mollie, then in the park while Anna had her cello lesson. This evening we’ve read a bit more of Little House in the Big Woods (did I mention that I’d started that? My first real foray into reading aloud … I’m still not really enjoying the reading part but it is nice to sit and be with the children sharing something together) which Josiah is enjoying just as much as the girls are, if not more. He’s counting guns, and so far we’ve got Pa’s gun, Grandpa’s gun, and Uncle Peter’s gun … Pa making bullets and shooting bears makes for a damn fine story in Joe’s eyes

Plan for the evening is to watch TV and use the exercise bike for once (another thing gathering dust ) in the vain hope that I might be able to get relatively in shape before Centerparcs …

Oh, and before I forget, photos of The Gap, which, as predicted, appeared late yesterday afternoon … and the strange but very ‘Abigail’ photos that we took en route …

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2004 at 20:24 and is filed under art and craft, english, general, growing up, history, maths, music, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.