just another morning here

Mother’s day means I get to decide what we do in a day; today that meant a beautiful walk on Dartmoor, finding as many geocaches as humanly possible en route! We popped to Sainsbury’s on the way and bought treat picnic foods – ate half as brunch before we walked and the other half after our walk at around 4pm – ideal, I don’t even have to cook tonight now!

I opted for one of the newly opened Drake’s Trail walks on Dartmoor, near Burrator Reservoir These walks even have podcasts that go with them, so I added those to all the ipods for extra interest, and they were really well done, interesting and dare I say it, educational! I would definitely do the other walks in the series, even without any caches near them. This walk, however, just *happened* to be near a good 10 caches

And we took some photos (none of cache 7 or 9 though, for some reason!). Lots more on flickr for anyone interested but this is my special Mother’s Day self timer shot. I don’t actually like it as much as the one that didn’t quite work, but Steve said I had to keep this one as the lines were right.

Walking on Dartmoor is always lovely – especially beautiful on a sunny spring day like today … I think the rest of the family got bored with the caching but at least they were all easy finds and as it was Mother’s Day they weren’t allowed to moan! Poor Abbie struggled with her boots too, she only remembered half way round that they are too small for her now – she spent half the time walking along the Plymouth & Dartmoor railway in her socks! At least it wasn’t wet on the ground!

Got home and had cups of tea, baths, a bit of music practice, and I’m going to have to fold some laundry later.
For now, we’re finishing off the day by watching Casino Royale together, in anticipation of the release of Quantum of Solace this week – none of us have seen it yet and I’m going to buy it, nothing like a bit more Daniel Craig on the shelf

School had a Victorian School day in aid of Children In Need today, so lots of the children joined in and dressed up. Some of the teachers looked great, and I think they all had a fun day. They played Victorian games in the playground, and did some lessons in rote-learning style, as well as addressing all their teachers as ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’. No corporal punishment though, unfortunately

At the beginning of term Josiah decided he’d like to do a project and lapbook on the Romans, so this is a round up of the things we’ve done.

Firstly we went to the library and picked up as many books on the Romans as we possibly could. Josiah particularly enjoyed reading Usborne’s ‘The Story of Rome’ himself, it was just the right level.

I confess to having cheated slightly; while googling for Roman Lapbooks I found an Ancient Rome Lapbook pdf pack at the HomeschoolEstore.com, and figured I might as well save myself the hassle of planning the lapbook out for myself so I bought the pack. I must say I was fairly impressed with it, it was very comprehensive and I think both of us benefited from not having the think up the ideas for things to do in the lapbook! It helped us to break the project down into manageable study chunks, too – as we did each section (food, clothing, specific people & places, etc) we learned about them separately. We didn’t do all of it, but we used the sections that we fancied learning about, and Joe’s lapbook turned out really well.

Steve took Josiah to the RAMM museum in town, and they inspected lots of Roman things (coins, mosaic pieces, games etc.), dressed up, learnt some Latin words [wasn't impressed at the suggestion of learning more Latin though!] etc.

We had a trip to the Roman Baths in Bath, which was great.

We took a trip to a rather lovely mosaic shop in town, Opus Mosaic, and bought ourselves a few tiles to make a mosaic with. Actually the lady in the shop (its owner) was really helpful and it turned out that her teenage daughter had been home educated so we had a lovely chat about that as well! Abbie enjoyed helping with this – and it was a great opportunity to bring in some maths and ‘planning’ skills as Josiah mapped out his design on squared paper before doing the tiles. Still need to get some grout to finish it off!

We’ve touched on a fair bit of maths; not only with Roman numerals which Joe enjoyed doing, but also due to discussing the timeline and calendar we ended up talking about negative numbers a fair bit, and adding/subtracting them. Josiah looked at a few of the Roman emperors in his lapbook, and worked out their ages from their birth/death dates, some of which were fully BCE, some were CE so easy to work out, and some crossed the change between BCE and CE. Can’t quite get the hang of this BCE and CE thing, I kept slipping into BC and AD by accident. Anyway, I digress – he got on fine with the maths of it!

The project and lapbook were pretty much finished by half term, then we discovered that during half term week the museum were putting on some Romans activities so we went and did some of those, which was a great end to the project. I think Joe would say he’d enjoyed most of it, well all apart from the writing, anyway! He is such a reluctant writer, he must have actually written about 10 sentences at most.

Weblinks we used:
History For Kids Rome Links
BBC Schools Romans
Roman Empire – children’s section
The Romans in Britain

We got home very late last night (early this morning?) from a good week away. We were incredibly grateful for a week of fantastic weather, bar one night of very heavy rain at the beginning of the week it was great. Finally!

The wet night did make the whole site a bit muddy for a couple of days but nothing too terrible on our side of the site anyway. My parents did have a bit of a Kessingland week in their awning though, and ended up throwing their groundsheet away rather than cleaning it! Think swamp mixed with cowpats and you have the general idea, yuk.

We were camped with friends from one of the other churches in the network, which was nice, because we were the only campers there from our own local church, so it meant that the children had friends to play with, I had more hair to braid (!!) and we had friends to laze around and share coffee and wine with

Saw a number of old friends throughout the week which was nice, and we also saw rather a lot of my youngest brother as well, who clearly had too much time on his hands and kept coming back to be clambered on by small girls – lovely to have him around though.

The organised ‘churchy’ activities (for want of a better word!) consisted of various meetings most mornings and in the evenings too, as well as sports and other stuff going on during the afternoon. The children all had groups to go to, which they really enjoyed and got lots out of. I was on a team helping with the 3 and 4 year olds during the morning sessions, which was a lot of fun.

Managed to get to most of the evening meetings as well, and generally felt like it was good for me, the spiritual kick up the backside was long overdue.

We had a couple of free days as well, where we escaped the site (it was *so* noisy!) and did our own thing. On the first day we went to Herstmonceux Science Centre where we met some of the Screamteam and most of the Monsterteenies, and had a fab day there. (I didn’t ever get my email from the Art Machine by the way, what happened to that I wonder?!)

From there we found a swimming pool in Hailsham – decided that was the easiest way to clean all our children at once

On our other day off we ended up in Eastbourne visiting Ros & Tony at Bonners Music Superstore. Steve made himself at home immediately and made a long phonecall but for some reason didn’t want me to take a photo Anna made herself at home too We didn’t spend too much money though!

Mooched around Eastbourne for a while, then went swimming again, then ended up at Pevensey Castle on the way back to the campsite. Fab castle with lots of interesting different parts added over the years. Tried desperately to get a picture of all three children looking nice at the same time but after four attempts I gave up!

We spent a fair bit of time enjoying Ashburnham again; it is a gorgeous site. Tried hard to get the camera to do things it isn’t really cut out to do with the lens I was using but the results weren’t too bad, all things considered.

As an aside, my Flickr post bar has miraculously sprung back into life tonight after months of not recognising me as a user – don’t know what happened there but I’m very glad to have it back!

Got a bit of washing done today but generally lazed around as we were fairly exhausted. Our wonderful neighbour(s) had done a fantastic job with the guinea pigs which was an extra blessing.