just another morning here

We recently were part of the Muddle Puddle hama bead co-op … which was basically a really good excuse to spend lots of money on lots of beads and boards. The girls and I really enjoy using the beads, I think I will have to get Josiah some maxi beads too!

We reviewed our Ecuador project yesterday and made some Hama fruit and a volcano picture as a result. Today Anna had the beads out again and followed one of the Hama patterns to make a rabbit.

this is Anna’s rabbit … a joint effort but she did a great job on the ears all by herself

this is my Ecuadorian Volcano! The children helped me choose and sort the colours

and these are all our creations so far this week – the butterfly is Abbie’s (her design, made with my help), and the rest are Anna’s. The fruit was all her own work.

For more bead inspiration look no further than the Queen of Hama’s site, and here is where you can buy beads, boards and all things Hama.

Today we also received our Eduss maths software. The jury’s out on this one, Anna wasn’t too impressed. Personally, I thought it looked very good, and I think it is the kind of thing I will use as a teaching aid should I need support teaching any specific concepts, rather than the sort of thing Anna will use to ‘play’ with. Abigail will probably enjoy it more, but she hasn’t had time to test it yet. Still, I have cancelled our subscription to Einstein, as the eduss programme is much better and we don’t seem to be using Einstein (without a lot of encouragement) any more.

We’ve finally got round to buying and writing some postcards for our Postcard Exchange (this was set up through the International Christian Home-Educators’ group), and we all enjoyed receiving cards from our postcard family in Wisconsin last week, too.

Anna has a Girl’s Brigade trip to Crealy tomorrow, so hopefully Abigail and I are going to take the opportunity to go worm digging and set up her worm farm which we can keep running during July.

My goals for July are to focus on France and things French, in anticipation of our holiday, so I’m intending to plan some activities in order to have lots up my sleeve. At the moment we seem to be a bit aimless, and I think we all enjoy a bit of structure to our days, and some ideas that we’ve thought out in advance will help I think. So if anyone has anything creative to offer me on my French theme I’d be very grateful!

Whoa, we’ve had such a busy week! A few items of note:

Kids – have done all sorts over the past few days including swimming, seeing friends, assembly at Emmanuel, more about Ecuador including some lovely paintings and some random spanish words, some gardening and our caterpillars arrived!. We bought a ‘Butterfly Garden’ and we’re hoping to grow these caterpillars, watch them metamorphose and change into butterflies. That’s the idea, anyway. We got the kit from Earthlets but you can see loads more similar things at Insect Lore. It’s all very exciting, for me, at least. The kids aren’t quite so thrilled, mainly because you have to leave the caterpillars in their pot till they’ve turned into chrysalides … no handling allowed! But it will still be fun to watch them grow and change. Knowing my luck, they’ll probably die – but then again the makers of the kit guarantee that you will have at least three butterflies out of your five caterpillars, otherwise they will send new ones, so there we go.

Steve – is very stressed because of the ongoing cashflow problem at work. Another 50K and he’d be happy.

Meanwhile I am chuffed to bits because we’ve finally cleared the front garden! Now I can’t decide whether to actually try and grow things in the garden or whether to pave/gravel it and grow things in pots. A friend boosted me into action and came round to help me with the worst of it. A couple of very stubborn roots later (took a couple of hours!) and the garden is clear. Well, of plants, anyway. As I was turning the soil over to break it up a bit, I discovered a wire which looks suspiciously like our cable tv wire running right the way across the garden, in a piece of green tubing. So I’m not quite sure what to do about that. Off to browse some gardening sites!