Blogging while at swimming lessons again, treating myself to medicinal chocolate during my 20 mins when the kids arent here to see (one gone to get ready to go in, the other two getting out and getting changed). Chocolate became necessary after an excruciating 5 minutes trying to extract THOUGHT out of one of the children. No prizes for guessing which one Who would know that 27 divided by 6 was so difficult to work out?! It was so bad that one of the other mums here comiserated with me afterwards!!

And this morning, she disappeared off to school but not to school – instead she caught a lift to a maths day held by the South West HEI Excellence Hub – a day of doing, thinking, and talking maths. She loved it and came home buzzing, ready to try out lots of mathematical tricks on me. And she’d apparently found out that 13 x 7 is 28

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

After lunch we went into school for more momo-making … the third week out of five, so we’re over half way. One day I will get round to making some at home too, including the sweet version!

Abbie’s class are apparently going to see one of the free films for schools next week. This has left me wondering what the point is, really. They’ve chosen ‘Night at the Museum’, which has been out on DVD for ages and my kids have already seen it twice. They sent home a letter all excited about the free film then asked for contributions of £2.30 towards a coach. Call me Mrs Silly, but wouldn’t it have been cheaper and easier to rent the DVD and show it in the hall on the school projector? Honestly, I don’t think going to the cinema with the class is that much of an educational experience; I only ever did it as a HEor because it was free – and this time round Joe and I aren’t going to see any of them as they’re all films we’ve seen before anyway! The educational activities that follow may well be based on the film but don’t need the cinema experience as well, really – the class will just annoy the HEors there, watch out anyone local who’s going to see that film! Don’t know why I’m getting uppity as £2.30 isn’t that much and I’m sure they’ll all have lots of fun but it just seems a bit daft, all things considered.

Anyway, other stuff happened – cello lesson for Anna, while she was there we went and bought a new washing machine as on further investigation ours is well and truly broken, dinner, then I went over to do washing at a friend’s while having a church small group mtg. Now more scrabulous … and some sleep …

Thinking that those were very valid points to make, we skipped over that part of the question, but then decided to email Pennywell Farm to ask if they could weigh a duck for us! Had a lovely email conversation with someone there and we ended up visiting yesterday. Joe got in for free as we’d collected activity stamps last time we went

The staff on the desk hadn’t actually heard anything about our little mission, but the lady who was doing all the children’s activities that day was more than willing to help us out.

So, around lunchtime (well, after the story time, egg collecting, goat milking, lamb feeding and goodness knows what else we did!), we found some scales (hidden under the bucket in the picture) and Josiah weighed this month-old duckling. He held it first, and made a guess of 600g, then we put it in the bucket, and lo and behold it weighed almost exactly 600g! I say almost exactly as the duck didn’t really want to sit still in the bucket to be weighed so it was a bit difficult to read the scales, but it was pretty damn close. We didn’t bother trying to hold a fully grown duck still to weigh that as well, although I suppose that would be an interesting question to ask/answer, but fairly irrelevant at this point in time!

Anyway, it was fabulous that Pennywell were so accommodating (I knew they would be, they are so lovely there), we had a great day. Joe did all the other activities and really enjoyed himself (Robyn and I literally just followed him around!), and he was pretty chuffed to have estimated the duckling’s weight well too.

Having said that, twitter did keep me amused today, when otherwise I might have gone stir crazy. Josiah is suffering from ‘my sisters have just gone back to school’ syndrome, he misses them and doesn’t really know what to do with himself without them around. He then relies on me for entertainment, yet of course doesn’t want to do any of the things I suggest. So today has been particularly hard work. I think I suffer from the same syndrome, if I’m honest. I know I shouldn’t but I do find it boring to be at home with one child, especially compared to what feels like the norm of having 3 (and often more!) kids around. Not quite sure what the answer to that one is!

Over the past couple of days we have done a bit of maths, through Trilemma (mental maths game) and some workbook – which did spin off into a weighing session where we weighed things from tubes of toothpaste to all the apples in the fruit bowl. Went to Sainsbury’s and bought ourselves a new mixer (ours blew up about 18months ago and cakes have been hard work ever since!), so when we got home Joe made a chocolate cake.

We’ve done some music, the usual practices as well as a supposed piano lesson but I am going to delegate that to Laura (the girls’ piano teacher) asap because somehow I think it will work better. And we went to the library; Josiah read a few picture books while we were there, then chose a Star Wars comic strip book but refused to bring anything else home.

This afternoon we played with the MGears set and Joe made a stunt plane which took him ages, but even that felt like hard work … following that with the usual Wednesday music lessons … I needed that quick drink at La Tasca in the middle of it all!

I have sent them all to bed with DSs and told them to talk to one another on Pictochat if they need to talk, as I am off duty and need some peace and quiet. Looking forward to the Apprentice tonight and then must think of something cheap to do to get me/us out of the house tomorrow.

Oh, and Anna brought home the absence authorisation from school for our Kessingland week, so we’re officially allowed to come!

Nothing else to report really – Viking day was fun, apparently.

Had a couple of rubbish days with Joe and him generally not wanting to do anything constructive after I try to limit screen-time. But yesterday was better, Crealy was open so I promised a visit, which meant that he got violin, maths and music done in record time with a great attitude towards it all.

Today we’ve done more of the same (violin, maths & music) and we’re about to head out to the South West Festival of Food & Drink which should be good fun despite the rain

Monday was a non-event of a day really, although Joe and I did defeat one big bad boss in Sonic at teatime so that was good (only one more to go now!). We did some maths and music workbook pages, and also played with pattern blocks and talked a bit about symmetry, reflections, rotations and translations. Reading and comprehension activities over the past couple of days have taken the form of hint guides and walkthroughs for Lego Star Wars and Sonic!

Joe’s been doing lots of maths – shapes/area related pages from CIMT – and we had fun looking for hexagons and pentagons in the house one morning. He’s also learned lots about time and calendars recently, which is a real pain in the neck – when he asks me what the time is, I have to be precise to the minute, otherwise I’m in trouble. He knows exactly how many days it is until his birthday, and seems to spend ages thinking about time and dates, working out random useless pieces of information, or giving me a running commentary about how long it is until the next exciting event in the day. This pedantry extends to all areas of life actually but I guess I only have myself to blame for that

Josiah’s also doing a fair bit of reading, mainly late at night in bed. His favourites at the moment are the Usborne Flip Flap body book, and How Your Body Works (the one with all the robot pictures). Since he lost his knotty a few months back we haven’t replaced it because we realised that he wasn’t sucking his thumb while he didn’t have it … so he hasn’t been thumbsucking recently but the downside is that he hasn’t been going to sleep until about 10pm most nights! Still, we think he has memorised the entire Chronicles of Narnia from audiobooks

I took him to Crealy on Thursday, then he got invited out there again the next day with Robyn and Adam, so he’s done plenty of running around like a loon. He’s doing really well with swimming lessons at the moment as well, which is such a relief, after years of it being really hard work – their teacher came and told me that Abbie and Josiah had both swum well in their lessons on Thursday.

The girls both enjoyed dressing up for World Book Day on Thursday (Abbie went to school as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and Anna went as Alice in Wonderland). On Friday Anna went to a friend’s house after school, and Abbie had a friend back here. Anna’s been busy doing lots of drawing from various ‘how to draw’ books, some of the results have been quite impressive actually!

The usual music stuff has been going on as well – for all three of them. Joe’s just carrying on as per usual with his violin, very nearly at the end of Suzuki Book 1 now, although I suspect there will be a fair bit of review to do before he’s at graduation standard with all the pieces. Abbie’s working towards Grade 1 piano in the summer and is sounding pretty good most of the time. Anna’s playing in some music festival or other in a couple of weeks, so she’s practising for that as well as for Grade 4 cello in the summer.

Had a bit of a stress at the end of the week as my car got written off – only bent metal, thankfully no-one was hurt and I wasn’t driving at the time but still a bit of a nightmare generally, takes a fair bit of emotional energy to deal with stuff like that, we discovered.

Can’t remember which night it was but the smoke detector went off for some unknown reason in the early hours of one morning – batteries are fine, and we couldn’t find any other reason for it – but Steve got up and checked everything, we both work up and couldn’t get back to sleep at all afterwards, so that probably didn’t help the latter part of the week either! We must be getting old, when one broken night wipes us out for the next couple of days!

The weekend has been nice though, lots of kicking around together. Kids brought me belated-birthday-breakfast-in-bed on Saturday which was great, so it was a lazy morning. Then we went up to Dartmoor and climbed up Haytor which everyone enjoyed.

The children went and stroked a nearby pony for ages, I was surprised by how friendly it was actually, I expected them just to run away. On the way back the kids decided to roll rather than walk down the hill!

Went out last night to a housewarming/birthday party of some friends who both have the same birthday as me; played poker there too, while watching the lunar eclipse! Steve’s gone out to play poker again this evening with a different set of friends.

Today it has been chucking down with rain *all day* so we’ve been at home just chilling out. Abbie did some painting – really nice pictures, some of them. Then she had great fun with a bath bomb kit – I think she made one bath fizzer and then spent the rest of the afternoon putting various ingredients together, then covering the kitchen in red and blue fizzy stuff

Anna and Joe have been playing their way through Lego Star Wars on the PS2 together – fantastic game, they’re both really enjoying it. In the midst of that Steve took the PS2 apart as he had done a couple of days previously, the game kept crashing – it is on a blue disc that apparently the PS2 lasers can’t always read well so he adjusted the laser which fixed it for them so they were quite impressed with their old dad for once

Steve and I have been working on a new website for the garage, and doing a bit more of Abbie’s jigsaw, and sorting out laundry, and that’s about it.

Started off with Joe re-discovering Reader Rabbit – he played on the Y2 Maths one very briefly, then changed to the general Year 2 game (some maths, english, and science, maths and science bits far too easy for him but he was challenged by the literacy side of it). By the time I’d had the usual arguments with the girls over getting ready and leaving for school he was utterly engrossed so I left him to it, and actually went up and sat on his bed so that I could watch

We had elevenses and then did violin practice and piano practice together. Tick music.

It was pretty much lunchtime at that point but we waited for Steve, so while we were waiting we made chocolate mousse. Two avocados had turned up in my Riverford box this week so I had to try the recipe, it just sounded too weird not to give it a go! Tick cookery and some practical maths through the measuring.

Put that in the fridge and got the fraction tower set out, which Joe enjoyed playing with for a good half an hour until Steve appeared. Tick more maths.

For some reason (can’t think why?!) Steve was hugely suspicious when I produced dessert – but he ate it – and Joe liked it as well.

Think I might head off to find some Valentine’s day crafty stuff for this afternoon, I wonder if Joe could be persuaded that he loves his sisters enough to make them a card …