Anyway, a nice weekend, after an extraordinarily busy week. Of course I’m not allowed to say what Ofsted’s judgement was, but it will be published in due course I was ready to be observed but thankfully I escaped – an inspector came in as we were getting ready for lunch but surprisingly he turned down my invitation to stay! I’m not quite sure why, there is plenty of learning that happens in my class over lunchtime too – but it can get a bit messy and noisy at times

As a result of a stressful week, Friday was spent generally spaced out, both at school and at home! Anna went out to FNX and Steve was out somewhere too, but the rest of us snuggled in my bed and watched tv which was a nice way to relax

Saturday was choir/orchestra as usual, then we had the addition of a strings workshop all afternoon for Anna. Josiah was back at the cathedral for an outreach concert; I came home and got a bit of work done before dashing out to pick them all up again (as well as to drop Abbie off for a birthday party). More vegging in front of the tv in the evening. Steve and I cracked open our Gentleman Jack that we’d brought home from the JD distillery

Today has been chilled too – Joe had services to sing this morning and I went to church too, while the girls caught up on homework and cleaned out the guinea pigs, Steve did the hoovering, but then we all went out for lunch together at the Swan in Lympstone, which was lovely. HUGE dinners!

We were meant to be going for a nice walk afterwards but we all felt very lazy, so came home and broke the screen ban for a film! Before that though, I insisted on a photoshoot as I often do around my birthday – it’s rare to get a decent picture of me with the kids (mainly because I hate having my photo taken!) so occasionally I have to grab them all and torture them by making them pose with me. There were a couple of nice ones in amongst the failures!

After the film we did our usual Sunday evening music practices in various combinations, which was mainly nice … and now the kids have gone off to bed, Steve and I have given in again and are on computers, not talking to one another at all!

p.s. I have decided that I can’t quite bring myself to let the blog go, despite it being total drivel most of the time. Enough people said ‘nooo’ when I threatened it!

I uploaded a bunch of photos that I found on my camera, which Joe had borrowed, then told him that I thought they were really good, and then he told me that he didn’t take all of them! We think that the good ones must belong to Harry who helped run the group, and who I think is also an art student, so that explains it!

We had various other activities going on during the mornings; games, art, drama, singing (generally mad songs with lots of jumping around and actions) team challenges, quizzes, etc. All good fun but very exhausting! I’m glad to be at the end of the week; we have a BBQ on Sunday for all the families – loads of them are coming, I just hope it doesn’t rain!

During the afternoons we hung out at home mainly; my parents and brother have been around so on one wet afternoon we took Ben with us to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which entertained us for a while. Otherwise the children have just enjoyed having downtime; the girls have both done a bit of baking on different days (this means I have eaten way too much but hey ho), Abbie and Joe played a long imaginary game one afternoon, they’ve played on the Wii, all the sorts of things they don’t usually have time for during term time

Okay, the rest of the photos from week one are here as well.

Sitting at the kids’ play area finishing this off, watching Steve & Joe play ping pong while Abbie plays some girl/boy gang game with other children! Anna’s reading in the tent …

On Christmas day itself we started here with stockings, which just had a few small things in them, and then went downstairs for a few more presents. The girls didn’t have much as they’d had Heelys not long ago on the understanding that they were an early Christmas present, but they were both really happy with the books and craft kits they had. Josiah stole the show with a Scalextrix set (we are benefiting greatly from Steve’s mechanic whose youngest son is Abbie’s age so his well-kept cast-offs seem to suit Joe perfectly!) which we got out and played with straight away.

Dragged ourselves away from that to go over to Steve’s parents for the day, which was lovely. Steve’s grandad now lives with them too, so he was around, and Adam, Em, Robyn and Lola were there too, so it was a full house. Now that we’ve given it to them, I must also add a picture of Russ & Marg’s christmas present, because I rather liked it

I took veg for Christmas dinner and had every intention of preparing it all, but I got caught up in a game of Cluedo and Steve’s mum did it all before I could extract myself! The children had a game each from them, and we had some chutney and wine, but our main present was tickets to the pantomime next week, so we have that still to look forward to. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the panto, so I’m very excited! We are planning to go by taxi so that we can have a few drinks as well and really enjoy ourselves! Only a few other gifts, which were either edible, drinkable, or spendable, so honestly nothing to be submitted for Tim’s annual contest!

I even had to eat my words over the crackers (my other pet hate, as they just generate mess, rubbish, and tatty toys)! We forgot to put the crackers on the table, so Steve’s mum came out with them mid afternoon, and very sarcastically I said ‘oh never mind, they’re only crappy things anyway, save them for another time’, or words to that effect. She insisted that we pull them and I had to take it all back, as she’d bought charity ones, in the style of WorldVision/Oxfam Unwrapped – so rather than a tacky plastic toy each one contained a note saying what the money would be used for, can’t remember them all now but they were fab – even with good jokes and suggestions for charades as well!

Boxing day and the girls still seemed to need drugs to help them face the day. In fact by the end of the day I was beginning to hate coughs as much as I hate sniffing and hiccups, but there we go!

We left fairly early to get up to my parents’ new house (they moved in October), which is in the village where I spent my childhood, so I got all nostalgic, and am looking forward to more trips down memory lane in the future, too! So we had a guided tour of the house, hid a present or two, then sat around chatting while all my siblings and their families turned up – another full house, and another lovely roast dinner where I didn’t do anything!

After dinner came what was a moment of truth for me particularly. Back at Easter when we were all on holiday together, I suggested to everyone that we try doing Christmas presents between us a little differently. After calling me bossy rather a lot (qui, moi?), people were cautiously positive, and said they’d try it this year and see how it went. So we sat round and pulled names out of a hat, giving us each one gift to buy for another member of the group.

There were moments, throughout October and November, when most of us thought it was a bad idea, as we felt the weight of responsibility for getting the one present for that person, that it had to be a good thing, the right thing, etc., but I think everyone managed it!

Certainly it was absolutely lovely to have the time to watch each member of the family open just one present. And it was great to be able to spend a little more money on the one present you had to buy, and to really think about that person while you planned what to get. Even better was just receiving one lovely present, rather than a pile of cheap rubbish! (so this is the other reason I have nothing for Tim’s contest!). And after all those good reasons why it was great, it was also fab to have time to actually use/play with what we’d been given, because the present exchanging hadn’t taken so long.

I got a watch, Steve got a game, Anna had a HSM2 DVD + DVD game (had to laugh at my Dad who admitted he hadn’t even heard of HSM until I said she’d like it!), Abbie got a chromatography art kit, and Joe got a fab Cars & Boats electronics kit. I was particularly pleased that all the presents I’d chosen went down well, too

We had a cup of tea and then left, as we had made arrangements to meet Bible College friends further up the country; Anna renewed friendship with their daughter over the summer, and they’d invited her to stay – having failed at half term we re-arranged the get-together for this week. So we met in a MacDonalds car park on the A43 between their house and Oxford, and waved Anna off for a few days.

And after that we popped in to show our car to Toni & Chris, who despite having been blog-acquaintances for a few years now I don’t think we’d ever met them properly, so that was nice. I think Steve spent longer admiring Toni’s guitars than the time spent out in the dark and cold with the car though!

Drove home from there, with Abbie’s cough getting more and more irritating, finally getting back around 11pm so it was a long day, but now we have a quiet couple of days before going away to the Isle of Wight with friends for New Year.

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

It was grey and misty for most of the day, then rained in earnest early afternoon – we braved the rain for a while but having got wet and cold we decided to head home for cake (the orange chocolate potato cake is great btw) and a film!

Had a fantastic day though, the children loved it. Anna played photographer during the day, having been inspired by the exhibition of wildlife photography (these images) that we saw at the museum yesterday, although even she realised that a few snaps around the zoo were never going to be as amazing as some of the images we’d seen. Here are the best of hers, anyway … and a few of mine and Steve’s here and there – and a couple more on flickr for anyone who’s never seen an elephant wee!

I just liked Abbie’s expression in this photo, taken while we stopped for a hot chocolate at the Double Locks pub yesterday. Cycling is always good if there’s a pub along the cycle route

Laura our music teacher is having a fancy dress Christmas party for all her students this evening … this is Anna’s outfit

added later: she won! yippee, the prize was one free piano lesson!

blog-break? yeah, what a stupid idea, I can’t do it!