just another morning here

Felt like a productive day today, Josiah went off to Start Right and the girls and I got lots of little jobs done; letters written, a tiny bit of writing in the Greek project books to go with the recipes, then some banking before taking Anna to school for the afternoon.

Steve was back for a nice long lunch, then when he disappeared again Abbie & Joe played gamecube while I cleaned bathrooms – then we went off to pick Anna up and go to Grandma’s for tea. As predicted, she really enjoyed Set, and we enjoyed spending time with her.

A first for me and Joe, we sent an invitation to a friend he’s made at Start Right to come over and play sometime. Would you believe, the children have, until now, never made friends with anyone whose parent I didn’t know at least a little bit – at least, not to the extent of wanting to invite them over. Marginally amusing that it’s Josiah who has done it!

Anyway, he came home saying he’d delivered the invitation but that his little friend didn’t want to come here any more. It transpired, much later in the day, that the true story was that he’d dropped his bucket on his friend by accident somehow, and his friend had responded by saying that he didn’t want to come and play any more. For some reason Joe didn’t get a chance to say sorry, and I think he’d been a bit upset by the whole thing, judging by the way it came out. I hadn’t been to pick him up, Steve had, and he didn’t notice anything, so it was probably something that happened at some time during the morning. Anyway, Joe seemed happy at the suggestion that saying sorry on Thursday would probably put things right … and by then I expect his little friend will have forgotten all about it.

To mark the end of our Ancient Greeks project we had a Greek feast this evening. I don’t think the recipes were particularly ancient, just Greek, but that’s good enough for me. Steve’s Aunty Jacky came round for most of the afternoon and cooked with the girls, then we ate it all for tea. Well, to be fair, the kids and Steve tried it all and then I ate most of it, as none of them liked it much – so guess what I’ll be eating for the rest of the week

They made Domatosoupa (tomato soup, if you couldn’t guess!), followed by Spanakopita (spinach pie – although we made little tarts instead) with Xoriatiki (Greek salad), then Baklava for pudding. Abbie and I both liked the soup, and I think everyone liked the spinach pies, but only Joe and I ate the salad. Pudding was an all round hit though

Steve was not impressed at having his photo taken (and yes, that Unfortunate Events poster is still up in the conservatory, a whole month later … ). The kids loved using their greek pots to eat from!

Haven’t done much else today other than more washing and playing with the children. Anyway, for my benefit and in case anyone with an early years Home Ed website fancies nicking it for an easy page addition, here is a round up of the things we have done for the Ancient Greeks project:

General resources:
Story of the World – Ancient times – story book and related activity pages
Groovy Greeks book and audio CD (part of the Horrible Histories series)
BBC Schools Ancient Greece resources
BBC schools video – Ancient Greeks
C4 schools video – Eureka! The Ancient Greeks
Ginn Primary History book – The Ancient Greeks … and some other schooly books borrowed from our resources centre, can’t find links for any of these though!
I Wonder Why Greeks Built Temples
Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Wooden Horse of Troy
C4 Learning Ancient Greeks Ideas Today website

Specific activities we did:
Looking at family trees – our own, and then the Greek gods family tree.
Mapwork from Story of the World
Greek Gods activities from the C4 site
Looking at the Greek alphabet and comparing/contrasting it with ours. Writing our names using Greek letters.
Key patterns – observing them on Greek artefacts, then making our own.
Looking for evidence – using photographs of Greek artefacts we asked ‘how do we know what the ancient Greeks were like’ and found some answers from the pictures.
Prime numbers activities using Eratosthenes’ Sieve – again, from the C4 site
Colouring pictures from Story of the World activity book
Painting – whatever the children wanted to do – we did key patterns, pictures of Gods and inspired by mythical stories.
Storytelling and the oral tradition – reading greek myths, making up our own greek stories
Poetry – talked about Homer’s Iliad and they read some poems – dramatically!
Theseus and the Minotaur maze from Story of the World activity book
Ancient Greek fashions – including dressing up and greek dancing
Making and decorating papier mache greek pots
Cooking – greek recipes from EatGreekTonight.com.

Other things we could still do as extension activities (or to add to my 4 year rolling programme ) if we wanted to:
Aesops fables, more Greek Myths, Pythagoras’ theorem, square and triangular numbers … and ideally go back to the British Museum sometime before too long!

Phew, well, I think that’s about enough education for one day’s blogging, but I just wanted to pull it together into one place so that it was easily accessible – I feel that we worked relatively hard on it together so it’s nice to have something to show for it – and I didn’t really plan any of it, we just gathered it together and did stuff as we went along, before I get labelled!! Must give credit to Aunty Jacky too, who spent loads of time with the girls on it all, which is just lovely for them and for me. We’ll have to have a think about what project to do next, although I’m not starting anything until after Melrose/half term/Animated Exeter activities are over.

Ah, Melrose. Must write a list, and remember to fill in my own baked potato poll before I forget

This blog has been bereft of photographs for a while now, so I just thought I’d redress the balance. We decorated our Greek pots this morning, so that was deserving of a photoshoot …

All three kids decorated their own pots, then Anna and Mollie collaborated on the big urn. We looked at a few pictures first, but it’s amazing how much stuff they have retained from all our Ancient Greek project work, it all comes out when they do something like this. Josiah did a great horse and man, followed by a pig. Abbie painted Theseus and the Minotaur on hers I think, so did Anna, and the urn has a Trojan horse on one side, and a Greek lady on the other side. Lots of key patterns and olive trees/leaves as well. The girls had to wear their wreath/headband things while they were painting, too

And here are the finished products:

Our friend Maria came round for coffee, with a stunning ginger cake (yum), and we had some fun with the Bongos together. Now we’re just doing lunch and waiting for Grandma. Josiah has been very excited about today, he came upstairs this morning declaring that it was going to be a ‘special day’ because Grandma was taking us to Crealy … and at breakfast time he asked if we could call it lunch so that we could go to Crealy after lunch … !! Anyone would think he’d never been there before …

Started off thinking Steve was going to be home for a day off from 10am onwards but he rang and cancelled, either the day looked like it was going to get busy, or being at work was preferable to having a day off! Probably cheaper all round for him to be at work … so, we got to work as well …

Joe read one of his Start Right books, and we played with his wooden letters – I’m trying to help him with sounding out words, just simple 3 letter ones. He will look at three letters (eg J-A-M), say the sounds correctly, and then when he puts them together he just changes them for no apparent reason, (eg he’d say JIM or something equally random!). Start Right use both phonics and ‘look & say’ with the children, but I think Josiah has picked up on the ‘look & say’ stuff and needs to build up his awareness of phonics so that he can sound out unfamiliar words. Anyway, he’s only little yet, doing really well with it all, but he does like to be doing ‘work’ alongside the girls. I am thinking of using 100 Easy Lessons with him, but not until the summer holidays when there is a decent break from Start Right, as I don’t want to confuse/overload the poor child – but I think he is more than ready *and* able.

Anna did some more stuff on verbs and tenses, while Abbie did a short reading comprehension thing. Oh, and Anna’s finished ‘The Miserable Mill’ (Book the Fourth in the Lemony Snicket series), too.

Abbie did some lines of symmetry activities, all fine, and Anna had moved on to tenths and decimals, which again, she’s actually understanding, until she has to try and write it down – strange. The Eduss software has been great in supporting it all though, we’ve been watching the little ‘teach me’ clips together and she’s found it helpful. I had to phone them today to try and unlock my re-installed version, and they are sending me an upgrade – just thought that might interest anyone else who has it (Joyce, Merry?) because it will make it transportable between pcs.

After a bit of chilling we came back together again and ripped up newspaper for papier mache – always satisfying, that part! We were going to make Greek vases, to tie in with our somewhat overhanging Ancient Greek project, which is sort of half finished, because Christmas got in the way. Anyway, I decided that the vases were going to be somewhat too complicated for everyone, what with bases, necks, and handles, so I’ve made one which they can decorate together, and they have made a pot each as well. I need to go and put another layer on in a minute.

Erm … then Mollie came over in her brand new school uniform (she did look very sweet), it was her first day at school today – so they all played schools for a while, we’ve bongoed (is that a word?), and made dinner much later than usual because the garage is now staying open until 7pm Monday – Saturday. Steve is now educating the children with regard to special effects in film, apparently. Just don’t ask