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!

Have had a fabulous if a little exhausting weekend, lots of travelling of various sorts, but also lots of fun spending time with some of our best friends, which makes it all worthwhile. (was that too soppy?! )

Saturday saw us have a very lazy morning with a delicious brunch, and then we headed into London to visit the slides at the Tate Modern. Simultaneous delight and anxiety is about the right description for my feelings as we walked into the turbine hall – the queues were soooo long, never mind the sliding itself! So we queued for tickets, then walked along the river for an early dinner at the Gourmet Pizza Co., then back to the Tate to queue more to use the tickets! Still it was a good day which we all enjoyed. More photos here

Today was E’s 6th birthday, the real reason for our visit – lovely to see him opening and enjoying presents, and then stick around for his party which was one of the most peaceful kids’ parties I’ve been to for a long time (usually I avoid them like the plague, even for my own children!). 13 children sat around the table painting pottery for a good hour and a half, courtesy of a lovely mobile pottery company (which I’ve forgotten the name of, otherwise I’d link to it).

Love the expressions in this photo …

Highlight of today was going to the 2-4 TV studios to watch a bit of the editing, I think the programme will be okay. Apparently Will (the director) has been doing draft voiceovers but has been told off for ‘endorsing’ home education in his commentary – so that’s good, I think. There is far too much of me in it, as far as I could see, but apart from that I think it should be okay. Also they’re not allowed to release the programme even to us before it is aired, so we will see it for the first time at the same time as everyone else – scary! Although I have been promised a transcript of the narration once it is finalised.

What else have we done? Picked up our pots from the pottery on the way home from the TV studio, a few more errands, some maths, played with Geomags again (Joe does a good line in Geomag Gun production), cello/recorder practise (am I getting tired of hearing the same tunes over and over!), made bread rolls and soup for tea at Abbie’s request … played outside and watched some TV … so not too much really. Lunch was in the middle of all that somewhere

Josiah was tired because he went back to Start Right today. When I told him earlier in the week that Start Right was starting again he squealed with delight … still asked me to stay ‘for about five minutes’ at the beginning, but in fact I only stayed for about 30 seconds before he was ensconced playing with the garage. Lots of other mums looking extremely nervous at their offspring’s first time at nursery, quite amusing … anyway, Steve picked Joe up today and apparently that is preferable to having me pick him up – so Steve has got himself a job for the rest of ever.

This evening we looked at the books he’d brought home, and he read one of them straight away – he’s recognising the words ‘help, look, we, I, you, no, yes, in, here’ perfectly most of the time, and a bit of help with ‘it, is, where, not’ and believe it or not, you can have a story out of those words. He’s quite motivated to learn to read, probably because he sees the girls reading, so we’re encouraging him, and having the graded books home from Start Right is actually quite helpful.

Anyway, the other four children were my girls and their friends Caitlin & Riona … we all went on a home ed group trip down to Bovey Tracey to visit the House of Marbles and Cardews Teapottery. Apparently this was a timely trip as Caitlin had wanted to visit and not been able to earlier in the week!

We met up with our EO group friends at the House of Marbles and enjoyed the marble runs and watching glass being blown – always fascinating, however many times you have seen them.

Then on to Cardews where we had a picnic (the less said about the wasps the better, at least no-one got stung this time!), looked around the pottery, then the girls each chose a way to spend some money … Abbie threw her own pot while the other three painted pieces of pottery to be fired. Oh, and we bought some clay to bring home, too. Anyway, as a picture paints a thousand words, here are a few – rollover for descriptions

We’ve had a nice couple of days – yesterday we went down to Bovey Tracy again to pick up our pottery from Cardews, then we took Steve to see the House of Marbles as well. We’ve enjoyed reading Roald Dahl’s ‘The Twits’ together (in fact I must get off the ‘puter for another instalment). Today both girls have done some workbook things and are investigating magnets again having been reading a book about magnets this evening.

We met Mel & Helen and family at Cardews Teapottery (btw, click that link, it’s a nice one!) this morning. We looked round the pottery and managed not to break anything at all on the way round – a major achievement! We ended up in the craft area painting some pottery items – Josiah did a bowl, Abbie did a teapot, and Anna did a mug, and this kept the children occupied for ages! They did some really nice painting, all three of them. They stay at the pottery to be glazed and fired so we’ll have to go and pick them up at the end of the month.

Flouting all the rules, we sat at a picnic table in the cafe and ate our picnic … well, we did buy a cup of tea, does that make it okay?

Then after lunch we drove round the corner (!!) to the House of Marbles. I’d been there before, but somehow managed to miss all the interesting bits (I was obviously too busy watching children to fully appreciate what was there!!). We spent ages watching the biggest marble run – with billiard ball marbles, it took up one whole big wall of the building and was a mechanical masterpiece. The children also enjoyed seeing the three smaller marble runs in one of the exhibitions. Joe and Abbie went for a wander and found a snoring teddy, and a moose who moved! The historical part of the visit included seeing old marble toys and games in one museum, and the old kilns from the pottery that used to be in Bovey Tracey, as well as a scale model of the site as it was.

Home now and we’re concentrating on preparations for Joe’s big day tomorrow, the girls are meant to be tidying their rooms but it sounds more like a herd of elephants playing upstairs! By the way for anyone who is interested, the gingerbread cake has turned out fine, I’ve iced it, but I’m resisting decorating it too soon because I don’t want the colours to run! Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have lots of pictures.