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

So, yesterday … we got ready and went into town first thing. Anna had a shield (that she won from a music festival back in the spring) that she wanted to get engraved, so we did that en route to the museum. Then realised why there are so many years left out on the shield as it was expensive! I didn’t realise and had agreed to the engraving already, but I am not surprised that some people haven’t bothered to put their names on it.

Anyway. Went via a couple of estate agents to the museum where there was a ‘Meet the Romans’ activity on – there were a couple of Roman soldiers in the museum alongside a table of various artefacts so we spent a while there, and then opened the Romans activity box in the next room. That was a bad idea, as everyone who visited the soldiers then came next door and pounced on the activities too – no problem with that in itself but as designated key holders for the box we were trying to keep track of everything and it was really busy – I think we lost one of the dressing up outfits but it was nigh on impossible to keep an eye on it all! Thankfully the museum people were very understanding.

We went home for lunch, and then had a crafty afternoon – well the girls and I did, anyway. Josiah wrote a thank you note and sealed the envelope with a special wax seal from a set he had for his birthday, and that was about all he could manage, he then slumped in front of the tv for a while. Everyone here has been slightly under the weather with colds/general tiredness and he was worse yesterday so tv and honey & lemon drinks were the order of the day for him. Nothing really bad, just that sort of illness that comes out as being really on edge and easily upset, not great when you are part of a family and other people are likely to annoy you all the time!

Meanwhile I helped the girls plan and start stitching little cross stitch bracelets that we’d picked up in a craft shop in town, so that was a nice afternoon. Reminded me how much I used to like cross stitch, haven’t really done any for years, I might finish Josiah’s birth sampler one of these days!

Emma, Robyn & Lola came round to play for a bit and have tea with us, so that was a nice end to the day.

The kids watched Ren & Stimpy before bed – got an old video from a friend who was chucking it out and we used to love Ren & Stimpy years ago so a good chance to reminisce, there!

Today we did some cooking in the morning. I made chicken & veg soup from yesterday’s leftovers, cheesy Shepherd’s pie for tomorrow’s dinner and some Chocolate Orange Potato cake. Josiah made an Apple & Apricot crumble with very little help. Then they watched tv and the girls got their stitching out again, all felt very relaxed and lovely.

Then we headed into town after lunch for a craft workshop at the Museum. They’ve had Roman things on every day this week I think, and today was Mosaic Making. We’d arranged to meet friends there too so spent a pleasant hour or so roaming the museum with them as well.

After that came a violin lesson for Joe, some house viewings with my parents who were down for the day, and then a lovely meal out with everyone in the evening. Managed to meet two lots of friends in the pub as well which was quite amusing.

Tomorrow is ‘mystery trip’ day – oooh exciting! And mysterious!

Steve’s dad is on holiday for a couple of weeks, and Terry our mechanic is ill with a horrible inner ear thing that means he can’t stand up, so we were awfully short staffed today. Meant that we had to give up on the home ed group trip we were meant to be going on but hey ho, that’s life.

Once the girls had gone to school, Josiah and I ended up at the office for the day, which was fine – we chucked a load of stuff in a box and de-camped there quite instead (as long as I have internet I’m happy!), the phone didn’t even ring until 11am so not too strenuous.

Joe did violin practice and then some of his Roman lapbook project; today he wrote out a few vocab words for a flappy thing in the lapbook, and we learnt about Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius too – looked at lots of pictures online. The whole Roman thing is making Joe want to go to Italy, he keeps saying that would be a good Home Ed trip to go on (the Roman Baths not good enough!). Went home for about an hour to scoop Abbie up then back to the office for the end of the day.

We looked on the fuji website and found their support section, so registered it and sent it off to them. It is under a year old so should have been under warranty, although if I’m honest I was prepared for them to say wear and tear had caused the problem, as I carry it around in my handbag all the time so it could conceivably have been dropped or something (although not to my knowledge).

Anyway, the fuji site has a good tracker system which told us that the camera had arrived and was in the service department. Within a week the message had changed to ‘your camera has been fixed and will be despatched to you by Special Delivery’, which it was, this week – with a brand new lcd screen and back section, all under warranty. Very impressed with that service – and very happy to have it back!

Steve, Joe and I went to the Roman Baths in Bath today so made good use of it there – random photos I know but it was naff light for actually photographing buildings, plus most of these were actually taken to illustrate Josiah’s trail/sheet thing! It was a good visit, we enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Steve enjoyed driving home ‘in time for the girls’ afterwards – luckily we made it only 5 mins late, as I’d supposedly given them a back door key just in case but it was the wrong key so they were waiting for us in the front garden!

Lots of other stuff has been happening but I’m not sure I can be bothered to catch up on all of it. In brief: home ed group on Wednesday plus extra coffee with friends including an introduction to some home ed blogs (waving to you, J!!), a trip into school on Thursday to learn how to make ‘momos’ (indian pasty things) which we have volunteered to help with over the next few weeks in Abbie’s class, baking, workbooks, shopping of various sorts, music practice, roman lapbook stuff, building an indoor run for the guinea pigs, nights out with friends, and there, phew, we got to the weekend.

After saying goodbye to the girls we did his violin practice which went well for once. It’s been a long summer without seeing his teacher and it’s been hard to wind back up into regular decent practice (everyone, not just Joe!), but today he managed great posture/bow hold, as well as actually remembering his pieces, hurrah.

Then we started putting his Romans lapbook together, which involved me doing lots of cutting out and Josiah doing lots of sticking. Joe chose to complete a little flap thingy on Romulus and Remus, so he drew a picture of them as babies, and then dictated a very brief version of the story to me (there was no way on earth that he’d have been able to write it out, so better to go for the CM dictation approach than have a frustrated writer on my hands).

He played outside for a bit, got the guinea pigs out, nearly lost one of them in the garden but we managed to catch it again! Then played with a lego creation for a while, before Steve came home from lunch.

After lunch I had a lovely chat on the phone with my friend Liz, and then I taught Joe how to play San Juan. This took a long time but was worthwhile as it’s a game I actually like playing! I am so so bored of most of our board games, I really need some other new games that are enjoyable for adults as well as children. Literally the only games I really like playing are Yahtzee and Mastermind/Mindbender, everything else makes me groan when he suggests them. So we went off to PlayMerrily and had a look there – we like a look of a few of the games

By the time we’d done that the girls were home, ravenous despite having had school dinners, and Laura turned up for piano lessons. Tonight it’s Stage by Stage and Wind Group so a busy evening ahead.

Went to look at a nice house (sorry, can’t find the details online easily – it was a big one to share again, but in Teignmouth this time – probably too small for all of us though), then had pizza and watched Touching the Void with friends. That was a very different film to our normal choice, we did enjoy it though. Anna stayed up to watch it with us, tbh the only part that made it a 15 was a bit of strong language in one particular place which went completely over her head anyway. I think she will have learned something from it, and it makes a change for her to watch something in a different genre as well. Anyway, I’m knackered, and have another busy day tomorrow so it’s off to bed I think, night all

Anna’s report of this to Steve went something like ‘we went on a roman walk and I think someone called ‘Trivia’ was buried there …’
Had to giggle at that one! I’m not surprised she didn’t manage to take much in though, it was a shame, because our guide obviously had loads of interesting stuff to say but it was fairly impossible to listen to him with the weather. Our friends Vicky, Joshua and Lydia came down to Melrose for this and enjoyed themselves with us which was really good. Today we started our big ‘camp mosaic’ project – at my instigation but with cutting out from lots of people, and the main drawing was brilliantly done by Roslyn!

Have been busy doing all sorts of other things … finally got round to making panpipes (Ecuadorian ones, of course), and had a great time on Cathedral Green yesterday with a bunch of Roman Centurions. Abbie particularly enjoyed being part of the army marching up and down, while Anna liked the stalls showing Roman food/cooking and mosaics, armour, and Roman artefacts. A great followup/review of our Roman project!

We all had to get dressed up in togas and sit on the floor … the children had worked really hard to make a whole meal of finger type food, as well as little bowls of water/lemon juice to wash fingers with, and a honey/red wine (grape juice!) drink. It was just such a fun evening, and one we will remember for a long time! As soon as I get the photos online I’ll post a link.