Phew, another really busy day crammed full of stuff … we got up early to pick up cars from Bridgwater, but were back in Exeter to drop Joe off at the childminder’s by 9am. The girls and I went to buy gold and silver thread for hanging our Hama Christmas decorations.
When we got home the girls both did some work from Magic Key comics, workbooks and Flying Boot worksheets, a bit of maths practice and reading/writing stuff.
After that we moved on to Hama beading, we’re trying to produce tree decorations to sell at a craft fair. Here are some examples of the ‘packs’ we’ll be producing – I’m interested to see what you think would be a fair price to charge – we’re raising money for charity … all comments on this would be welcome.
imagine them hung with silver/gold thread, I just haven’t got round to doing it yet!
r />Also, while I’m updating and posting pictures, here are the girls’ decorated pots from yesterday. Great for Grannies’ presents, I think.
Anna’s is on the left, Abbie’s on the right.
r />Our postcard exchange is being regularly updated, this is how our poster looks after this morning’s additions. We’ve used the OS maps to colour in the counties that we’ve received postcards from, and places we’ve visited recently, etc.
r />After lunch (by this time Steve was home for the afternoon, yay!) we began to talk about volcanoes, in anticipation of doing our next Young Scientist kit. At that point, Steve said ‘did you know Rougemont Castle is built on an extinct volcano?’ Now, I was somewhat hesitant to believe him, having lived in Exeter for 10 years and never having heard such a tale … but he looked it up on the internet and sure enough, he was right – he learnt
something at school after all! Or rather, he learnt something
out of school – he probably only remembers it because of the school trip!!
So anyway we decided to go and see the castle walls, and spent a lovely hour walking through Rougemont Park, which is in the centre of Exeter. You can read a little about the history of the castle and gardens here. The girls took paper and pencils and each drew a few pictures of the castle walls at various points, which they really enjoyed.
We had to pick Joe up after this, but having collected him we headed home to do the volcano experiments – the children followed instructions to make their volcano erupt, and had to say which combination of ingredients was the most effective. They also reviewed solids, liquids and gases from the last kit. I would have taken more pics but the batteries ran out at this point – here’s Joe enjoying the volcano, anyway.
r />Something else we’ve really enjoyed this week was our memory verse – the kids brought this home from church on Sunday and decided they wanted to memorise it, so we stuck it on the wall and learnt it by taking a piece away and filling in the gap. Steve amused himself (and the girls, it has to be said) greatly by re-arranging it to talk nonsense!
r />When we have such a fab day/week it’s very reassuring that we’re doing the right thing – the kids enjoy themselves so much, their learning is very much integrated into every day life, we as parents are far more involved and that’s a real privilege, and it’s just great FUN!!
The kids are playing Rayman now – I’m sure that’s vaguely educational, too. I’m off to finish Zoombinis (Logical Journey) this evening, I hope something really spectacular happens at the end of the game because the last few runs have been a bit boring – but it’s probably going to be a real anticlimax!