Summery feel

Tuesday we were home, and had a productive if rather stressful day. Boys calmly got on with their fiqh and maths lessons in the morning but in the afternoon they decided to make swords from cardboard, using an idea from an art and craft book. Their overexcitement about this along with U’s whingeing with her illness caused a somewhat fraught atmosphere.
Ia spent Wednesday at a friend’s house and had her group lesson. This evening she wanted to start learning to read, so I read to her from a first reading book. Need to work on her letter sounds. Yesterday I received my Book People order with some more phonics readers from Oxford. The set is called Songbirds. Ia likes the look of them, and I think the books will encourage her with the letter sounds, as at the moment, given the choice she usually goes for maths type workbooks. Yesterday she wrote some of the numbers out freehand, which I was really pleased with, maashAllah.
With L here yesterday we started the plants topic in science. Found that our pansy seedlings are about 3cm tall, while the bulb shoots outside are about 0.5cm tall, and only 7 of the 10 have come up at all. (At this point the organised blogger would insert photos).
They drew a diagram and labelled parts of a plant, answered questions on the functions of different parts of the plant and made a table of the different roots, leaves, stems and flowers we eat.
After that they did the maths assessment during which R had an enormous tantrum over one particular question he couldn’t answer. This put him in a bad temper for the whole thing and meant I couldn’t divert any attention to the girls, which seemed very unfair. Alhamdulillah in the end R and J got exactly the same percentage mark, which restored peace, until I had to explain to J one of his mistakes (which was rather silly), he didn’t want to tell R about it, but he told L, who took an oath never to tell, so imagine the uproar after that.
It was a lovely warm day so I took them to the park after that, however the boys complained of having nothing to do there (it was rather crowded), I think R and J are getting fed up of playground equipment (unless it is a new playground).
In the evening they have been reading Enid Blyton books again. As we have now finished with “The Conquest of Syria” I have started reading a big, thick book of seerah to them.
This afternoon the weather was lovely, maashAllah, sunny and warm, but not too hot. We had a picnic arranged in the park, lots of mums and kids. The boys played cricket with their friends and Ia played with the girls and went on the play equipment. This was the first day of the year for the kids to wear short sleeves.