Rainy, rainy

As the rain whirled down you could have been forgiven for thinking it was November, if it wasn't for all the greenery and the still vibrant, yellow flowers in the garden. Even the birds are getting confused it seems, we saw our first visitor to the bird table, a thrush, which just chucked everything off the table. Should fit in round here then.
H took the boys to an indoor nets cricket practice, from which they returned highly excited.
I think I've finally settled on an effective routine for the home ed. A lot has changed since the move and we needed to find new ways of working. Now I'm making a weekly list of topics to be looked into, under very general headings, such as "history", "project". The list should be completed within the week, but in no particular order and on no particular day. This gives us the flexibility we need. The boys get to have some control over what they are learning and when, but I still get to "manage" the overall balance. This is on top of daily Quran, and 5 times a week maths and English.
Yesterday I continued reading to them from a history of the Prophet Muhammed (saw). I'm using "Man and Prophet" by Adil Salahi. Its for adults, and I tend to skip over the analytical bits and stick with the narrative, so that they understand better. After that they filled in a time line for key events in the Madina period. We used a time line kit from Learning Roots, because we had been given it, but it is easy to make really. That will go on the boy's bedroom wall, together with the Makkan period one inshAllah...once I find the blu tak.
We've also been doing some more work on the general history of the Prophets as part of our study of the Pillars of Emaan. The favourite facts from that session were that Adam (as) was 40 metres tall and lived for 960 years. Sound incredible? The Prophet (saw) said "Allah created Adam according to his (Adam's) image, and he was sixty arm-spans tall. After him, the size of people continued to shrink until now" This hadith was recorded by Al-Bukhari and others.

Ia has been busy with her art work as ever. She has also been cutting and sticking things into an exercise book.
Today the boys did the final maths test for Year 3. (They love tests - so did I as a child - just the sort of challenge I could manage and do well at) They got exactly the same percentage mark, although different questions wrong. Its a twin thing.
We've also got plumbers in. One of them had an accident today and put his foot through the hall ceiling. The debris just missed U, alhamdulillah.