While the sun shines

When the sun shines I get more lenient with the study schedule. Playing outside is such a memorable part of childhood, I just want to let them enjoy it. This being the UK it could be dull and rainy for most of the next few months! So, making the most of now!
I've also been doing laundry while the sun shines. Fitting those odd loads in on top of the normal ones, like, cricket whites, red stuff (not together of course).
But still some HE has to go on. There is only so much garden stuff to be played in a day, and brains have to be kept occupied. The boys have done some work on capacity today, listened to a chapter about the life of Abu Ubaidah (ra), read Quran and done an ICT exercise on adjusting fonts, text sizes and inserting pictures. We also finished up the year 4 science programme, with looking through the last couple of textbook pages and doing an assessment sheet on the electricity unit.

Ia had a friend over to play and learn with. They play together at tea parties and pets. In between times friend's mum and I prepare bits and pieces for them to do, which we give to them after food breaks!
Today we did a little introduction of place value. The girls used interlocking cubes to make representations of 11, 12, 13 and 14, using a stick of 10 cubes and then the number of extra unit cubes. They copied these representations onto 1cm squared paper. Large sized squared paper seems relatively hard to get hold of, I don't know why, it is SO useful.
Friend's mum had a good idea of getting them to collage their names written in Arabic, one letter at a time, so we began that too, using old wrapping paper as collage material.
I have managed to weed the back border today, which is the worst for weeds, with ground elder, herb robert and bindweed entrenched and spreading from neglected plots on the other side of the fence. I'm turning the corner into looking at the garden and seeing the beauty, rather than just seeing the mess. There are lots of highlights, as the photos show, maashAllah. I know the photos often don't add any meaning to the text, they are just there to brighten the page.