A castle please

Last week Ia said that she'd like to make a castle. I was rather defeated by this suggestion, having already got rid of all the cardboard boxes and tubes that pile up so often.
After a quick search I found this Usborne cut out  model book, which arrived today. It took Ia and I about an hour to make this small portion of the castle! It is fiddly work, but she is enjoying this project, maashAllah. Let's see how long it takes us to put it all together!!

Home ed highlight #2

Examining the river's load. We went down to our local river/stream again today to look at the features of the riverbed, as part of our geography fieldwork endeavors. The kids picked up samples of stones of different sizes from the riverbed, which we measured, weighed (if they were big like the one below), and recorded the colour and shape.

Everyone likes wading, even when the boots leak!!!

Little Highlights

Even when we are not home educating in a structured way, we are home educating. You can't get away from it really. Even when the parent takes a break the child continues the education in one way or another. Its just living.
It feels like summer - even though its April - and after this break I feel like it should be the summer holidays! It feels strange to think of getting back into the swing of structured days. I think the children feel the same!
I don't update this blog as often as I feel I should. Somehow I find I'm running out of things I can say here, that I haven't said before, but maybe I should be on the look out for those little home ed highlights, the things that tell me its all ticking along, alhamdulillah
Today I did some sewing. I made a khimar and a rough and ready laundry peg bag, using some left over cotton and a small clothes hanger (the kind that comes with small size kids clothes). Seeing me sewing made the girls think of making little clothes for their soft toys, so they got out the scrap bag and cut out bits of fabric to make non-sewn coats, scarves etc. Different fabrics cut in different ways. Some slip about, some easily tear, depending on the direction you make the cut. Today's little highlight: learning about cutting fabrics.

Spring pace

From today we are taking a couple of weeks off, to coincide with the school holidays. As most of my kids' friends go to school they like to treat those weeks differently too.

As another sister recently remarked as children get older you just get busier! Although when busy with little ones and their constant demands you can feel very tied down you do still get to set the timetable. As they get older I'm finding myself busy with accomodating their various activities and  having to work myself around the timetable that brings to me. Its a different sort of busy! Plus, I suppose when they are younger you do get periods of the day when everyone else is asleep, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Now of course that is no longer the case either, as pretty much everyone goes to bed at the same time, and only U tends to sleep a little longer in the mornings.

So, although the weeks have gone by and I have blogged very little here, home education and life in general has been continuing apace, alhamdulillah. In fact, if anything things just seem to get faster and faster, as I try to squeeze more and more in!

Recent good weather saw us taking time in the garden and bringing the books out there too whenever possible. The boys have been doing lots of their usual outdoor sports practice and also cycling, alhamdulillah. The garden is really too small now for them to play "football" in, as their kicks will always send the ball staright into the hedge, and they can only run a few paces before reaching the hedges themselves! However, it is still good for cricket shots, so they can go outside for hours just bowling at eachother, maashAllah! They are getting better at controlling their shots now too, so fewer balls go over the hedge.

Last week I put U on a free trial at Reading Eggs.co.uk, which I heard about via a sister on the IHSAN forum. Clearly this has come along too late for us, as U has really grown out of this stage of reading, maashAllah. She has been enjoying playing the games, as there is plenty of novelty value to the site, however I don't think she has really learnt anything new, as the word level she was placed at is pretty easy. So, I won't be enrolling her after the trial expires. However I think that if I had found this site a year or so earlier I would have been really tempted to sign up. It looks really good for a child of around four to get started with.

Sunny days also saw me return to Ia's science topic on light and shadow. One day last week she spent the day recording the different lengths of the shadow cast by a brick standing on end in the garden. It goes to show what a grey winter we had that I didn't feel we could do a whole day experiment like that until now! Of course the book she was working with told her that the shadow should be shortest at noon, but as we are in British Summer Time, of course it was shortest at around 1pm, by the clock. So, this led to a discussion about the  changing of the clocks.

So, we are still here and still immersed in our life of home ed, maashAllah. Now in these weeks of break I have the delights of spring cleaning (!), next term planning and maybe a little sewing to look forward to!