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!