Garden pics

Ending a damp week

In this mild, damp weather everything looks grubby to me. Shoes get muddy, mud gets on the carpets, the muddy patches in the garden lawn stand out more, with their bobbles of worm casts. And it's not only the mud, the dampness in the air means that nothing dries, like a grey film of dull on every surface. A few hours of glimmering sunlight yesterday made me want to open the doors to the garden wide, to let the light dry up all the corners it could touch.
It has been a relaxing HE week. The children have had friends over to play, which is a treat for us all, and in between we've been finishing up bits of work. The boys have finished another half term of the maths scheme and completed the assessment. We finished off looking at the life of Ayyub (as). This means that I am ready to move onto new projects in history and geography. Science for the year has been completed, as has English really, but I let that just tick along as we've already blurred the year group boundaries in that subject too much to see them any more.
So, I'm thinking of summer projects now. I don't know why I have these boundaries and timetables in my head, but I just need to organise I suppose.
Ia has been doing more and more arty stuff. Today she wanted to paint and then she made tiny gifts wrapped up in chocolate wrappers. U joins her in this now, they have become quite a team, maashAllah. Other than that she has done bits and bobs of workbooks and continued her before bed reading. Now she is using the Peter and Jane Ladybird books and has moved to 2a.

Rain, rain, rain

Ia has spent much time at her "graphics table" (term carried over from her nursery days). She's been making cards, decorated boxes, drawing and tracing pictures and even doing a little copy writing. I don't tidy it away at the end of each day, as she returns to her projects the next morning.

What else can we do when the days are so wet? I've done lots of baking and I sorted out the old exercise books from the shelves and sent them into the loft. Can't quite throw them away yet!

Yesterday it was dry enough to have a fun day with friends, alhamdulillah, but all the excitement meant a slow start to today! Once again it was raining this morning, so just a routine day was in order. As an extension of work last week when we looked into an increase in the number of earthquakes being a Sign of the Last Hour I got the boys to do some further research into earthquakes. It is amazing, subhanAllah that there are recorded movements everyday, just most of them are not serious enough to get noticed.

I found useful information at these links:

BBC

Weather Wiz Kids

Earthquakes for Kids

Unplanned

Yesterday the sun shone and R tried to teach Ia how to ride a bike in the garden. She progressed from completely crashing to falling off carefully.
This morning, however brought disappointment as heavy rain cancelled R and J's first proper cricket match of the year. This afternoon we went to the library and picked up some books to go with my wider reading plans. This has paid off as this evening J has read "Friend or Foe" by Michael Morpurgo and "The Danger Zone Avoid being a Second World War Evacuee". R is working his way through it now.
Ia chose a crayoning skills book and drew some colourful pictures when we got home. She has also been doing some more junk modelling with cardboard boxes.
Ia has also learned all the new words in her Talha and Asma book, so she can read the whole thing now. It happened just like that, subhanAllah.
Allah plans everything and is the best of planners.

Friday

It's the end to another week. The evening is sunny and the girls are playing in the garden. My neighbour let me borrow his hedge clippers, so my side of the hedge is no longer a shaggy mess. He wanted a neat job made of it actually and needed bits from my side trimmed to get the effect. I'm working on a shady patch of the garden, by the shed, with foxgloves, primula, hydranga and hardy geranium to go with the clump of something, mahonia and wizened old rosemary.
We've had a sociable couple of days. U did her first long walk without her pushchair. When I say long I mean about 30 minutes, so, long for her! I had to carry her a bit here and there, but over all she did well, maashAllah. It is strange to be without the pushchair. I had that feeling where you think you've forgotten something but can't remember what it is. Then all the children did well when we had to wait 40 minutes for a bus. I was finding it hard to control my impatience by then, so they did well not to lose it I think!

When and how?

I've started getting Ia to read from a "Talha and Asma" book every evening before she goes to bed. The Talha and Asma books are a copy of Ladybird's Peter and Jane, except that I think they only made the first three books. I started the boys with Peter and Jane, as I had started myself as a child, I actually still have the old copies I learnt to read from. Just as I did with the boys I get her to read one new page, plus the previous pages every evening. I think that the time is good. U sits and reads her own books to herself at this time, before she lies down to sleep, so she does not disturb Ia and also Ia herself is not thinking about doing anything else at that time. Then when she has read I read something else of her choice to her, then they recite a surah, say their dua and sleep. (Usually).
Yesterday I continued work connected to Surah Al-Zalzalah with the boys. As the surah speaks about the events around the coming of the Last Hour I thought this would be an opportunity to go through the major and minor signs of the Hour, listing them down briefly. One of the minor signs is that there will be an increase in earthquakes, so we looked up news pictures of the recent Chinese earthquake, and thought about other earthquakes which have occured in the past few years. By using a cross curricular approach like this I hope, inshAllah, that what we study from the Quran will stick in our minds for longer! Accessing information is not a problem in this era of the web, but retaining information remains as challenging as ever, if not more challenging I think!

Neat flowerbed (it is the only neat bit just now)

I'm in one of those stages again where there just seems to be so much that I want to do and yet I can't organise my time. The neighbour cut his side of the hedge today, so now my side looks like a big shaggy mess. Things seem like that generally!

The boys' work seems to be under control, alhamdulillah. I heard about a Saturday Quran class, but they don't want to go. I would like them to do more, but I can't force them to attend a setting they don't think they like. I continued reading to them today, including reading the history of Ayyub (as). Then they got their other usual work done too, leaving lots of time to play. Alhamdulillah we got a surprise call to meet friends in the park in the late afternoon, so they got some football fun too.

Ia's work is still not really that well organised. She does various activities most days, but it is just not organised. I could do more with her, things I know she would enjoy and which she has even been asking for, like her own lapbook. But I don't like to disturb her when she is in the middle of a good game with U, or when she is doing educational activities on the computer, so then the days pass. She is only five, I don't think it harms her in the least, in fact I think it is better this way. But sometimes I think she wonders why I have not done this or that with her yet!

These are the days of home ed!