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!

Reading (again)

Anyone who reads along here from time to time may notice that I have an ongoing theme with sourcing reading materials, especially for the boys. It just gets harder and harder. The library selection of books for the "young teen" age range is very poor. If horror or fantasy is your style, then maybe you are happy with what's on offer. If you are a girl whose interests are gossiping, backbiting and general rudeness then you are probably satisfied too. If you don't like either of those types of books then the library has hidden away the reading stock you'd like in the "reserve store".
You have to be pretty determined to unearth items from the reserve store. To start with you have to know the authors or titles you want to read. This means you need someone who read them to recommend them. If you are a kid then this is quite hard. Your friends can't recommend books they've never seen either. I asked around on a home educator forum full of clever home educators and someone suggested the author Geoffrey Trease.
Since getting this name I've ordered lots of Geoffrey Trease books from the reserve stock and the boys are really enjoying them. Most of these books have not seen the light of day for as long as ten years. They have the price in shillings on the cover. They are historical, adventure stories. The main character is always a teenage boy. I liken it to grown up Famous Five in an historical context. The boys are always "decent", the girls are always no-nonsense with a touch of tom-boy. The history in there is often based closely on real events, but is so wrapped up with the adventure story that it is effortlessly absorbed. It's ideal for my sons at the moment. So good not to be hearing "What shall I read now?" every few days!
Geoffrey Trease wrote loads of books, but the library stock is dwindling. Only the survivors remain in the store. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Geography fieldwork

Today we took advantage of some sunny spring weather to do a little more on our rivers project. Today we did fieldwork on measuring the rate of flow. We found a shallow, but quite fast flowing area to investigate. We placed markers using string attached to either side of the bank, to mark the start and finish lines. On one side we tied the string to plants, on the other we found a piece of wood lying about, which we made into a post. We placed the two lines 10 metres apart.
Next the boys took measurements using a measuring tape. They measured the depth of the channel by either bank, and in the middle, then they measured the width of the channel. They did this at both lines.
Next it was time to measure the flow. We used clementine peel as a float. R put it in the water at the start line and started the stopwatch. J caught it at the other end and called out to stop the timing. I recorded the results. We measured from the left, right and middle three times each.
After that everyone had a paddle in the water (except me), then we came home. InshAllah we'll be putting the results together later this week.

Home ed still going on!

Home education is still going on. In fact, everything seems to get busier and busier, alhamdulillah.
We've been working on a rivers project amongst our other usual activities.
I've discovered that U gets much more motivated when she is given something new to work on. Always a new book, preferably one that can be got through fairly quickly. If working through it takes too long she will lose interest. I'm not talking about working in one day here, but using a book over a period of weeks.
Today I tried her with an Emaan series workbook. I bought some of the reading series years ago, just at the time when it temporarily became harder to get hold of. I just picked up the copies that remained in the shop, these included a level three workbook. For whatever reason I never used the workbook before, but decided to try it with U today, as something different. She read the story " A Home for Fuzzy" then did the few pages on it from the book. It worked out well, alhamdulillah.
These days the reading books are available again. You can find them here.