Another beautiful autumn week......

We have been well and truly blessed with another week of glorious autumn sunshine. Thomas is really getting into his fresh juices, so we start out by picking beetroot from the garden and juicing it along with carrot, apple and ginger, which makes a beautiful rich juice to start the day on. Both thomas, and now George are professional juicers! check out the pics!

This week has well and truly flown. This morning we woke up and explored flower fairies, which are new to us. We have ordered a book second hand from amazon and eagerly await its arrival. Thomas skipped around, chatting endlessly about where the fairies would be, how to find them, and even caught a few and made beds for them from petals. That was the morning gone.......

In the afternoon we went along to our new art group with 4 other boys, two of which we are getting to know from forest

school.

.

Forest school is really great now. Thomas is growing in confidence and really seems to be enjoying being with the others. He was shy at first, and was slow and cautious joining in. I'm glad we persevered........

Here are some pictures of monday at forest school. The theme was nuts, which were sorted, planted, and labeled with witteled hazel sticks. This includes of course

the famous three R's reading writing and arithmatic!!!! We dug the potatoes, collected tin

der and shared lunch over a fire.

Sorting the nuts

planting the nuts........

whittling and labeling the planted nuts.

We've been out to a friendship group for lunch today, mama's I know through our La Leche League, and their youngest children. Its beautiful to watch Thomas's friendships grow. I guess one of the first questions people ask about home schooling is often regarding social life. Its wonderful, to watch him develop lovely relationships with other children. He has great social skills, maybe takes him a short while to warm up, and he definately enjoys playing with one friend at a time. He does need his friendships, and gets very excited about meeting up with friends. We are blessed to have live on a street with different aged children who so far love playing together, especially on bikes, scooters and skate boards. His growing skills and friendships feel organic, and safe. Through reading playful parenting I have gained trust, watching boys play. Its such a huge honour and priviledge to be on this journey with my family...

Here is a pic of a wood pecker we spotted on our lawn at lunch time.

Ok. I'm struggling with this blog, to make it look nice! It took me all night last night to do yesterdays blog! and I didn't get much on in the way of pics. I like the idea of this blog being a bit of a photo diary of our adventures. So here are a few more pics of yesterdays a pirate play with Anna our neighbour down by the stream.

23rd September 2009

This morning Thomas wanted to use the balancing scales again, so we made bread. As I cleaned up with George snoozing in the sling, Thomas set to with his pirate jigsaw.......and a pirate theme for the day emerged. Thomas dressed up as a pirate, and we met a friend for a walk down the local stream, where they paddled, and played pirates.

Our stream fun was cut short a bit to run home to get the bread finished off.

At home, Thomas started on a pirate hat craft, his own design and creation, a bit of help cutting the thick card.

George in the mean time concentrated on his own project.....climbing onto the chair, and then the table, and then settled with fitting together peices of the wooden cactus.

22nd September 2009

Thomas was keen to explore the Roman Baths again today in town. After making another quick robot, we played with our neighbours. Thomas an freddy explored cars, sliding down into a big bucket of sand. They played long and hard, moving inside to build train track together. Finally at about 2pm we set off in the car for the |Roman Baths. We were excited to notice that the colour of the stone was orange, the same as our an area near our local stream. Thomas also wondered about the green colour of the Bath water. We asked two "Romans" about these two queries, and learned the iron deposits make the stones orange, and an algae makes the water green, but in the roman time the roof, which now doesn't exist, would keep the sun light out, and so algae wouldn't have grown.

We then spent time running on, sliding on, skidding on, and talking about the huge world map in Bath city centre.

New home learning adventure

Its September now, the end of infact, and we've had a busy month. Its been the first official month of home learning, and we've set off with some busy fun and adventures.

We've been busy baking, collecting apples from the garden and blackberries from the lane for baking puddings, lots and lots of crumbles.

With the glorious weather, we've been outside a lot. We've been to Dyrham Park climbing trees and deer watching. We've spent lots of time in the Botanical Gardens and on nature walks locally. The berries are ripe and we've been painting with their juices. Wednesday is our Craft Day although, as Thomas is into creating things at the moment, we tend to end up making robots, masks, pictures and greetings cards most days. He often runs to the recycling box and comes back with an arm full of items to be used for building his latest creation.

Now We Wait

Now we are going to wait...

George Helped

George helped by eating soil.

Close up

Here is the house close up.

Setting Up

Here we are setting up the caterplliar's house. We put leaves in and twigs for it to hang from and slide down when it becomes a butterfly. We also put some water in with a cloth over the tub to provide moisture for it.

The Vapourer Moth Caterpillar

We found this caterpillar eating a geranium leaf. It is a Vapourer Moth caterpillar. Its latin name is Orgyia antiqua. ukmoth.org.uk