Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Hallowe'en fun

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For the last couple of years we've enjoyed the fun side of Hallowe'en, carving pumpkins, making crafts, dressing up and visiting the locals as is custom. This year has been no exception.

Yesterday we carved our pumpkins having viewed a huge number of photos of very inventive carvings on the BBC website. K and B set too on their own. B carved his little pumpkin that he grew from seed last year to resemble a rather ghostly open mouthed goul and K carved a lovely floating ghost.

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B taking great care using a knife to design his pumpkin

Yesterday evening we went along to the park for a group Hallowe'en BBQ and party with some games and lots of fun. Children had a fabulous time running around in the dark with those clever glow sticks that look so pretty. The children all dressed up for the occasion and each brought a carved pumpkin to enter into a competition. Other games like find a scary toy in a bucket of "worms", or guess what you're eating, playing in slime and a traditional apple game. As the light fast disappeared we were cooking our food by torch light, but we all had a good time and the evening was mild and dry.

Today, we used the internet to understand the traditions of Hallowtide better. K and B made a mini poster which has been divided up over the three days of Hallowtide (Hallowe'en, All Saints Day and All Soul's Day). Today they concentrated on Hallows Eve (Hallowe'en) and drew pumpkins, ghosts, skeletons, bats etc., etc., and wrote a little about them. We all made scarecrow ghosts to line our pathway with K and B writing small cartoons about their ghosts with lovely drawings showing scared faces on the people their ghosts met!

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Ghosts and pumpkins line the pathway

Trick or Treat after dark, with more dressing up (and make up too this time). Temperature here dropped dramatically since last night with quite a biting wind too, so we just went "round the block" with the children pleased with their loot at the end of it all.

Rather exhausted kiddies after two nights of excitement. Hoping for a quieter day tomorrow.

HappyPhotobucket - Video and Image Hosting Hallowe'en!


Monday, October 30, 2006

Utterly Horses Live Show

On Saturday (early!), we headed for Theydon Bois (Essex, on the borders of beautiful Epping) for K's second model horse live show. This show was very well run by the Utterly Horses Team - it started on time and finished on time and had a nice relaxed feel about it all.

I'm sure many people feel this is a rather strange hobby for K, collecting and showing model horses, but she loves it and you certainly pick up the vibes at these shows and feel quite competitive towards the end! It was lovely to see her wandering around chatting to other collectors, all of whom she'd never met before, holding conversations on a hobby she's passionate about.

K came away with 17 ribbons, one of which was a lovely red 1st, so she was pretty chuffed with herself. During the lunch break, Utterly Horses produced some unpainted mini models for us all to paint and enter into the Halloween or Customised classes which was a nice touch.

Here's some photos of the day.

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"a sea of models"
Couldn't resist taking this from the kitchen area (my
favourite place of the day as there was a tin of
Celebrations to munch through!)

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"Performance Class"
K's rider on Milton wins a ribbon

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mini painted models, K's are at the front, mine's the golden one.


Friday, October 27, 2006

So, the end of another week!

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Where does the time go? We managed to finish off quite a bit of outstanding "work" this week. B has proudly finished his Star Wars project, printing it out and drawing a lovely cover for it. K continues with her Red Pepper story and has asked to keep it going as an on-going novel! She's signed up to do the Young NaNoWriMo, first discovered on Qualballah's blog. Well, sort of signed up! I registered K under me, as a homeschooler, rather than do it as an under 12 and send off a permission form all the way to the great US of A. Thinking this would be easier, I've now had two emails, with different wording, but both requesting a list of members in my class, their ages and whether I've received their parent consent forms! Hoping K will be properly signed up by 1st November, when it all starts. Anyway, she's busy planning her characters and drawing them, and has an idea of a story line, so she's pretty much set. The NaNoWriMo is for those wishing to write a novel in just one complete month. There are no prizes, just pride in yourself once you've achieved the 50,000 words in the time limit! For youngsters you can set a workable word limit, we've set 10,000 words for K!

Yesterday, getting cabin fever due to rather unsettled weather, we headed out to the local museum to view an exhibition that was finishing this weekend. It was named "Pictoplasma: Characters at War" and was basically about cartoon characters. Lots of large cardboard cut outs of cartoons lined the entrance, but we only recognised a few (B was pleased to see "Mario" there). Inside the actual exhibition we found lots of grafetti style cartoon characters all over the wall. It seems they'd had a workshop and the children had been allowed to draw their own cartoons! Further on we found more wall drawings in lovely patterns, all cartoons again, and a large film screen showing short films of modern day cartoons. This seemed to appeal to the teenagers who seemed to have set up shop on the sofas together with packets of sweets and drinks, etc., etc.! Got them out of the rain anyway! We watched a little video about children making quick films using plastacine, just like B and K had done. B instantly asked to do more film making, and he also drew a Mr Key cartoon character! We didn't wander round the main part of the museum, but we did visit two more exhibitions, one about Victorians with lots of interactive things (B put on a short Punch and Judy show for us), and another wonderful exhibition of crafts. K and I were mighty impressed with the array of beautiful pictures produced using silks, cottons, wools, crafts items, dolls faces - you name it, it was there. Such imagination! We picked up lots of ideas anyway and B said it was time we all made more canvas paintings for our hall wall. Too right, I've been promising P more masterpieces since we moved to this home 3 years ago! When the kids were much younger, we each did a canvas using paint and craft materials. They are in our bedroom now and I always look at them first thing when waking up. B must have been 3 when he did his and it's really very artisitic.

Today we started to make mini Egyptian mummies using clay and Plaster of Paris. Great fun! Haven't used this before and it warns you not to pour any down the drains ("unless you want a happy plumber" it said!) Once we were happy with our mummies, we left them to set, which didn't take long at all. We'll paint them on Monday. The children really enjoyed all this, so B made a small tea-light holder using clay and P of P, and K followed instructions to made a lighthouse scene using the same two mediums.

Managed to get back to the plot this afternoon and did a good couple of hours clearing. We've cleared one small section now and covered it with cardboard, including the Battle of Hastings collage, just to brighten up the area a bit! K and B helped again today, although K soon decided that reading her Pony magazine was more fun. After a short wander round the allotments, K and B headed off to play in the brook and had great fun (they were soaked afterwards)!

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First lot of weeding done, lots more to go!

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Water was clear when they went in!

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The joy of nature

B made me breakfast in bed this morning - sooo sweet! When I hit the sack last night at about midnight (shakes head and tuts to self) I was cold, like cold as in winter cold. I put my hand up and admit that I do wear socks in bed during winter and I've started to wear them already, but my feet were still cold (surely I don't need to hunt out the hot water bottle just yet). Anyway, had our lovely throw over the duvet which usually makes for a snug night, but not this time, so I threw on a fluffy floor rug too (only thing I could find at that late hour). Boy, I really was snug now, so snug B had to wake me up at 8.30 a.m. (an hour later than my usual rise in the morning). Anyway, he goes down stairs to prepare and then reappears and says "I've done it all but I don't want to risk taking the tray upstairs". How grown up is that! So B and I had breakfast in bed - K didn't want to know (she's a little grumpy in the mornings).

So, we're up and ready by about 10 today and the kids are eager to head for the "plot" to start digging. While I sort myself out getting boots, gardening stuff, thick bags to kneel on, bags for dirty wellies, etc., etc. K and B did some "work". They update the flag book as P has been to Netherlands recently and is in Italy at the moment. They find the relevant countries on the world map and stick his photo up to show where's he's been (to 15 countries nowin total, lucky fella), draw the country's flag and write a little about each country.

K also does more to her "Red Pepper Story" and B does more to his Star Wars project, adding light sabers this time. Kiddies didn't want to wait until after lunch so we then headed out.

Allotment is ... muddy ... very muddy. We manage to get a small patch sort of weeded, but our bucket loads were more mud than weeds I'm sure! The section we've done is now covered in carpet and I see tonight that a local is giving away a good sized carpet on Freecycle, so hopefully I'll be able to get that too. Otherwise cardboard boxes (I get them from Iceland) should be OK. K said that being at the plot was as good as being in the country, so that's made me feel a little better as we've now decided to stay put house wise, rather than move out of town. She enjoyed wandering around the site and came back with two small cauliflowers, and offering from a neighbouring plot holder, which we used in a nice winter warming casserole tonight. Another chap offered us some marrows too - all very friendly it seems. Wish I'd had the camera as our feet were so caked in mud it was hilarious - we could hardly walk! Tip from a rather chatty old fella on one of the plots was to buy a 3 for £1 wallpaper scrapers from Poundland "they do a treat on muddy boots duck!".

Question from B this evening, and I can't answer it and have no idea where to look to answer it: "if all the people in the world were put together, would they all fit on England (meaning UK)?" Another question: "what's ink made from". I'll try and find out an answer to this one.
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Monday, October 23, 2006

Allotment Fever

Seeing as how it's half term (already?!), rather than come to a complete halt with the kiddies "work", we've decided to wind down a bit (i.e. not do the dreaded maths each day!) and try to finish off some of our outstanding work from these last few weeks.

What I'd like finished is K's Red Pepper Story (which must be a novel by now), B's Star Wars project, the Take a Picture thing (yep, I really do have to work out how the collage thing works on Paint Shop) and perhaps even the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory story and storyboard. That'll leave room to concentrate on the Around the World and start our Flat Stanley project by actually making a flattie to send around the world via Yahoo's flat traveller's site.

During the summer holidays, T and her family from the HE group and I decided to share a local allotment plot. Councils, being councils, have dragged their feet and still haven't accepted our payment for it, but apparently it's all ours to start work on (they've even rotivated it for us). Went along today to mark out our patch. All the kids had great fun as the earth so wonderfully squishy - we all came away a few pounds heavier lugging clumps of mud back to our car and homes! During tea, we had another chat about what we'd like to achieve on our plot. They are both very excited about it all and I hope I can make that last as it certainly is a commitment, especially at the start with all the boring weeding to do! K is keen to get weeding whatever the weather, so perhaps we'll trot along there again this week to make a start. Anyway, decided to start another blog all about the "plot" so people, and us, can keep tabs on it's progress. Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Friday, October 20, 2006

Week ending 20th October 2006

Started the week recapping the Battle of Hastings, which we'd talked about last Friday. We decided to finish off the collage that had been started by the group at Friday's session and we added more boats, knights, horse backed riders, King William's throne and Harold with the arrow in his eye (although actually, according to all the "blurb" the tapestry shows Harold falling with an axe close to him, not an arrow!). K wrote names above the key people and the Latin above poor Harold which read "hic Harold Rex interfectus est" which means "here King Harold has been killed".

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K and B have also started looking at Egypt for our "around the world" lapbook and, after reading a little about the pyramids, they drew one for their little Egypt envelopes. Later in the week we looked at the wonderfully colourful hieroglyphics and used the Snaith school site to write out names, decode names of Pharaohs and use an Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet to write a simple sentence. They both produced some lovely work, very carefully drawn pictures and beautifully displayed end results. During lunch times we've been listening to the Horrible History freebie CD which came with last Sunday's Telegraph - all about Eygpt. It's brilliant with weird sounds and short stories to keep the listener interested. B keeps asking to hear it all again and has quoted from it at times so obviously this style of learning works for him.

On Tuesday evening, like many others, I added our day to the history matters 17th October blog. Typically I'd decided to make this day a free-for-all as the children had both asked to do things at breakfast time that I hadn't planned and I thought I'd let them work on their own for once! It was only after reading a couple of blogs on the ring that I realised it was the "great blogging day", but it turned out we'd done quite a bit once I started writing. B decided to finish off his birthday present solar mobile. He painted all the remaining planets, added the glow in the dark paint, and helped measure it all out correctly for hanging. He took a lot of care with the painting and the finished result was lovely. K was excited because she'd finally received information on the forthcoming Utterly Horses Live Show (it's next week). She'd been waiting and waiting for the details and finally they'd been posted on the internet so she set to with sorting and labelling and all the stuff she needed to do with her models! Surprisingly the kids spent most of the day on their chosen activities with little breaks in their work filled with other things like listening to more of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" while they drew the next section of the storyboards and playing with Lego, Duplo and Hama beads, etc., etc. It was a lovely calm day all round (perhaps I should introduce more days like this).

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B's finished solar mobile that glows in the dark!

Lots of drawing has been going on as usual in the home. K with her horses, she's drawing stories too now, like comics I guess, and B with a new style grafetti drawing which is quite striking. He's done a Light Saber one in this new style for his project.

Went swimming on Thursday afternoon - we haven't been since the summer holidays and it took K and B a short while to regain their water confidence. Soon K was swimming widths unaided and she eventually swam a length of the baby pool - a great moment for her and me! She's also getting more confident at swimming very short amounts underwater. B is ducking under water all the time now and is trying hard to swim without arm bands. He does well with aids swimming on his front and back. We've decided, as they love swimming so much, and it really wears them out (B was too tired to eat in the evening and asked to go to bed), that we'd make the effort to go each week.

Today was our last group session at the first of our new venues. We've signed contracts for the other venue to start after half term. Today we did harvest and national fruit day with soup and bread making, fruit salad, topical colouring and 3D craft fruits, vegetable printing and paper basket weaving. We'd been preparing for this last one during the week, covering a cereal packet with sparkly wrapping paper and cutting it into 8 lengths of 2 cm x 30cm and 4 lengths of 2cm x 40cm. It really helped B with his cutting (as he's left handed) and he kept asking to do more and more. Today one of the ladies showed us how to do simple weaving with our strips to produce these lovely small baskets. K worked on hers by herself and I helped B a little with the weaving in and out (it takes some concentration!). K wants to make more - they'd certainly make lovely little gifts.

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K and B's paper woven baskets

B had a spurt of question asking this evening at tea time. He was firing them off left, right and centre! Spurred on when eating the left over fruit salad from the morning's session, he asked what fruit was made of, how seeds know when and how to burst open under the ground, why humans and seeds need sun, how are seeds formed. I think I helped solve all his queries, but wow - all this at once (at the end of the day too!). Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Monday, October 16, 2006

Sharing a piccie

Thought I'd share this lovely piccie of K and B sitting on the back flap of Elsie Mo during some greenlaning yesterday. We found three new lanes to explore. One circled a outdoor activity centre which looked worth exploring further at some point in the future. The second was long and bumpy and we found ourselves sandwiched between two large tractors with trailers containing heaps of freshly harvested sugar beet. The last led us through lots of muddy puddles and ended up running alongside the most gorgeous dream home - a good size cottage with a large pond and flowing water with a woodland garden - ahh (sigh). Maybe I could add something like that to my Christmas wish list!!


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Sunday, October 15, 2006

as the song goes ...

"Take a picture of something you see ..."

That was the title of our summer holiday project. The idea was for us each to take a photo a week over the five/six week holiday and then use Coral Paint Shop Pro X to alter the pictures to produce our own individual pieces of art. This seems to have taken a long time to do (and still isn't finished) for these reasons:-

1) The kids needed encouragement to do this on a weekly basis! We each chose a theme for our photos - K horses (!), B buildings, me trees.

2) I needed to work out how to use Paint Shop Pro before I could get the kids to play around with their photos!

3) I never found enough time to do number 2) above!

4) I wanted to do a simple merge of all the five/six photos to produce one collage masterpiece - I still haven't worked out how to do this without tearing all my hair out!

5) However, we've done this so far, using just one of the photos and playing around with it using Paint Shop Pro to alter the image amazingly.

6) I think the photos they've produced are marvellous - now, on to the next stage, collage (I'll report back in another month or so!).

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K's start picture - toy stable door ...

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... became these two wonderful abstracts

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B's start picture - bricks and plaster ...

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... became this mosaic style star

Just a snippet of some of the other work this week ...

We're continuing with our "Around the world ..." lapbook - this is so much fun! Have looked briefly at Greece this week. Most of the time the kids were demonstrating their rather strange version of Greek dancing to the music on this website. They also drew their own Evzones complete with fluffy black balls on the shoes and read about the Acropolis and the different styles of architecture. Used this site to write our names in Greek, we also learnt how to say "good morning" correctly. We read four Greek Myths using this website, drew the characters and wrote details of the meanings of each myth. Finally we read the booklet "I wonder why Greeks built temples" which has interesting snippets of relevant information.

Came across this site on Merry's blog and B really enjoyed making up some lovely mosaics.

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B asked what syllables were, so we covered that and they both picked up the idea quickly. By checking out the Enchanted Learning website, I discovered that Haiku is made up of expressive lines of writing containing a certain number of syllables in each line. Perfect. We had a laugh a few weeks ago by making up a rather rude poem which we thought could be Haiku (see previous posts) but this was the perfect opportunity to actually produce a correct Haiku! We chose a theme of atrocious weather as we'd experienced torrential rain, lighting and thunder on Tuesday morning. Enchanted Learning explains how to write a Haiku - check it out here. Here's the Haiku's produced by K and B:-

The day is rainy
Mist falling down from the sky
Calming sound of rain
(K)

A wet, rainy day
The lightning flashing about
Sounds calm and restful
(B)

B has been playing with Lego all week and is producing some wonderful things. He's either building them freehand or follows the instructions on his own.

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Geomag has reappeared too which kept B busy for a while one morning while K was battling away with some maths! K has been producing little goody bags for people in her model horse club containing literature, star charts and Hama bead goodies. Bought some Flome and had a play with that, although I don't think it'll be something that they reach for on a regular basis. Did find a website with a recipe to make our own which we may try at some point. Ks been using the "Paint" application on the PC to draw little horses.

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Finally, Friday we ran a group session all about horses in history which we feel was successful. K helped pull all this together. I couldn't believe how much history involved horses in one way or another. This site was very useful in getting information that I needed. We did lots of arts and crafts and then the kids enjoyed another run around outside thanks to the lovely Autumn sunshine that we seem to be experiencing a lot of this year. Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Romany Museum

Yesterday we did a group visit to The Gordon Boswell Romany Museum which is based near Spalding in Lincolnshire. B took most of the photos during the tour so I've added a few into the text.

The owner, Mr. Boswell a Roma himself, talked to the group about the history of the Romany civilisation (they originated from Northern India), including details of his past, the various wagons known as Vardos (some of which we were able to step inside) and we watched slides of his trip in 2002, by horse and Vardo, to the famous Appleby Fair. Information on the history of the Romany (shown as Romani in this site) people can be found here.

The wagons were absolutely beautiful. Naturally we saw the old fashioned "gypsy" wagons with the lovely painted wood, wood burning stoves and beds that slide out to provide "ample" sleeping accomodation. Caravan style homes were on display too, some were quite small and would have housed a whole family. This seemed shocking but we were reminded that families of yesteryear would have been residing in one-up-one-down properties! Two gorgeous 60's style homes on wheels, that would have been pulled by a truck and would have been available to only those with some decent money in their pockets, were open for viewing and would have been lived in by just the adults. Children would have slept in a tent and any cooking would have been done outside to ensure the main home stayed smelling fresh!


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One of the many decorative wagons

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Living under a tent, the style of which has been copied in today's small tents,
plus a view of the rods that would have held cooking pots and kettles
over a log fire.

Watching the slides with running commentry was interesting. The trip to Appleby Fair in Cumbria, took Mr. Boswell and his wife three days, most of it in torrential rain! The journey starting from Spalding through Pinchbeck and then along the old forgotten lanes through Yorkshire towards their final destination. They would stop periodically to feed and water the horses and light a road-side fire to cook or have a cup to tea. As the Vardo was not equipped with a fridge, they took with them a cured ham which would stay fresh for the entire journey. In fact they followed the traditional Romany style of living from beginning to end.

The two stabled horses, used for funerals and weddings, and the little Shetland outside in the paddock, were the highlight of K's visit. They certainly had a lot of attention and seemed to enjoy the children's company, nudging and nipping for more strokes!


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After a picnic lunch, with Mrs. Boswell providing warm drinks for the adults and squash for the children, we headed off for a spot of retail therapy at Springfields Shopping Centre close by before B, P and I headed home just to head out again to have fun at the fair that is visiting our town at the moment. A ride on the kiddies helicopters and hook a duck for B and good old bumper cars for us all and then home to warm up and wind down! K, by the way, stayed with her friend overnight, a treat she really looks forward to and always thoroughly enjoys.

Just to finish off, here's a lovely picture that K drew, named "Starlight".

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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Remembering Opa

K has been busy Hama beading today. She's been making mini winners prizes for a model horse show and they all look really lovely - different colour horse heads, a Champion banner and numbers 1, 2 and 3 for different winning places.

For maths today we did some dessert making. B made a chocolate cake and I left him to get on with all the weighing this time - he did really well and is getting on well at working out his fractions (we use the pounds/ounces on my electronic scales, so they show fractions) and turned out a very yummy cake! K did some liquid measuring to produce a strawberry blancmange.

Having read all about lapbooks on the Wellyboots blog (on left hand bar, scroll down to lapbooks) and thinking what a fun and interesting way to record learning, we've started our first lapbook on the topic of "Around with World in 80 Days". The first section is on Italy, Michael Palin's first proper stop on his lengthy tour of the world. Had fun with understanding the beautiful Italian language learning numbers, colours and simple words through this site. We also had a bash at the sentences, but found they spoke too fast for us to pick them up correctly! It is such a lovely language - I'm trying to persuade the kids to think about learning this rather than Spanish, although I'm sure that's just as lovely a language to learn as any. Anyway, this section we've looked at and painted mini masks (check out the "techniche" section for mini movie on making the masks) for the Italian Carnevale, B's done a few notes on Vespas, we've found out the capital city and which continent Italy is in and we've drawn the flag. K also had a go at a Leonardo da Vinci game on the same website. Must admit I didn't really take it in, but she followed it through to learn about him and his work.

B has done some more to his Star Wars project. It's looking good but I'm getting the feeling he's losing interest in it. This happens a lot with B, and I'm trying to encourage him to return to his previous enthusiasm! Luckily a trip to the library later in the day helped as he found a fabulous book on Star Wars which prompted him to want to write about the light sabers. He also picked up a book on special effects in films - looks very interesting (it has a rather gruesome picture of a gorilla on the cover, half gorilla, half mechanical). The library seems to be mucking us around abit at the moment. A couple of weeks ago I'd returned a couple of books which later showed up as unreturned on their system. I found one of them on their shelves and they didn't even apologise for the mistake. When we went in today I mentioned that there was still one book that I'd returned etc., etc., and they just took it off the system and said "not to worry". After checking out all our new books, a new message popped up to say a book which we'd returned way back in August was also missing! Luckily we had a decent person behind the counter, she took my word that that book had also been returned and deleted that message off the system too! Seems like their computers are full of problems - a bit awkward really as it's my word against theirs!

We also bought some much needed new felt tip pens. Ours never seem to last long, but this set of 50 for £2.99 from Smiths are lovely, according to B, who used them to colour in a dragon.

Watched a bit of Narnia later in the evening and did a bit more storyboard for "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", so quite a bit done today.

P is in Holland at the moment attending his grandfather's (Opa) funeral. Opa reached the age of 95 and he'll be missed by us all. (btw it's not a typo, February in dutch is februari!)

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Monday, October 02, 2006

A day in photos

Captured some of the events of the day in photos ... here we go.

After our normal maths "work" first thing, we did a collage using faces and objects taken from the newspaper. This is because we found out that yesterday was National Newspaper Day! We had some fun with this:

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Bs theme was "snooker" (so I'm not sure why there's a car in it)

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Ks theme was "bored" - obviously what she thought of the activity! We especially liked the headless person top left (with added gorey blood!)

After this, B did some work on this Star Wars project. He's done some lovely drawings of AT-AT and other characters, which we scanned so that he could cut and paste them into his project. He also used Wikepedia to find snippets of information to boost the written side of his work.

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K started making another model horse jump for the forthcoming Utterly Horses Live Show.

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On Saturday we browsed around a new shop in town that sold cut price books and art materials and found, lurking all by itself in a corner, a rather nice magnetic mosiac board. It took us most of the afternoon to tear off all the different colour mosiacs before any play could begin and we've all had a bash at being creative. K and B had a little play this morning during a lull in "work".

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B's creative work

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K's horse jump!

Camera was abandoned for a short while after this due to some petty quarrels amoung K and B. B has been quite tearful and grumpy today and has started sneezing too! I'm hoping it won't develop any further and that it's just his three new teeth coming through (he looks so gappy at the mo).

While B was busy burning off energy by jumping on the sofas in the living room, K found the Oidz that P had bought on Saturday. For those unfamiliar with Oidz they are two oval shaped magnets that you throw in the air to experience a rather loud buzzing sound as they attract to each other - here's a website about them. Sounds strange but they're quite compelling. Here's a rather weird photo of K throwing the Oidz.

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After a lovely family lunch we head off to the ice rink for an hour on the slippery stuff with the local HE group.

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P and B managing to stay upright!

By the time we'd reached home it was close to 4 o'clock and the kids are then allowed to have their 2 hours of fun on the PC (and I can have a rest and do some housework!!!). B played with his Lego Loco, a Star Wars game and an online pinball. K went on her model horse forums to chat and gaze longingly at all those model horses she "needs" in her collection!

As a treat, we bought a lovely curry from Sainsbury's for dinner. Wasn't too sure whether to delight my readers with this lovely photo of K enjoying her Korma, but here it is anyway! She's always been a messy eater, but this is the first time I'd witnessed this kind of "foaming at the mouth"! During our meal we discussed Ramadhan and the month of fasting and how well disciplined the Muslims are to honour this tradition. We all agreed it would be a good exercise for us as a family to do a fast for one or two days to experience this (but we haven't as yet set a date - will keep you informed!).

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So on that messy note I bid you goodnight!Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting