Cleaning, entertaining and outings

I've started putting up a rough timetable of the week for us all to try and follow work wise. Into our second week of this now and it seems to be working - it often gets added to during the week and looks a total mess by Friday when I can wipe it clean and start afresh for Monday!

All seems to be ticking along nicely: Maths, handwriting practise, Latin, sign language, science, project work and Sketch Tuesday (art seems to be the most popular subject at the moment). Katie did some lovely art on Thursday with the group, drawing seed pods and Autumn leaves practising blending using coloured pencils. Science has been linked to our project work on the Poles - found some fun and easy experiments here. We tried making a mini iceberg to see if 11% (or thereabouts) did actually protrude above water, but ours seemed to average a lot more than that to start with! Maths has taken on a new spurt with re-discovering a now working (for us anyway) Timez Attack. Free downloadable software to help children (and adults I guess) learn their times tables the fun way! We recommend it. This game, together with the physics one I mentioned in my last post, have been played alot this last week. Katie and Ben were even asking to play Timez Attack at 8.30 on Friday morning so it must be good fun. There's a link on my side panel.

My parents visited over the weekend (they were staying for a holiday close to us) and so I spent most of the previous week cleaning the house from top to bottom (major clean, I even did the windows and trimmed all the hedges out front), luckily the weather was on my side. We had a super Sunday roast and lovely walk up to the marshes with them and then met up at Sandringham for a tour of the house and wander around the fabulous gardens during the week. A very popular place Sandringham, although not as busy as at the weekend when we went apple picking there. Came away with two full bags of apples - one of Bramleys the other of Laxton's Fortune. Most people were going for the Cox's but we found them all tiny and very hard. The Laxton's Fortune were spot on!

My house - no, only kidding!

Gardens were lovely. Ben, as always, was drawn to the water. Very peaceful.

You can imagine the smell of apples, it was wonderful.

Weather was just so beautiful it seemed a sin to go home so early in the afternoon, so we stopped off at Snettisham beach for a couple of hours lapping up the warmth of the sun and gentle breezes while the children played in the mud and made trenches and castles in the little stretch of sand. We'd remembered our binoculars for once, so could see right across to the marshes of where we live plus the wind farms there and out at sea near Skegness. The tide was out and people were digging for lugworms. Lots of beach houses with wafts of evening BBQs in the air. We picked up fish and chips on the way home - bliss.