a very late post on lifecycle wheels

This is one of the posts that has sat half finished in the back end of the blog for months, so I thought I'd finally get on with finishing it (along with a bunch of other posts).

What you'll need

- A4 card
- a saucer, small plate or bowl
- pencil
- scissors
- a ruler
- a set of compasses
- a paper fastener

How to make them
Draw around your bowl/plate/saucer on your card. We (just!) managed to fit both circles on one piece of card but you may not.

As you can see, we had an overlap in the middle.

Cut out your circles.

Use a ruler to measure across the circle, and then divide this number by two. Measure that amount on your ruler and set your compasses to that length. Using the compasses, set the pointy end on the edge of the circle and use the pencil to make a cross to mark the centre of the circle, and then from this mark draw two lines out to the edge. This is the section that you cut out, remember to leave a bit near the centre for your paper fastener.

Draw your life stages (however you choose to do this - print them out or do them by hand - we did ours by hand), and stick them on.

Attach your two layers together with the paper fastener. Voila!

to read is to fly

The sprogs have been doing a lot of Reading Eggs/Eggspress over the past week or so.

Little has made good progress on her comprehension gym lessons. She spent a long time on level 3.1, as that was where she started, and then she got discouraged because she got a few questions wrong on a  couple of lessons and felt she wasn't able to do them at all. However, once she managed to get those lessons done, she has spend through level 3.2 in about 3 weeks, and is now on level 3.3. She's also been exploring the Quote Quests, which she refused to do before because they have games on that are timed, and she panics when she has a limited time to do something, even something that is supposed to be fun. We've been slowly working on her doing the games calmly rather than panicking and then becoming upset when she doesn't manage to do it.
We also signed her up with an email address. We were reluctant to do so as technically she is not supposed to have one until she is 13. However, she really wanted to be able to keep in touch with various friends via email, so we created her an account and added some contacts and she has been emailing them about every other day. As part of this progression she has also been doing the Dance Mat Touch Typing which she's enjoyed in the past.

Small has also made good progress on Reading Eggs. He is much more confident now with the idea of sounding out words and is starting to recognise some of the common words, but we still have a lot of work to do on that front. Even simple words like 'in' and 'is' he sounds out before realising what they are. I'm really pleased he is at home and not at school... I dread to think what he would have been like had they been forcing him to learn faster than he is comfortable. I've mentioned before what he thought when he left school - that he couldn't read, it was too hard and made his head hurt. He has not made any progress since then in terms of what he can read, but his self-confidence is much higher, and he no longer believes that reading is the worst thing ever, and I think that is more important. I don't actually care when he starts to read "properly", as long as he is comfortable with what he can do, and feels good about reading as an option. It's also has no impact upon his ability to learn - he just does it all by watching and listening rather than reading.

Tiny has been dabbling in the very early Reading Eggs lessons. We have now covered m, s and t, along with the sounds 'am' and 'at'. A while back we did a little letter M lapbook, and I think we may do another two for S and T, with the intention that eventually we'll have a whole alphabet. I'm not pressuring her - it's all self-directed. Yesterday she requested to have a go on Reading Eggs, and then did 2 lessons with very little help from me.

having a hectic month

Hmmph. Blogger fail. I wrote out a blog post last week, attached all the various labels and added pictures, and then saved it and hit publish. It registered as published on the post list in the back end and I shut it down and went on with my day. Then I came back to write some more on a draft post that I started a while back and discovered that not only did it not publish the post but it's actually lost half of it and reverted back to a previously saved draft! Not impressed Blogger!! Not impressed at all!! >:( will attempt to recreate the post from my memory :/

It's been a while since I last posted. This is partly because we've been very busy for it seems like the whole of July; partly because Podd had a bike accident a couple of weeks ago; and partly because I've been putting some work into my new blog: starting from scratch :: living simply. I started the new blog because I wanted a place to ramble about my efforts with growing more of our own food, and generally becoming more self-sufficient but I didn't want to put it on here because it's not home ed. Please feel to check it out if you wish.. or don't!

Two weeks ago, Monday was the usual busy day of gymnastics, lunch and swimming. On Tuesday Little went to Bazingas, a new over 8 group that has started to run locally, while Small, Tiny and I went into town and went to the butchers, and fishmongers, and finished our afternoon by having some cake from Starbucks, before going to pick Little up again. After that we dropped Little off to stay overnight with my sister and Small, Tiny and I went to Homebase and bought some exterior wood paint. I shall explain why in another post. On Wednesday we had a day off and spent the day at home pottering about the garden and house. On Thursday I had a study day/workshop for work and my sister had agreed to look after the sprogs while I went to that so I dropped Small and Tiny off with her (Little was already there) and then caught the bus to the business centre where the workshop was. On Friday we collected ML, Little's friend, and went to Forest School. The sprogs had lots of fun making and then doing a treasure hunt, while the parents caught up and chatted.

Last week was the sprogs final swimming lesson before breaking up for the summer holidays. They have been booked onto an intensive course at the beginning of August, which will be interesting. On Tuesday we had a play date with some home ed friends, and then the rest of the week seemed to fly by without a great deal to show for it? Saturday was Little's birthday party (she is 9 this week), so there was some preparation for that in the form of cake baking and food buying. We also have our science group this week which I have been preparing for quite a bit. I've also been making arrangements for this weekend as I am attending a training course near London so have been sorting out travel and accomodation, plus some other online training I need to have completed asap.

Saturday was a fabulous day. We had a garden party - blew up a small bouncy castle, had giant dominoes along with our usual garden toys, and bought BBQ food. We invited a few family friends and some home ed friends. Our guests started showing up at about 12 and the last one didn't leave until around 7. All in all it was a wonderful afternoon. I think spending time with friends like that, enjoying some food and generally milling about, chatting, laughing and playing with the kids, is pretty much my favourite thing to do, ever!

I must say, I am feeling really quite overwhelmed by everything this month, what with this training, the fact that I am covering some on call time for a client of a fellow doula, plus with it being Little's birthday and preparing for the science group. It doesn't sound like much when I write it down, but it's been enough to mean that I don't really feel able to do anything else. As a result there hasn't been much active home educating going on at the moment. I am trying to decide whether what we have been doing counts as radical unschooling or whether it simply counts as a holiday from home ed. There has still been plenty of life learning going on, and the sprogs are still doing Reading Eggs/Eggspress several times a week, so perhaps I need to relax and just go with it. Things will ease up soon.

building a wall

Small wanted me to share a picture with you all. He asked me to help him build a wall. He had already tried to build one across our path, which hadn't worked out too well as the path is quite narrow so there wasn't really enough room for anything other than a tower. Then he'd tried to do it again and it fell over due to being wonky. So he came and asked for help, saying he wanted to build a wall across the whole garden. I suggested we could do a smaller one from the path to the slide.

We carefully chose the stones to make sure they were the same height for each level, and he made sure we had the right lengths so that we didn't have any joins in the same place. When we had finished we took the picture, and then talked about safety (it's been very windy here for the past couple of days) and then broke the wall down carefully and put all the stone back behind the garage where it was before.

Here's our wall :)