This morning, for the sheer fun of using my camera, I thought I’d document a little of what goes into a reasonably typical morning round here. Nothing earth shattering but a slice of mid-January life. For the last couple of weeks Stephen has been doing all of the morning chores on the farm, there are lots of reasons for this but one of mine is that it gives me the chance to rustle up a hearty breakfast for us all…
I’ve recently spent a lot of time thinking about maths. A lot. Not so much the maths itself but about how I teach maths and how my children learn maths. I’m currently undertaking an e-course through Stamford University Online called How To Learn Math, which has opened my eyes to so many possibilities and helped me to address many of the poor lessons I absorbed as a maths learner myself. I’ll try to come back to this topic a bit…
This week we had the joy of hosting our science club at the farm. We were doing a botany and tincture making day so it was perfect to have people here where there was plenty of room to spread out and plenty of plantain to tincture! The children and parents roamed the fields and woods collecting leaves and flora, with so much space we never felt crowded and we were blessed with the most beautiful mild, sunny September day. The…
When I take the boys out with me and there is a bit of waiting time for them, I often get the same comment from people, “They are great at using their imaginations, it’s lovely to see children playing like that.” I’m paraphrasing but that’s roughly it. The thing is every kid I know plays like that, they spend hours at it, inventing games, running around like maniacs, making cities out of furniture. You know, being kids. We spend hours…
Last week, along with some of our homeschooling friends, we visited one of our favourite places, the Cumberland Village Heritage Museum. Much like Upper Canada Village, Cumberland village is a living museum set up with homes, businesses and activities from the 1920’s and 30’s. There is so much to see and we were lucky enough to participate in one of their educational programmes teaching about thrift and prudence in years gone by. In the general store we learned about…
We are very lucky to have a good friend who organises a wonderful homeschool co-op where we get to try out all sorts of lovely activities and have adventures in all sorts of new places. Today we went to our second fairy garden workshop and how lovely it was. At our first workshop the boys really didn’t take an interest which was frankly fine by me. I got to assemble my nicely tasteful garden with stone walk ways and artfully…
After what has felt like an age of rain and mud we finally saw a break in the weather over the weekend and Monday dawned bright, dry and beautifully warm. The perfect day to go foraging! One of our homeschool friends had arranged a wonderful outing to meet Amber Westfall, a foraging expert and enthusiast. We met at a local community garden (I love those places!) but it was the bounty of the hedgerows that we were exploring rather than…
It is with great joy (and a little relief) that we move on from our Maths block and onto…History! We’ve picked up Story of the World 2 and have thrown ourselves headlong into the wonder of the Medieval period and we are loving it. If you are looking for ideas on how to expand on Story of the World, I have lots of fabulous ideas and activities pinned here, we are working our way through them but I’d love to…
Over Christmas Stephen and I spent some time talking about our homeschool priorities for the rest of the year. Ok, well I spent a lot of time blathering endlessly and he talked rather less but with much more purpose about how we could meet our ‘targets’ in 2013. Basically we decided that I would devote January to reading, reading and more reading. Over Christmas I noticed that Huwyl was having more trouble with his reading than really seemed reasonable, he’s…
On Friday we made a start on one of Huwyl’s christmas presents, a volcano making kit. He mixed the plaster and poured it into the mould and then waited (sort of) patiently for it to set. Next he painted it, graciously allowing his little brother some creative input, and allowed that to dry. I think it was a longer process than he’d originally imagined. Neirin had his own little experiment tray to play with, water, baking soda and some drops…