Planning

Iv been busy organising today.

The girls headed out on a walk up the village with Paul this morning leaving me at home with my boys. I baked enough bread rolls for a couple of days and then got stuck in to planning our days next week.

We are loosely following the waldorf essentials curriculum dipping in and out , mixing things up a bit , leaving out bits they have no interest in , digging deeper in to things they find interesting.

Well to be honest we have been pretty child lead since December but we will be starting back with our main lessons on Monday .

The girls are pretty enthusiastic about it .The new main lesson books arrived in the post today .

Iv written a brief summery of what id like to do with each child on each day next week.

Charlie is continuing with his maths block on the months of the year.
Summer is starting a block about Egypt.
Gypsie will be studying the physics of light and colour and Jasmine will start to look at explorers of the renaissance ,beginning with Columbus !
Circle time will focus on deep hibernation and Charlie , Eva and i will study black bears!

On Friday we will have a day full of Chinese new year crafts and cooking.

Well Thats the plan anyway....

Im looking forward to next week .

Lists , lists and another list!

Today has been an organising and planning day.

Myself and jasmine and summer wrapped all the  presents iv brought so far for my family . I have three brothers and three sisters so this wrapping process usually takes a while as i normaly insist on doing it all myself .Summer had asked if she could help and i soon found that they were infact more than capable of wrapping the gifts.They also wrapped birthday presents for my brother and sister . They did a great job .

After lunch i started with the list making. I made my Christmas card list . An advent activities list (i made a felt stocking calendar a couple of years ago ,in each stocking i place a treat for each one of our children and an idea for an activity we can do together) and an elf on the shelf list (for the past couple of years we have had an elf come to stay for the month of December ...he likes to have fun at night and the little ones wake up each day excited to look for him and see what he has been up to). The latter two are still work in progress but i am almost there .

So yeah i spent far too long on pinterest looking up activities and crafts for December . Summer and jazz had a tiff that resulted in me over reacting n banning summer from her phone , the computer and the wii....that ban lasted all of about an hour once we had both calmed down.lol.

Gypsies and jasmine spent the afternoon baking with Evas help. I love how patient they can be with her. They made chocolate chunk shortbread , vegan cup cakes and a chocolate fudge cake.

Charlie made the dumplings for tonights dinner. I explained he would need double the amount of flour to suet and he worked out that there were ten teaspoons of suet left in the box so he would mix that with twenty teaspooons of flour.....practical maths is far more fun than any workbook!

Eva , Charlie , jasmine and i also enjoyed a stroll ( i strolled,well waddled, they scooted) down to the shop just as the moon was rising. The sky was streaked with purples ,blues and pinks.Charlie said it looked like a rainbow  and Eva as always was excitedly pointing out the moon.

This evening Charlie and i read one of his library books about rescue transport .

Today seems to have really flown by!

Halloween preparations

After a couple of days of feeling very poorly and like an absolute failure as a mum and home educator , i was extremely happy to feel better yesterday and made the most of the energy i had.

I took the girls breakfast in bed. Cleaned the kids bed room and kitchen, had dinner bubbling in the slow cooker and a long line of washing hanging out to dry all before lunch time by comparison to the past couple of days this was a big achievement.
Id even had time to sit with jasmine and plan out her next main lesson block on astronomy.

After lunch with the glow of a tea-light and the delicious smell of apple and cinnamon  wafting from the oil burner,we made a start on some Halloween crafts.

Charlie made a scary pirate and scarecrow . Gypsie made a pumpkin garland and i made a pin wheel and 3D model of Marvin the mummy.
Summer decided to make tissue paper flowers....not Halloween related but very cute. She also cut up bin bags to make a scary door way and trick or treat bag.
Jasmine baked a coffee cake and spent a long time on pintrest looking at Halloween craft projects .
This evening she decorated her cake to look like Frankenstein ...its great!

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