Out and About

Sam,Rose and I had a fun day out this week with some fellow FIAR friends.We met up at the playground and all the kids had lots of fun as you can see(above)!.Then after a little walk we enjoyed a picnic and our friends brought some yummy banana muffins (the recipie for which I have been promised)

Thankfully the weather stayed good and we had a great time. We're planning to do it again next week and hopefully a few other home educating families will join us!

Tea and Crafts

Ok,I have been reading lately about people having 'Tea' and crafts time with their children and using the time to talk about bible studies or religion.

I thought this was a great idea, so this evening we had our own version of it.

We started off by making 'Good Deed Beads' which are simply 10 beads threaded onto thread/string/wool and at the bottom could be a cross or holy medal.At the top you tie the thread/string/wool onto a safety pin and the child can then pin it onto something.The idea is that every time you do a good deed or say a little prayer you can move a bead up or down the string and you should try to do ten of these things each day.

This is Sam enjoying his tea which we had just before bedtime,we used some fancy china and enjoyed cheesecake bars which we made earlier this evening.His good deed beads are laid on the table.During this time we listened to music and talked about examples of kind things that we could do each day.

Rose is wearing her beads.The tea time was a really pleasant experience,I bought special camomile,honey and vanilla teabags today so we had tea from these and I sweetened it with some honey.I hope we can make this a regular occurence,I am going to try and do it at least once or twice a week.

Quiet Weekend & lots of DANCING!!

A quiet weekend here.Dh wasn't home until sat evening from england (filling in for a driver on holidays).So, dc and I spent the day about the house,as guess what? It was raining for a change!!lol.They helped me with a few chores in the morning and we had some fun playing Snakes and Ladders this afternoon.After dinner we watched a movie,but dh was too tired after no sleep the night before so he went to bed very early.

Sunday we all had a lie in.Then went out for a late lunch before mass at 5:30.After that we went, as we usually do on sunday evening to visit my MIL -Granny.Sam went across the road to his cousin's house and ended up sleeping over,so he wasn't home until teatime today.


While he was gone Rose and I discovered that you can listen to lots of songs on nick jr radio at their website,so she did lots of dancing to all the lazytown tunes.Here she is;

Storm in the Night

For the past few weeks we have been reading 'Storm in the Night'.It has been very interesting and fun.

Here are some pictures of the children's notebooks.And a rundown of what we did;

Page1 :

Sam drew some different facial expressions from the lesson in the manual.

We listed some sources of light,and learned a memory verse about fear.

There is a picture of Sam holding the "worry warrior"that he made.We got this idea from the crayola website,it is to help childern talk about their fears.
Sam decorated this page by drawing some sources of light.

Page 2:

We experimented with acrylic paints and did the lesson suggsted in the manual.

Sam completed a book on using the 5 senses,after we had had lots of fun doing sensory activities.

After reading all about lightning Sam did a few quizes about it.

Page 3:

I typed out a narration of the story which Sam dictated.

We learned the vocabulary from the story and made a mini book for it.

We made a mini book about Onomatopoeia and stuck some examples into it.

Sam illustrated the page with thunder and lightning.

We talked about Sam's relatioship with his 'Papa' and he wrote a few sentences about it.

Finally we put in some pictures of our special 'Storm in the Night' tea.

I also decided to get a notebook for Rose,although she is only 3 and won't have as much to put in it as Sam.I thought it would be nice for her to have her 'own' book to put a few things into.So,she has some painting,coloring,a rhyme and some photos too.Here's her page;

Pillowcase Prayers.

I have been looking through my new book-' The Big Book of Catholic Customs and Traditions'
which arrived just the other day and there are some really good ideas in it.I spent a few hours today on one of them;It gives you a simple morning offering and night prayer for children and you write one on either side of a plain pillowcase in permanent marker.So the child can look at one side in the morning and say their morning prayer and at bedtime turn the pillow over and say their night prayer.I was really pleased with the results.Here it is!

Tuesday Tales

Yesterday our new curriculum arrived from Math-u-see,so we started using it today.I have a bit of a phobia about maths and I began to fear that this was wearing off on Sam as he always groans at the mention of the subject,so after some deliberation I decided to take the plunge and buy the quite costly Math-u-see Alpha curriculum.I'm hoping that this will help Sam understand maths as we can watch the author(or teacher?)explain the lessons, which I seem to be unable to do without confusing both of us!

So maths today went well!! Long may it last......we'll see!

We also started our LLATL red book yesterday,which I'm quite impressed with so far, although there is quite a jump with the amount of written work compared with the blue book.Sam just HATES writing, although his handwriting is good and he can do it quickly when he sets his mind to it, he moans so much about it.


We did some Spanish after english, and after lunch we went grocery shopping.I bought Rose and Sam some cool new markers ,in the hope of inspiring some masterpieces.So when we got home Rose started drawing,when she couldn't draw a 'good' dog she asked me to help, so in the middle of frantically cooking tea I tried to oblige.Tried being the optimum word.Rose said very irritatedly 'Mummy you drew a dinosaur-I wanted a dog!' .That made me laugh!LOL