Crafting with the kiddies!

During this week we have also done lots of art and craft, here are a couple of thier projects that are worth sharing inshaAllah:

You may remember Daisy started this bag from kit eons ago, well it's finally finished.  It was so easy for her to sew as the felt type material was so think and the holes were pre-punched so it was difficult to go wrong. She absolutely loved doing it and is chuffed with the results.  I have been trying to find more kits like this but haven't seen one anywhere.

All together complete with bling

We also found this old storage board in a charity shop and decided to alter it.  Everyone had a hand in this one and it did get a bit messy but it was great fun. The kids learned lots of new techniques and all put their own ideas into how it should look... which involved using lots of my paper flower stash!

Not sure what we will use this for... perhaps storing cards with ideas for those 'bored' moments and other activity type stuff.

Daisy was also tasked with making a musical instrument for Beavers for one of her badges... it was difficult to steer her away from all the string/wind instruments and she didn't want to do a drum as everyone else was doing a drum so we ended up making the trust old maracas out of out of date rice and lentils [everyone gives me their out of date stuff as they know we use them for art etc lol].

After she sellotaped the cups together she glued on torn scraps of wrapping paper [pink of course] with a PVA glue and water mix to decorate it.

Let's see what next week brings as they return to school :o|

Brave Writer Discount

For those of you that may be interested in puchasing the Brave Writer program the chaps at Homeschoolers Buyers Co-op have a 50% off deal that expires on the 31 October 2012 - so go on over and check it out.  Join up if you haven't already you can get some great deals.

Back yard fossils!

So today the kids decided that they were feeling much better so after Jumah prayer Crush and Daisy raised an expedition to the garden to '...dig for fossils...' and what d'ya know, they found some too!

All very common but the intrepid explorers were filled with excitement nevertheless. Here are some pictures of a few that they found:

a very worn ammonite - a marine invertebrate related to the squid, octopus and cuttlefish family which apparently became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period [about the same time as the dinosaur].  In medieval Europe it was thought that they were petrified coiled snakes and were called Snakestones in England.  Apparently ammonites found in Nepal are thought by the Hindu's to be a concrete manifestation on of of their gods [astagfirullah; how does this make sense?]

ammonite... this one is much clearer

 

There's that ammonite again but not sure what the others are (if they are fossils at all; but I'm not going to burst any bubbles until I know for sure LOL)

absolutely zillions of Devils Toenails [Gryphaea], these were oyster type animals that lived from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous period.  They are very common in the UK and apparently it was believed that carrying one of these around could prevent rheumatism.

Daisy has been looking through her Beaver Handbook and has decided that she is going to work very hard to get all of her badges.  She is of the opinion that if she does a small project/presentation on her finds she may be able to submit it for a badge.  So that's on her 'to do list' for next week inshaAllah; I'll let you know how she gets on!

A brief return to HE!

The kids have been at school now for four weeks alhamdulillah and I must say that life is really busy with them at school and I'm not quite sure that I like that.  We always seem to be rushing about too.  Rushing to school, back home, to madressa, home to eat and then out again in the evenings for their other activities.  I miss them such a lot, we don't seem to get much quality time together anymore and it's not quite the rest I was hoping that I would get either alhamdulillah.  BUT... it has been good to see them learning even if it's not in the way that I would like them to.

I am a little worried that their zest for learning might begin to fade under the weight of so many worksheets, homework and 'the curriculum' so I will be keeping my beady eye on them.  They have already expressed a wish to be home schooled again and I would just love to dash in on my white charger and rescue them from the 'system' however hubby wants them to stay where they are.

That's a turn up for the books.  He's usually a 'whatever you think is best' kind of man when it comes to their education so I have a suspicion that it may be more for the benefit face within his community than anything else [his friends son has just gone off to university to be a solicitor with a whole stack of A's grades behind him and hubby has been wondering if our children '...could be solicitors if they wanted...'] but Allah ta'ala knows best.  Not sure what to do now... more istikharra and patience I suppose.

Anyway, the kids have been off most of this week [yay!] with a virus [boo!] so we have been busy and have really enjoyed just being together, snotty or not!  Despite being ill we have still been...

using the maths balance for solving maths problems...

exploring weight using the scales..

r

... writing stories and poems in great abundance

They have also been colouring pictures... dogs, castles, warriors, knights, Warhammer knights, foxes, houses etc... the printer has been on overdrive lol.  The kids were also inspired to write using tips from a program that a friend introduced me to called Brave Writer.  It's developed by an author who believes that English classes do not teach us how to enjoy writing which leads to blank faces when children are asked to write about something [among other things].  I have only grasped a tiny bit of this program from what I read at my friends as I am waiting to purchase my own copy so can't expand on it any more at the moment.  I'm really excited about this and from the little bit I introduced this week and their response I think it would be especially beneficial for Sprite as he already 'hates' writing because of his issues... more on this program in later posts inshaAllah.