Peaks and troughs!

Well our slight peak has unfortunatelty troughed! What started out as a promising week education wise dipped with the return of my lack of sleep! But we have done this...

Inspired by Umm Tafari the two little ones started a visual journal however, they wanted to start it 'NOW' and I didn't have any spiral bound books but I did have some scrapbooks so we used those instead. The first one is Daisys, she did start off trying to do blow painting but the paint was too thick so she ended up scrunching up paper and dabbing, there are also some flowers made with thumb prints and some material flowers stuck on. I was worried that they would be dissappointed as the blow painting didn't work out but they were pleased with the overall result mashaAllah.


This is crashes journal, he wanted to do handprints on his and painted all our hands and made each one of us put some hand/finger prints on it somewhere lol...he even said that he wants to do a page inside on the theme of families with each of our handprints; I think he may really run with this inshaAllah.


Lego has actually started putting his WW2 lapbook together and produced these two mini books..the first one he put a lot of effort into and it looked great with some great but amusing factual writing [he is actually very good at writing mashaAllah]. The second one...well, it does what it was meant to do but the effort is just not there...this drives me made with him, he is so inconsistant with his work standards! Arggg, he can really let himself down sometimes.


We are in the middle of a garden revamp and hubby [for some strange reason] got the kids to dig this huge hole anyway, it got filled with water and they put their small dingy in it for a paddle...they really made me laugh, they were soooo happy floating on what was basically a deep puddle and it kept them entertained all day. They have also been helping hubby put up fences; apparently cementing and playing with hammers, saws and nails is so much more entertaining than maths and English!


Sprite figured out how to make a water pistol using a hydrolic system...you could have seen it working/spraying but for some reason we couldn't co-ordinate the picture taking with the spraying!


I have been given a copy of 'Just so Stories' by Rudyard Kipling and the illustrations are beautiful - the photo doesn't do them any justice at all I'm afraid - so tomorrow I am going to read it before they start their visual journals to see if it inspires them at all.

Finally getting stuff done...

OK it's taken us [well me] a few days to get into the swing of things this Ramadan...I was ill the week before Ramadan, then we decided - because of the long fasting day here in the UK - to stay up all night and then sleep from fajr until dhur. Well that was the plan and everyone did sleep until dhur...except me! For some reason I was waking up at 7.30am and couldn't get back to sleep so for the first few days of Ramadan I was sleep deprived [about 4 hours a night] and a little tetchy to say the least. Well, now I can manage to sleep until about 11am which is just enough sleep for me to back on track, alhamdulillah. So for the last couple of days....

Lego has constructed most of the buildings for his D-Day landing model - built to fit his ready made army, as you can see!:

We completed our Ramadan bulletin board thanks to the very talented sisters at TJ Ramadan and Mini Mu'min for their wonderful downloads:

We also spent an afternoon at Watermead Country Park and visited the Climate Trail:

They played on a dinosaur [with cargo nets, woop!]

Learned about recycling and our contribution to the ozone etc..

They climbed long poles...

Rode a polar bear.
We [yep, me too!] walked a rope bridge across the river [it was very wobbly and I didn't like it *pout*, lol]
Then we spent an hour or two sitting in a quiet spot by the lake reading Quran, skimming stones, fed the ducks and swans and did some sketching....what a lovely day. The swans kept coming up on the bank to hear the Quran and scaring Daisy lol!

And Sprite built this bubble blower from a Robot Kit [there was a bit of artistic license in play there I think, I wouldn't go so far as to label it a 'robot' but he's chuffed with it nevertheless].

And that's it!

FREE Mini Ramadan Kit

http://www.mini-mumin.com/RK.html

A few nice simple charts etc and an online childrens book about fasting and a lovely certificate to print at the end of Ramadan.

Grown up Crafting

I am in the throws of adding another arm to my 'self employment' by hand making memory books like the ones I did for my sister... let me know what you think!

Wedding memory/scrap book...for those that are interested!

Well here they are, well some of them. There were lots of pages that I couldn't include as they had photos on; such as pages on the bride and groom, members of the wedding party, fireworks, reception etc..and the first few pictures are of the box I made for the book to kept in; I wrapped the whole thing up in patterned cellophane [similar to what bouquets come in] and presented it to my little sister!

Lazy week....

Alhamdulillah this [well last] week was a lazy week as we were all preparing for Ramadan. The children had no madressa all week but instead their ustadh [teacher] planned different activities for each day of the week. So they had: football, bring and share food, a certificate presentation and a dawat where their teacher provided the food mashaAllah. I was also very pleased to hear that the boys all received grade A's in their tests mashaAllah...they all came running in waving their certificates in the air lol. Sprite made this lovely [so I'm told as I didn't get any **pout**] chocolate fudge cake for the bring and share day.

Lego has been playing around with movie making and has made a very short stop motion animation film. He was just playing around and seeing how it all worked but he is pleased with it nevertheless. I would attach it but he is trying to work out how to get it into a format that will play on the blog. He's been using VideoPad which was very good but it was only a 14 day trial, we're now on the lookout for some good free software...I will upload his movie when I can inshaAllah.

On Friday we were inspired by Umm Tafari at River City Homeschoolers to have a tea party mashaAllah. However it was soon overtaken by the boys and was transformed into a BBQ; that's boys for ya, and there was me saying how they enjoyed a tea party lol! They are all growing up so fast mashaAllah... Lego got everyone organised, set up the BBQ and got the coals going and Sprite did the cooking. BBQ's are a real mans domain aren't they? I guess Daisy and I will have to have our own little tea party one day without the testosterone muscling in!

We have been doing lots of stuff for our owl project including some virtual owl pellet dissections here... in preparation for the real thing [which I'm really not looking forward to!]. Nothing else much going on, just ad hoc learning at the moment. I was ill yesterday so we didn't get our Quran reading started so have a juz to catch up on already! Not a good start to Ramadan eh!

On another note, I finally finished my sisters wedding album cum memory book, I'll put the pics in a separate post as it's easier, and I have a commission to make another for a 50th wedding anniversary gift, yay! Here are some pics of the first memory book I made her when she got married, it already has photos etc in so I can't show too much as it's quite personal to her [she's already gonna kill me for the 2nd pic lol, but she did grow into a beautiful young lady mashaAllah [there, are we good now?]]:

Daisy spent the day at an International Scout Camp yesterday and had a thoroughly fantastic day mashaAllah, hubby couldn't believe that she spent the whole day out without her mum or dad in tow lol....personally I think he's in denial and doesn't want to see his little girl grow up...it's different for the boys of course lol!