Well these past two weeks have been so busy and have flown by.  I've been having some Osteopathy on my back [great stuff; highly recommended!] so am getting back on track back wise but came down with an evil stomach virus.  Nevertheless we have all taken the opportunity [on any rain free day] to get in the garden to do some clearing, digging and general chopping stuff down and it's now looking like this;

That's an exhausted Sprite you can see in the middle who had been chopping wood and digging with the pick axe [alhamdulillah for his axe training with the scouts lol]....he is soaking in a hot bath as I type! You will notice the missing pile of wood etc that took hubby three trips to the tip to dispose of; not to mention all the metal etc he took a day to put in the garage poor thing.  And just in case you don't remember what it looked like here's a little reminder.

We have also been collecting conkers:

And Crash has been cooking [if you can call a flan cooking] and it was extremely yummy!

 

We have also been making ribbon roses [very addictive and therapeutic!]...I know they look a strange type of cool in the photos but we weren't very successful I can assure you!  Lots more practice needed LOL.

Apart from that we haven't done much at all outside the usual daily madressah, maths, English and reading etc and are still trying to get back into 'the swing of things' following Ramadhan.  However, Cubs and Beavers are back on as is the English tutor for Lego and sports for the two little ones so I guess it's back to the mad daily dash around.....but on reflection, they won't be needing me for much longer so I should savour every moment inshaAllah.

And lastly... in my quest for the right home schooling curriculum/method for us the 'Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Educations' keeps coming up so I guess that in response to my prayers Allah ta'Ala is guiding me to this book...which I have ordered but it STILL hasn't arrived!  I feel that Montessori doesn't really have much to offer my children but feel really excited about what this has to offer and would love to hear from any of you following the recommendations in this book for your home ed!

Inconsistent until the end...

OK so that was a bit melodramatic but the week did start of exceptionally well and then went rapidly down hill.  We started well on Monday with a brand new schedule and everything went really well....everyone got their work done and it was fab...I should have known it would never last.  Tuesday I woke up and had a relapse with my back...bah humbug!  This was followed by another call from the hospital calling Lego back in and yet another to say that Sprite had to go in to start his physio this week...so another two days taken out of the week!

And with the English lessons starting back for Sprite tomorrow he decides that he wants to change the way he presents his 'nature diary' for his homework!  So the old one was dumped and he made this...

Isn't it lovely?  It was made out of a corrugated cardboard box cut to fit our stock of 6"x6" papers.  On the front the larger flowers he cut from a die I have and heat embossed using different color powders and he  stamped on top of them whilst they were hot [you should be aware that these are MY craft supplies and he had me cringing in the corner all the while he was using them, lol].

The first entry was the frog booklet that you may remember from his first attempt at the diary.  The second page was mostly researched information and photo's from the internet but the third entry he found an outline picture and he painted the image using watercolor pencils.  I like watercolors, you can get away with a multitude of sins [art wise] and always have a good result.  Apart from the art lesson these two entries also included a lesson on internet research and IT (cutting, pasting, changing fonts etc).

Lego hasn't done much this week and is milking the 'poor me' thang far too much....his WW2 model was also broken into tiny pieces when it was accidently knocked off a cupboard by dad [I was just grateful it wasn't me or one of the other children!].  He wasn't very happy.  Nooo, not happy at all; and he seemed to be uninterested in the fact that he was the one who had left it in the precarious position in the first place.  Any ho, it has been unceremoniously dumped in the bin and he proclaimed that he would never build a model again.  However, this pledge didn't last long and he is in the middle of building a WW2 scene out of Lego!

Crash and Daisy have left me all Peter and Jane'd out and I am currently in the process of making flash cards of all the keywords to assist in the word recognition process.  All maths has been done on Maths Whizz this week but I need to get them putting some stuff down on paper too to so that can apply all that they learn.

Well, that's it for this week! Have a great weekend everyone.

Apparently...

Daisy's journal has inspired the boys so we have two new journals on the go and Crash also did a page in his journal.  Personally, I think they liked all the cutting and sticking and getting their hands on my personal stash of craft supplies....well it's 1am and they have finally finished and I am off to bed, there's just enough time to show you what they created; the first is Crash's [he comes out with some stonking quotations; I don't know where he gets them from and he always manages to catch me by surprise, lol].  The second one is Sprite's, he's very patient and creative mashaAllah.  The last is Lego's journal and yes he did have to have a pic of Lego on there didn't he?  He has some very interesting ideas but is very impatient and loses interest if things don't work out as he expects mashaAllah, he did very well with one hand I thought!

Sorry about the photos, not sure what happened there I'll try and sort out some new pictures tomorrow inshaAllah.

Loving the art journaling...

I'm not sure why this love has kicked in with such vengeance today but I think I'm going to HAVE to splash out on a proper art journal for myself...I am really enjoying doing this with the kids and my head is just about exploding with ideas that I would like to do.

Well, back on to the kids lol. Today Daisy's journal seemed to be heavily influenced by something I was doing on a project and a longing to use the grown up crafting materials, lol.  I have started doing the 99 Names of Allah with her and our journal entry today was based around the name 'Al-Malik'.  She decided that she wanted to do lots of collage but that I had to do the cutting out [arggg, I hate cutting out].   So she painted the pages with a coat of white paint [it was from a Crown match pot] and then did some patches of colour with acrylics and stamped butterflies images randomly over the pages. Not sure if you can see it but she also sprayed the pages with my purple glimmer mists. She then used some letter tiles I have to spell 'Al-Malik' and then we [well I] typed the translation of the name in English with the ayat from the Quran that we discussed in relation to this name.  She coloured in two of the words with pink [as always] pencil and chose some sequin mesh and a couple of pictures from the internet that she wanted to glue onto the page.

Well here is her entry in its full glory.....

 
We haven't done much else today as the disk in my back has 'popped' just a little but I am hoping to get back in full swing for Monday inshaAllah.  The boys have been building with the Lego all day and have been very quiet in consideration of my injury [bless] and hubby has done all the cooking and tidying up....so, all in all I had a very relaxing, quiet day!

Eid Mubarak...

I hope you all had a good Eid inshaAllah....ours was spent at the local hospital so that my son could have a thumb that he broke at the Sky Ride on Sunday reset - they made a mistake at A&E and actually sent him home, all plastered, without even resetting the bone! However, in an effort to make up for it we did get first class, personal treatment from the plastic surgeon when they called him back in.  We got back so late that we never really had time to celebrate so had a delayed Eid today mashaAllah!

Everyone has had a virus too so things have been a bit slow here over the last few days but we have been drinking in some inspiration from this very talented lady today - she has unbelievable talent in all areas of art/craft and when you think she has finished a piece of work she adds something else to make her creations even more fab.  Well I am hoping that we can do a couple of pages tomorrow based around what she has done here inshaAllah:

I have officially started work on getting the children back to their normal pre-Ramadan sleep patterns so we can get cracking with our new schedule inshaAllah. However, with physio beginning for Sprite [because of some  tendon/ligament problems] and Lego with his thumb I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time at the hospital and I am hoping it won't disrupt our  home ed too much!  However, it is fortunately very close to town so I could back it onto a sly visit to the art shop to get some supplies, yipee, I LOVE the art and craft shop!  Sad, I know!

Busy, busy, busy....

We got an Ikea draw set from the charity shop some time ago and it had been varnished and decorated in some animal stencils by it's previous owner and while we had always intended to redecorate it we had never gotten around to it until now lol....

We decied to give it a crackled paint effect but it didn't turn out quite right lol...it was supposed to look a little like this....

However, it turned out like this....not entirely the look we were hoping for and to be honest I'm not quite sure what went wrong; I've done this tons of times before and it's more or less fool proof.  Perhaps the glue was too thin or not tacky enough when the final coat went on....or maybe the varnish wasn't sanded off properly.  Nevertheless, they like it and here it is in pride of place sandwiched between the PC and the reading box, lol.

Lego has been busy with his 'D-Day' model and made the sea today...it was made with sugar, water and food colouring and scrunching the tin foil up underneath gives it a 'wave' effect and I must say I am really impressed.  He researched how to make it on the Internet when I refused to buy 'fake sea' paint [or something] for £8....so he can be resourceful when he wants to eh!  Once it sets rock hard he will trim off the tin foil and paint some foam and crests to the top to add to the effect.  I must admit I'm getting quite excited about this model and can't wait to see it finished.

We were inspired by a Fiona on YouTube today to do some layering in the children's visual journals....they did them all themselves after watching the video with little input from me; except retrieving the materials, mopping up the spillages and the writing which they dictated - I was happy to oblige as it was almost midnight by the time the last coat had dried and they were tired!  They gave their pages a base coat of paint and when that was dry they chose a second colour and painted that over the page ad hoc.  They then tore up some paper and glued it on randomly over the page. After that they drew some 'patterns' over the pages in acrylic paint.  The writing, which was themed around an important thing that they had learned today, the went on top!  They were really, really happy with the results and so was I....we might have to do this one again!

The top one is Daisy's and the bottom one belongs to Crush; he is actually showing some artistic flare mashaAllah and gave consideration to his work with regard to the colours he chose, the way he wanted to put on the second coat [i.e. by flicking or splattering the paint], the patterns and how he wanted the writing to look - strange for a boy! or is it?

They also did some work on their Maths Whizz accounts [for the first time all Ramadan] and actually enjoyed it...a change is as good as a rest they say! We have also spent a considerable amount of time organising our classroom and sorting through the vast array of books we have....they seem reluctant to get rid of them and it's been quite frustrating to convince them that they don't need all of them and remind them that we have access to a vast number of books at a vast number of libraries! And last, but by no means least, Sprite made one of his infamous chocolate cakes which smells so yummy I'm off to get a big piece to have with my cappuccino, lol! Caio!

Too busy to post....

hummm, well almost!  We have all been very busy getting the back garden sorted...hubby laid the patio and we have all been helping to strip paint/repaint/put up fences/planting etc so the patio area of my garden now looks like this alhamdulillah.  There are still some bits and pieces to do and that's a lot of white space...I can feel a mosaic coming on lol...

However, the back of my garden still has a long way to go but that's enough for Ramadan inshaAllah..

 We have been making flowers from scraps [some of which you can see below] which was really fun and it was almost impossible to go wrong so they were really chuffed with the results...

 We also had a day at the National Space Museum again [thanks to our free annual pass, yippee!] so the kids could participate in the Lego building competition; the criteria for which was to build a space station out of available pieces. Here are their efforts mashaAllah,  starting with Daisy's

 

Next is Sprite's attempt...

Last but not least was Lego's space station!

Here is a photo of a piece of moon rock....now it may not look like much to you but it had Daisy transfixed for what seemed like forever; she just couldn't believe that here in front of her was a real life piece of the moon lol!

Here are the journal entries that Daisy [top]  and Crush did about their trip to the museum mashaAllah. They both used the certificate they got for taking part in the Lego competition as a background. The theme of the entry was collage and they both also stuck on their tickets with Daisy also cutting out one of the rubbings she did at the museum and Crush [quite inventively I thought] managed to acquire Sprite's certificate and cut out the Lego men and used them as decoupage pieces on the page.  Sorry about the oily patches they are from the marbling they did 2 pages previously!