Finishing UFOs

During art this week, The Fashionista went to work on completing her very first hand sewn teddy bear. There's a bit of work still to go but she has finished attaching, stuffing and sewing up the legs. The arms are also attached and there is now only the head to go. I have been helping with the pins used to secure the limbs as they are a little hard to twist. When I first started hand sewing bears I used to get the Papa to twist the pins for me.

Agent Smelly chose to sew a bow onto one of her teddy's ears (that's teddy in the pic and you can just see a glimpse of the bow on her right ear which matches her dress) and then she sewed some Guiding patches that she recently earned onto her sash.

Both the girls said they are really enjoying our Fridays and I had to suggest they take a break a couple of times as they got so into what they were doing.

I confess I sat at the end of the table updating the blog rather than completing any of my own UFOs ... Naughty Mama.

Harry Potter Learning Activities

This week for Harry Potter, we read another chapter of the book, filled in the questionnaire that related to the chapter we'd read and also did some .

In one of the earlier chapters one of the things on Harry's school book / uniform list was that they may bring either an owl, cat or toad with them to Hogwarts, so I had the girls write a paragraph for me on which they'd choose and why? The Fashionista thought an owl would be good to poop on any enemies (this is what you get when you homeschool I suspect, trying to make their mama laugh!), Agent Smelly included the following poem in her answer.

The Moonlight Owl

My postie was my owl,

it delivered late at night,

that's why I called it the Moonlight owl

but it had a bad habit to bite.

Their Family of Owls

Both girls chose owls (I suspect because of Harry's own beautiful owl) so when we did art later in the week I had them make clay owls. Our clay wasn't very good as it kept breaking up but they still came out kind of cute. TF made one big one and AS made a wee family.

For living maths I wrote up some random maths questions based on the wizarding currency, galleons, sickles and knuts (IE one galleon = 17 sickles) and on some of the things mentioned in the book. Did you know unicorn horns are 21 galleons each ... seems rather pricey to me but these ones are apparently silver so maybe that's not a bad price.  The "chocolate" gold coin was an incentive for them ... nothing like a little bribery to have them finish quickly so they could eat their galleon.

Camping Out

My girls love, love, love camping. No idea why ... they do not get it from me that's for sure! Last Friday night they asked me what the weather was going to be like that night and when I said, it looked fine, they asked if they could spend the night in their tent outside.

As there's basically no work involved for me these days as they are quite competent at putting it all up themselves, I agreed to it. They do make me laugh as they basically set the tent up outside our bedroom / deck door. Apparently that's in case they need the toilet in the night they can just come through and use our en suite ... yeah right!

Even though they hadn't asked, the next morning, I pulled out their camp burners and some bacon and eggs and took it out to them to make their own breakfast. They were very surprised and absolutely over the moon and offered to make breakfast for all of us, which I gratefully agreed to.

Note The Fashionista's face, that was caused by the smoke coming from the burning bacon! The camp frying pans are very thin and they will need some practice getting used to using them. They also aren't used to cooking over a flame as we have an electric stove but it's all good fun and a good learning experience. What you can't see here is that once they had cooked the scrambled eggs (which has started out as being fried ... oops) a rain shower came down so we had to eat inside. Our plates had burnt bacon, scrambled egg with bits of burnt black stuff through it all served on a slippery wet camp plate with damp toast ... oh yum, such a veritable feast. 

They made no mistakes with the tea and their hot chocolate though. I do confess drinking tea from a camp cup whilst sitting out on the deck, watching your kids destroy breakfast, is kind of fun.

Christmas Block Countdown

How onto are we ... it's October and we have already completed our first Christmas craft. OK because I am so honest I will confess we started these not last year but the year before and simply ran out of time to finish them. I packed them away and only found them over the school break. 

Now I have scheduled (yes I am a scheduler ... I tried going freestyle and it was awful but that's for a whole other blog post) Fridays as our creative day. We spend the day doing a shared reading, poetry, music, arts and crafts. Because we have a few UFOs (unfinished objects) laying about I have decided that these must be finished first before we tackle any further big art projects. This Mama is as bad as the kids and it's really not a good habit to get into, so I am endeavouring to either finish it or get rid of it for someone else to enjoy doing.  

Now for this project we ...

1. First up cut some wood. We cut two small cubes from a 4" x 4" and then a third piece that was just a little bit longer than the two small pieces of block.

They grow up so fast.

2. Sand the pieces so there are no rough sides.

3. We painted the blocks in an acrylic paint. We used some enamel house paint for the white and purchased a small tin of tester paint for the green and red. You could simply varnish them or even decoupage them if you wanted to.

4. The girls chose a Santa picture / clip art (The Fashionista wanted modern and Agent Smelly old fashioned) and I printed off their labels (a bit smaller than the side of the largest block) on the PC and then simply laminated them. You could use stencil, stickers, or even hand paint them. I hot glued their labels onto one side of their largest blocks.

5. They then painted the numbers onto the blocks. You could use a stencil (the girls used me to sketch them on for them), or even foam numbers or stickers.
      - One block needs to have the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5
         and block two need to have 0, 1, 2, 6 (which also serves as 9), 7 and 8.


Sadly the girls are already using their blocks to count down the days to Christmas, which is causing me heart palpitations ... who knew Christmas was so close!!!!

Swimming Lessons

One of the few stipulations that The Papa had about homeschooling that the girls be taught to swim well. He himself is not a strong swimmer and it is something he feels strongly about because we have a bach (holiday house) down at a seaside village.

I was finally able to organise swimming lessons for homeschoolers in the area, this year at a nearby swim centre. I have been trying to talk the centre into it for years but was finally able to negotiate some good rates this year. We meet once a week and have 30 minute lessons. As there are only two teachers available (it's a rural swim centre so can be a bit quiet) we have lessons there for about 1 1/2 hours (there have been five or six groups each term) but all end up there longer whilst the kids have a play before, between, and after their lessons. There are about 24 kids having lessons so it's kind of cool to see so many homeschool kids mucking about in the water together.

The Fashionista, who is in her final level for lessons passed her speed trial this week (she swims faster than me now!), which I think means she graduates from the lessons. She had to swim four laps of the "big" pool (there are three there) under 2 mins 30 secs. She'll continue to come next term as Agent Smelly still has 3 more levels to finish, but will simply do laps with a couple of the other kids who have completed their levels. I am very happy as it means saving some money next term on lessons ... hehehe

What I like about swimming lessons is that not only do they learn to swim but their teacher really puts them through their paces and has them working hard so it really gives them a work out.