The Great Outdoors wk 26-28; 37 hours

The downside of all the lovely weather we've been having over the last few weeks is that I'm forgetting to post our time outdoors total at the end of each week, although I am still keeping track. The last few weeks have included a lovely heatwave, which we made the most of by going to a nearby Lido, and had an amazing time there!

We've had lots of other outdoor adventures too, trying to make the most of the lovely summer weather that we're having. 

Stay at home Mondays and an awesome visit to the fire station!

Today has been a brilliant day of home education! Most days the kids choose to stay at the table after breakfast, pottering with activities, working to a loose rule of 20 minutes max per activity/topic, and before we know it we've done a day's work in our PJs before 9am!

I look forward to Mondays being our 'home' day. I try and get all our washing done on Mondays. And we do our 'Charlotte Mason Feast subjects' - composer study (we're listening to Rachmaninoff this term) and picture study. Today we started looking at a new artist's work - Mary Cassatt. Last night I did a brief Google search to find out some interesting facts to tell the kids about her, which I try to do to help them build connection and relationship with the artist. For us today, this included her growing up in America and moving to France (we have family living in both places), her teacher being Edgar Degas (coincidentally our previous picture study focus for the last few weeks) and the fact that she was blind for 10 years before she died, meaning she had to stop painting (we have a guide dog pup living with us so the kids were interested in why Cassatt didn't have a guide dog). I showed the kids her self-portrait, before introducing her first picture in our picture study. I think I'll save how we go about studying a picture for another blog post... 

After finishing our table work this morning at 8:30am (just as most kids at school are starting!), the kids had a bounce on the trampoline in the garden and then Eden, with my help, made a cushion for her bedroom that she'd been researching how to do yesterday. She was very excited about this! We continued watching our Muzzy French DVD with a snack and then had a quiet time before lunch. 

As I mentioned above, usually Monday's are our 'home' day, but today I decided to take advantage of a local home ed visit that had been arranged at the fire station, and I'm so glad we did! It really was brilliant! Never mind the kids, I learnt so much! I'll leave the photos below to do the rest of the talking about what we got up to there! 

Watching caterpillars turn to butterflies.

Last September we picked some caterpillars from the garden. 

We kept them in our butterfly garden, bought from a couple of years ago. 

We fed them fresh nasturtiums everyday. 

8 days later we had our first chrysalis, we were so excited!

All winter we've waited patiently. 

I read up on 'over-wintering'. 

We kept the cage high up in our dining room, occasionally bringing it down and giving the netting a poke, watching the chrysalis do a teeny tiny wiggle, thus confirming it was still alive in there.

A couple of weeks ago a butterfly emerged! We fed it some sugar water from a plate before releasing it. 

But we still had our first chrysalis. 

We've waited some more. Just yesterday I wondered about moving the cage outside into the fresh air, but hadn't quite got around to it.

Then this morning, we spotted the butterfly emerging slowly out of that first chrysalis. We watched it wiggle out, wings curled up, slowly unfurling them, sitting there drying its wings before taking its first flaps. 

It was fascinating! 

And the most amazing of all - we worked out it had been in chrysalis form for a massive 259 days! Awesome!!

The great outdoor wk 24 and 25: 27hrs 15

The last 2 weeks have been a bit hard because chicken pox has hit the household, limiting where we can go. We've harvested our first fruits from the garden and allotment, the strawberries as always are a winner and we have lots this year as the plants establish in the garden. Hopefully next year we'll have even more on the allotment too! 

The kids have really come in loads in their cycling ability. Eden's learnt to push off by herself and Asher's learnt to whizz along instead of walk his balance bike. 

We've also managed some fun times at the parks with friends, inbetween bouts of infectious chicken pox! 

We have at least another week ahead at home, as Asher now has chicken pox. Fortunately the kids are loving the garden which helps a lot. 

Down the allotment we are harvesting...

Gooseberries and rhubarb. We popped to the allotment this morning as another excuse to get outside and enjoy the sunshine. Our rhubarb plot is on it's third year now, and it's really taken off! We have far more than we can eat or even freeze! We've tried a few different recipes to the standard rhubarb crumble, the highlight definitely being rhubarb ice cream! Today I cut the rhubarb patch back a lot, leaving only the smallest, thinnest shoots on each plant. I wonder if it will encourage even more growth this year or not? 

Last year we planted a few gooseberry bushes, given to us as cuttings from another plot holder. We harvested a small handful this time last year. Today, Eden really enjoyed the task of picking the gooseberries (despite it being a prickly job!). We picked from just one bush, with more than enough to make a gooseberry fool for tea later. Looking forward to more gooseberries over the next week or two and much like for the rhubarb, I need to research some different recipes to make use of them! 

Rockpooling at Crackington Haven

During our holiday last week in Cornwall, we spent an afternoon at Crackington Haven beach. I have fond memories of this beach from growing up. Running from the top of the beach all the way down to the sea is a fast-flowing stream. My siblings and I spent many a happy hour as children sailing boats, building dams and finding the fastest route for boat races! 

To the left of the beach at low tide is a fantastic collection of rock pools. We took our fishing nets and scrambled among the rocks looking for interesting catches. 

I was so chuffed to find 2 crabs, one of which I spotted scuttling through the seaweed. We filled a couple of buckets with water and were able to get a close-up look at them. Later, we identified that these were shore crabs, the most common type of crab in the UK, recognisable by the 'teeth-like' edging along their shell. A great entry for our nature journals! 

Here's our beautiful boy Viking, happy in the sunshine on the beach! 

The Great Outdoors wk 23: 27 hours

A fantastic week of fresh air spent in Cornwall! The weather started pretty badly - with weather warnings for rain and strong winds! Despite this, we started off our holiday with a lovely nature trail walk close to where we were staying and mostly under the shelter of trees. 

The weather picked up by mid-week, and we enjoyed lots of outdoor time at The Eden Project, a farm park, Tintagel, a couple of national trust properties, and of course, the Beach! 

Visiting Eden Project

We had a great time last week down in Cornwall! The weather at the start of the week was pretty bad. We'd planned to visit the Eden Project on Wednesday and it turned out to be a beautiful day. 

The Eden Project is one of my favourite places ever! I was last there with the kids in September and a visit to Cornwall isn't complete without a trip there in my opinion. The Eden Project first opened in 1999 and I've visited a number of times in the last 15 years, watching it develop, it just keeps getting better! Particularly with having young children now there's loads for the kids to do. If you're thinking of visiting with kids, have a look at the Eden Project website which lists all of the activities the kids can explore. There's also fun activity trails to print off to help kids (and grown ups!) with getting to know more about the plants in the biomes. Asher loved the land train down to the biomes, pulled by a BIG tractor. When we got to the bottom, the first thing he said was 'I want to see the dinosaurs!'. I was so surprised that he'd remembered this from September, although sadly for Asher the dinosaurs weren't there this time for him. 

This time, we had Viking our guide dog puppy with us too. Dogs are allowed on site as long as they're kept on a lead and in the outside spaces. With Viking being a guide dog we could take him into the biomes with us too. The whole day was great training for him, he spent a lot of time lying down, waiting patiently and people watching! I was very proud of his behaviour. 

I can't wait to visit again! 

The Great Outdoors wk 22: 8.5 hours

Half term week is always a strange one for us, out of routine and we avoid anywhere likely to be busy with the kids being off school. This week we've had lots of lovely quiet play dates with friends,  enjoying outside time in the process. A highlight has to be the sculpture trail we found at a nearby nature reserve that we hadn't visited before. The kids and their friends loved running ahead to find the next one. There was also a lovely bridge over a stream that we spent quite a while playing on, throwing leaves and twigs into the water and balancing on rocks. We've finished off our outside time this week with a trip to the allotment, to put the pumpkins and courgettes in and to do a little weeding. However, rather than joining in the kids instead played happily in the sandpit, listening in they were creating mountains in the sand for adventures. 

The Great Outdoors Wk 21: 13 hours

I've been back and calculated our total time spent outdoors so far this year, playing, learning and exploring in various ways - the current total stands at 154 hours and 15 minutes. 

Regular readers will have seen on my home ed posts that we are big fans of Charlotte Mason, a 19th century educator. She recommended that children between the ages of 0-7 should spend 4-6 hours outside everyday. In today's day and age this seems an unrealistic amount of time. But this daily length instead calculated over 3-4 times per week works out at about 1000 hours per year. 

Over on the 1000 hours outside blog, you can read more about where this figure comes from, the research supporting it and the developmental benefits of outdoor time on this post here http://1000hoursoutside.com/join-the-challenge/why-1000-hours/ 

I think we will still be a long way off the 1000 hours total by the end of the year, but nevertheless I'm enjoying keeping track of our time outside and seeing the difference it makes in the kids, in both the short term and over a longer period. Some of those benefits that I've seen, and many other good reasons for getting outside, are listed on this blog post from the 1000 hours outside website http://1000hoursoutside.com/2015/01/21/100-reasons-spend-1000-hours-outside/

The Great Outdoors Wk 20: 13 hours 15

Highlight of the week has to be the super Batwalk that Luke and Eden went on at the local park on Friday night, coming home with lots to tell! 

Here's a collection of pics from the week..

A new year on the allotment

I'm excited about our growing year ahead on the allotment. This will be our fourth summer having our allotment here in the Midlands. When we first took it on back in August 2012 it was covered in weeds upto our waists. Every year we seem to make a bit more progress in staying on top of the weeds. We've realised how important (and helpful) it is to keep the ground covered over when plants aren't being grown. The plot looks tidier, and more importantly the weeds are suppressed. The committee on our allotment are very strict about keeping weeds under control. 

Today was the first nice day of this year for the kids and I on our allotment plot. The kids seemed to appreciate the better weather down there! To my surprise they straight away got stuck in pulling up the surface weeds growing over our geotextile ground cover. 

The rhubarb patch has gone bonkers this year already! Previous years the crowns have clearly been spending their energies establishing roots and this year it seems to have really taken off. We cut 20 stalks to bring home, which barely made a dent in it at all. I'm going to need to look up some varied rhubarb recipes that don't involve the word 'crumble'.

I found some spare strawberries from last year lurking by the shed, so moved them to the end of our asparagus raised bed. I'm really chuffed that we have our first asparagus shoot! We planted 5 crowns last autumn, I hope the others start to show signs of life soon too. 

Finally, we put our potatoes in. Two rows of Charlotte potatoes, second earlies. Luke prepared the ground for us one evening earlier this week and Asher especially loved dropping the potatoes in the holes, learning about putting the shoots facing the right way up, covering them over and watering the rows. Asher at the age of 3 is a very hands-on learner, and his engagement in activities like this really confirm this for me. 

When we got home we made a 'rhubarb crumble cake' together and enjoyed it for our pudding for tea. Well earned after our work on the allotment. I'm looking forward to many more occasions spent down there this year. As the kids get older, not only are they able to help more (and as today showed, cheerfully help), but they can also learn so much along the way.