Not back to school

It's that time of year again when my social media is full of those pictures of shiny, smiley children, standing in front of their houses, bedecked in brand new uniform. With faces full of excitement and anticipation for what the new school year brings. 

Our first day back looked like this:

We kicked things off by heading to the park with the dog to drink in the hazy morning warmth of the last days of summer. Or are these the early days of autumn? I'm not sure, but either way we spent some time together talking about our plans for the day and appreciating the renewed  tranquility that is ours now school is back for everyone else. 

I suspect these glorious warm morning walks will be few in number as the month progresses and soon we'll be donning our sweaters and wellies. I'm looking forward to it! Happy new term. 

Embarrassing!

Nearly a year since I last posted. Well that's embarrassing 😳

I think maybe daily posting was setting my expectations to high and so I crashed and burned in glorious anti-climax. 

So what had brought me back? Two things really. Firstly my gorgeous gymnastics crochet buddy has oy gone and left the country (how rude)! Luckily for me she and her family are blogging their adventures so I can at least live vicariously through her as she gets up to mischief half way around the world from me. Her blog entries reminded me that I too had means to collect my memories for safe keeping in blogland and so I popped back in here to have a look. The second kick up the backside was seeing all those beautiful threads of my memories, some of which I'd already forgotten which has galvanised me into action. So on the advice of my beautiful, wise friend, I'm setting the bar lower and am going to attempt a weekly post of what we've been done. There should still be plenty for me to reminisce over when my babies fly the nest. 

So here in the UK right now it is official school holiday season. The parks are all teaming with people, my facebook feed is a mix of family holiday snaps and desperate cries of "need more wine" and "when do they go back?!" We however just try to continue our gentle pace, minus the extra curricular clubs that have all suspended for the summer. 

Since I last posted I have begun to adopt more structure to our journey and we are using a beautiful Waldorf inspired curriculum from Oak Meadow. Our day rhythm goes something like this:

Breakfast

Morning walk

Main lesson time

Lunch

Stories/reading

Afternoon studies (craft, cooking, music etc)

In addition to that, at certain times in the week we also have a weekly history co-op (where we use The Story of the World book and activity books), swimming lessons, our local home ed group and forest school. It sounds hectic, but really it isn't. 

So this week in literacy we looked at the traditional folk tale from Scotland about Grey Friars Bobby. The boys drew their own interpretation and did a summary. 

In science we learnt why we have day and night and seasons and in our history  group we looked at the first writing and had a go at making our own stone tablets with cuneiform letters and parchments with ink made from berries.  

E finished his current topic in maths and is about to start the next topic - times tables! B has been doing his phonics work and both boys have been practising writing the letters a and b, really concentrating g on how to form them correctly and in E's case trying out cursive. We met with friends in Friday to play our recorders, went to a birthday party or two over the weekend and alongside that lot there was much playing and merriment. The weather has been lovely this week. It's all set to change next week- watch this space.