Last few weeks

It's been a while since I posted, mainly because we have recently suffered 11 days without a broadband connection.  Yikes!  It has given us all a bit of a jolt as to how much we rely on the internet for learning, so we have been doing lots of stuff involving information from good old fashioned books.  This has been helped by the discovery of a home educator's perk (yes, really!) - I can get an extra library card from Norfolk Libraries!  And I can borrow up to 20 books at a time!  And 12 of these are allowed to be junior non fiction (usually limited to four)!!  Woohooo.  Now to get myself a bigger trolley to haul all the books home ;-)

So what have the boys been up to?  Readers of my sewing blog will know that I am into quilting and have recently discovered the Liberated Quiltmaking of Gwen Marston in this book.  It has such lovely pictures, that Waif has been inspired to design his own quilt pattern:



Gman's main thing has been learning about Mexico.  Buoyed by the success of the Impressionist lapbook, he is putting together a Mexico lapbook on the bits and pieces he has learned.  He has done a minibook on food in the shape of a chilli; music in the shape of a sombrero; fiestas in the shape of a papel picado...and so on.

Tied in to this, we have done some Mexican themed crafts:

• Made an Ojo de Dios - check out Gman's blog here for pics and info about this


• Created some yarn paintings


• Decorated skulls in the style of the Day of the Dead

We are about to move on to the Aztec era and there are sure to be plenty of activities relating to this we can do together :-)

This week we have also been on an home education field trip to Castle Acre Priory near Swaffham, where we enjoyed storytelling from the marvellous Yarnsmith of Norwich.  As you can see, the children were totally captivated by his storytelling in such a beautiful setting, helped along by a bit of sunshine.  Take a look at the Yarnsmith's website to see if he is storytelling at an event near you.  He really is wonderful!