Seeing as it’s been a while…

I’ve been cycling through periods of being more or less engaged and organised. I was very organised around the beginning of Autumn, where I got back into the seasonal units, K started a unit on the solar system, and I did a lot of thinking about where we were going. Then we had birthday parties and a big community event to organise and I slacked off again. I did get back into the seasonal stuff before Samhain, and we had a unit on fungi, including going on a magical fungi walk which the kids are still taking about.

We incorporated ANZAC Day into our Samhain celebrations again this year.

K marched with her Guides group in the local community ceremony. Who knows how much she is getting out of it all at her age?

I’ve been gearing up for Winter recently because if I don’t, the four kids stuck inside this house for months with nothing to do will drive me crazy. I’ve been getting back into organising things for the shelves, including making some file folder games and buying a few new manipulatives.

The robot beads are particularly popular, which of course translates to them ending up all over the fecking floor no matter how many times I tell them to pack them away *sigh* They were only cheap, but that’s not the bloody point!

Of course, even when I buy purpose-made manipulatives, they’re never quite as much fun as the box of random doodads I collected from the backs of drawers, down behind the sofa and in my jewellery box, etc.

My aim is to fill the box. I’ve thought of a couple of different activities to do with this, including Treasure Hunt cards where they have to find matching items, but also alphabet sorting (by their first sound), number sorting (finding groups of the same kind of item), etc. Then of course there’s just giving them a muffin tray and letting them decide how they’re going to sort it themselves.

K played guitar at her first concert this month, the end of term student concert organised by her guitar teacher and his wife. She’s also sung with Eric at an SCA feast. Clearly she takes after her Daddy!

But she also takes after her Mummy, and there’s now a question mark over which of us is the biggest bookworm in the house. K is churning through at least one book every couple of days. She currently has three on the go. And she may have a challenger coming up behind her: H wrote out the alphabet the other day and can form all the letters perfectly legibly despite no one ever sitting down and showing him how to.

There is of course more to write. I read back over entries from a couple of years ago and it was really lovely to have that insight into our daily life, most of which I had completely forgotten about. So I’m going to try to get back to recording our day to day lives a bit more here. I’ve moved towards keeping my Flickr account as a record of what we get up to (for us and the grandparents), which is fine so long as it’s photogenic, but when it isn’t caught on camera I’d like to catch it here a bit more often.