Land art at the park

We had a really fun morning at the park creating some land art today. We were introduced to land art at our last National Trust workshop based on art in nature. Harry often creates land art at the beach by drawing in the sand.

We looked at some pictures on Land Art for Kids before we went for some inspiration and Harry decided he wanted to make a star. We took the acorns and conkers we have collected recently and a bag of pine cones from the garage. At the park we gathered sticks and leaves.

We set out the shape of the star with sticks and layered the other materials in stripes coming into the middle. Harry and Peter both loved doing this.

Harry also found some stones and used them as the basis for a dog picture.

We found a really big twiggy stick and attached leaves to it by tying the stems onto the sticks to make a mini 'tree'.

The boys had great fun playing in the amazing leaves today as well. They took turns to cover each other in leaves and be a 'leaf monster' waking up from hibernation. It still amazes me how they can play so co-operatively outdoors when they are often bickering and annoying each other at home at the moment. I definitely have outdoor children!

Autumn leaf craft and optical science

I have been meaning to post all week but the task hasn't found itself at the top of my priority list, so here is a brief summary of our week!

We finished our Autumn leaf pictures we had started last week, using card, felt and sticker leaves.

I also cut out some leaf shapes, in order to fill the holes with tissue paper to stick at the window. Harry wasn't very imaginative with his colour but the light shines through nicely still.

Harry and Peter are both enjoying jigsaws at the moment and they have turned their bedroom floor into 'puzzle land' by making nearly all the jigsaws we have. This was half way through and it is difficult to tiptoe around them on the floor now so we may have to pack away tomorrow!

We have been using the free Oxford Owl e-books for reading practise this week. Harry likes choosing and reading on the iPad for a change - there are 250 at various levels so it is a great free resource. He has read two this week. We also set up these cards with sounds written on. I said a word and Harry had to find the correct sound. This was good listening as well as phonics practise as Harry had to hear the word and identify the different sounds.

We baked cakes, always a popular activity!

We walked to the post box in a break from pouring rain and the boys had fun splashing in the puddles. They got VERY wet! Their wellies were suctioned to their feet due to the water in them!

We had a look at some optical science and made a pinhole camera. We looked at flick-book animation and some optical illusions. We both liked one where you were asked to count the black dots but when you blinked the dots moved around the page. 

We have been using torches to make shadows on the wall and we looked at the beam of light from our torch when talcum powder was sprinkled into it. I think we will make some shadow puppets soon to follow this up as they both love using torches.

We also made kaleidoscopes using a shiny prism inside a tube, with beads at the end, using these instructions.

We played a place value target maths game from last week again and Harry correctly worked out two of his three hundred value numbers without help this time! He has done a Conquer Maths lesson relating to identifying and drawing 3D shapes. We will do some real drawings of 3D shapes to follow this up.

Harry has also practised his cello twice so far and has started listening to an audio version of The Magician's Nephew. I thought he would enjoy the Narnia stories now and he did - he took it to his bedroom for an hour today, so I read lots of books to Peter downstairs at the same time. 

Stuart was using the car for work today so we went to the City Library on the bus and we had lots of new books to read this afternoon from there. We sat on the floor going through them while tea cooked.

A perfect outdoor day

We have had a superb day! It was a warm, Autumnal sun and we spent nearly the entire day outdoors with our friends. We are so lucky to be able to spend days like this together - there is nothing else I would rather do than be outdoors in nature with the boys and like-minded friends enjoying the seasons.

I squeezed in a bit of work first thing, as I expected we would not get any more opportunity to do it. Harry stuck his postcard from Center Parcs into his outdoor book and drew and labelled a red squirrel. He looked up red squirrels on the internet too and I read him the page we found. He wrote his most interesting fact in his book - that the babies are called kittens. He also completed a few pages of his phonics workbook.

Peter was drawing and he wanted to glue his post card on too and said he was writing 'duck' - of course he wasn't actually writing but it was quite nice that he wanted to join in!

We then went out to meet our friends at the Rising Sun Country Park. The children played in the adventure play area and we ate our lunch there before walking to the woodland. Harry collected some good helicopter seeds which he enjoyed watching as he let them fall to the ground. The boys had a box each and they collected some nice Autumn treasures along the way - rowan berries, bright yellow leaves and fluffy thistledown. We also spotted acorns and elderberries growing, as well as blackberries.

We stopped at the pond to watch the various birds. The swan family was very interested in us!

We also saw horses close up in the fields and a stag, although the children were all convinced it was a Christmas reindeer!

I took along some supplies for painting and we collected blackberries on the way to squish and use the juice as paint. My children weren't really interested in doing this when we got started but others were. Harry was far too busy making his den with huge sticks!

We walked further to the community farm where one of the volunteers picked plums from the trees for the children and gave us cooking apples. He also took everyone to see the pigs in their field, although I missed that as Peter was sitting on the floor protesting at his weary legs - Harry went along with the others though. We have all done a lot of walking today and Peter was asleep at 6.30! The apple crumble we made tonight from the cooking apples has restored my energy a bit though.

A trip out - Gibside

We met some home ed friends at Gibside, one of our favourite National Trust properties, today. Peter watched an excavator in the car park for a while with his friend.

We spent a couple of hours in the large adventure playground before Harry got bored, so we had ice cream and headed off in search of more adventure.

We spent a good while looking up at the trees with this sheet from Nature Detectives. We noticed recently that lots of trees now have seeds, so we tried to identify some. Gibside is a great place for this kind of activity as there is so much woodland and we actually saw most of them.

Harry had a good scramble around the low ropes course.

We found sticks and stones to throw into the river

And Harry actually spent over an hour pottering in the river - the water is crystal clear and shallow so it's a lovely place to let him have some freedom. This is one of his absolute favourite things to be doing and he didn't complain once about his soggy feet and shorts all the way back! He dragged sticks around and borrowed a bucket from a friend to use in the water. 

We walked very close to some cows with calves in the field on the way back to the car and saw a calf drinking milk from it's mother. Harry noticed that the mother cow was eating grass at the same time and said that 'she is doing that to make more milk for the next day'. Maybe he did learn something from all the hours I spent sitting around (and possibly eating at the same time!) feeding Peter as a baby.

Both boys were asleep very quickly tonight after a full day in the fresh air.

Gibside outing

We had a really great family visit to Gibside last weekend, which I haven't been able to blog before due to lack of internet at home, but here it is now. The light was stunning and the leaves were an amazing carpet - a perfect autumn day. There was frost on the bark in the playground, a sign of things to come!

The boys had a good climb and swing in the play area

We walked through the woods and built a den, then sat in it to eat!

Peter found lots of tree stumps to practice his new favourite skill - jumping - along with his own commentary of 'jump' (very cute!)

We found holly with berries and a beautiful log which had been burned on one side but was untouched bright white wood on the other side. We also collected a handful of tiny acorns.

Peter enjoyed dressing up at the stables and feeding the cow.

 It is getting colder, but I hope we can manage some more days out like this before winter really arrives, just wonderful!