End of term music concert

It was Harry's Christmas music concert today. All the children in his year (he is year two of three) played a solo or duet piece and he also played in the ensemble concert. He really enjoyed it all and played very well. 

He was pleased that his concert even had its own special tickets! 

I had a haircut this afternoon so Stuart and the boys went swimming and had great fun. 

Christmas music and Beavers activities

We've had a musical and festive weekend! Harry and Peter went to their music classes on Saturday then we met friends to go to a children's concert called Warming Songs for Winter Days. This was really nice and included songs such as Let it Snow and Carol of the Bells with participation for the children.

We put up our Christmas tree on Sunday. It is a very colourful creation with lots of home made decorations and the boys love it!

Harry and I also went to the Panto (Cinderella) with his Beavers group, which was fun.

Harry took part in his Beavers show last night. They made Beavers masks and sang a song to the tune of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer called Beavie the Beaver Mascot. He really enjoyed it.

He also had his last speech therapy group yesterday and we have several games to play at home to keep practising his problem sounds. He has improved lots this year and I think the group has been really helpful. 

Ten pieces follow up

Harry had his cello lesson at the weekend and Peter attended the under-5's music session at The Sage. We also watched two more of the Ten Pieces performances at home.

Harry's favourite so far is Mars by Holst so we had a look at some of the follow up activities from the BBC resources page.

We listened to Venus, Bringer of Peace by Holst and compared the pieces. Harry identified that Venus uses higher, slower and quieter notes to create more peaceful music. We talked about the musical terms 'tempo' (speed) and 'ostinato' (repeated pattern of notes).

We then did some painting. I asked Harry to paint what he saw in his imagination when he listened to Venus and Mars. 

This was his Venus, using glow in the dark paint for the lighter areas. The paint (from Tesco) worked really well; they took the picture into their bedroom at bedtime and it was a great effect. 

This was Mars. The black circle areas are the eyes of the God of War and the red planet Mars is his mouth.

Peter joined in with painting too and enjoyed doing some sponge printing.

Harry also played the beginner cello version of Mars from the resources page. He enjoyed this and could see the link to the complete piece of music. We will use this over the next two weeks for extra practise as Harry's music class is now finished for a half term break.

Board games, books and Ten Pieces

Harry seems to have picked up Peter's cold and high temperature so I modified our work plan for today to make it more relaxing. Harry had a long bath first thing whilst listening to The Horse and His Boy. Peter and I played board games and read several library books due to go back. While Peter had his bath, we played Trilemma and I finished reading Harry's latest Sea Quest book to him. He still loves these books and is waiting for the next one to arrive in the post. His reading speed has doubled at least since becoming hooked!

We then watched the performances of the first three pieces of music from the BBC Ten Pieces DVD. Harry liked the first one best: Mars by Holst; he said it was exciting and loud. There are lots of resources to use alongside the DVD here and I printed some of these today for us.

Harry practised his finger positions on his cello and they were both really inspired to play their own music too. We played music to make us feel scared (long, low menacing notes) and excited (faster, higher notes). Harry also played a song to tell a story on the piano which he called The Lost Piece. It was really sad at the start but became lighter and more hopeful as he found his lost object. It was very good! 

We went to the library on the way out to return books and borrow another bagful. Harry was dosed up with nurofen and warm juice so he managed really well at his swimming lesson this afternoon, before coming home for TV on the sofa! Hopefully he will look a bit brighter tomorrow!

Speech therapy, air activities and pre-school work

Harry had his monthly speech therapy group this morning and Stuart took him. He has a game to practise at home that uses lots of words with the 'ch' sound.

Peter and I stayed at home and did some adding using Lego bricks, where we talked about the plus and equals symbols. He is good at counting into larger numbers so I thought we would start some simple adding and subtracting activities. We also went to the shop and bought an Alphablocks magazine. He practised some writing on the cards that came in the magazine. I really like the BBC pre-school magazines for literacy and numeracy activities and Harry used to do these a lot too. Peter is quite confident at writing with a pen and recognising letters now.

When Harry came home, he did an activity for Beavers. He had to find out about one type of aeroplane to earn his Air Activities badge. He searched on Google for the 'heaviest army plane' and came up with a Russian military jet. We printed a picture then he typed some facts and printed those too. This was good practise for typing on a keyboard and I think we will add typing to our usual writing activities for some variety.

Harry has also practised cello and was really pleased to make the correct notes first time. He found this hard in his lesson on Saturday as he couldn't quite press on the string hard enough, but maybe he was more relaxed trying it at home. He has done a Conquer Maths lesson too on reading a calendar and a list of animal name spellings on the Squeebles spelling app, while Peter had his enjoy a ball class.

The post-holiday days

I have had to work hard to keep the boys occupied since coming back from holiday. They are tired and end up squabbling a lot if they don't have things to do! I have discovered this on several previous occasions and decided to keep them busy. Peter has actually had a high temperature on and off and is feeling quite sorry for himself so he has been watching some TV under a blanket. 

Peter and I listened to a Listen and Play BBC podcast based on The Animal Fair rhyme yesterday which he really likes. He then drew his favourite animal from it - an elephant. He has started to hold a pencil correctly now without being reminded. 

Harry joined us for drawing and started a picture of 'rainbow stones from the moon'. We listened to some cBeebies radio whilst drawing.

We have also played numerous games of Ker-plunk and Harry has practised cello ready for his lesson today, where they worked on finger positions. 

Peter has enjoyed building train track and Harry has been reunited with his Lego and has spent a lot of time building these vehicles for his 'base'.

We have watched last week's Blue Peter and Harry thought up his own 'After Dark' poem based on the one written by Michael Rosen on the show. We also watched this week's Blue Peter, which had an introduction to BBC Ten Pieces - a new schools music initiative. We have the DVD to watch next week too.

We have also been doing a very nice activity for Beavers, which is in a separate post and have talked to my mum and sister to tell them all about our holiday.

Harry finished his latest picture at art class yesterday morning, using soft pastels and started a dinosaur.

He also went to his enjoy a ball class, where they were learning the rules of cricket and he won the weekly trophy for the best trying and listening so he had a good day! 

Home education and art, sport and music

I like having time at home during our week for me to cover academic work with Harry and also unstructured time for them to play at home, go to the park and visit interesting places. Our Fridays and Saturdays are quite busy with structured classes, however, which I also like as it gives Harry a chance to be taught by someone else and work in a group situation. In the case of art and music, he is being taught skills I am not able to teach. 

Just one of the great things about home education is that you can access as much or as little as your child needs and plan your week in a way that suits your family. Harry's only class purely for home educated children is art and we also meet up at least once a week with other families, sometimes for structured activities and sometimes for play. The other classes are out of school time and include schooled and home educated children.

Harry started a new art class on Friday morning with other home educated children. I am hoping he can improve his drawing skills and learn to use different art materials. They each chose a picture and worked on it for the whole hour. Harry chose a Batman image and will be finishing it next week, so he didn't want me to photograph it yet! He said 'I loved art' on the way out.

Peter is not ready to focus for a whole hour yet so we sat on some seats just outside the room and read books. I took his sketch pad so he could do some drawing too and he really enjoyed this.

There is also a play area over the road so I expect we will go there with the other children after art, which will cover exercise and socialising too. 

The builders are still busy with our new bathroom and it's going well. We can use the bath now so the boys have enjoyed trying it out as it's much bigger! We have also started some sanding in the hall as we plan to decorate it this year. 

Harry also had his first enjoy-a-ball class of term on Friday. This is his fourth year of this class! I really like it as it's a general skills class and introduces aspects of all the ball sports, so it's a good foundation for whichever sport Harry might want to continue playing. He really likes the coach and has a few friends there. Peter also does this class on a Monday, with his own age group.

We started back at The Sage too yesterday for cello and music class. Harry is quite rusty after the summer holiday and has three pieces of music to practise this week so we will be doing daily practise. He was all smiles when he came out of the group session and he enjoyed it. We often take Peter to the under-5's music session at the same time, which involves singing, small instruments and parachute play, but this doesn't start back until next week. 

Board games and superhero football

I am pleased that the boys have rediscovered a love of board games this week. They go through phases of activities and we haven't been playing games recently. Today we have played Crazy Chefs and Insey Winsey Spider by Orchard Toys. Peter won both and gave a very impressive bow - I think he has learned from Harry's music bows. I like these games as we can play them together and we all have an equal chance of winning so it is enjoyable for all ages. Harry and I played Trilemma, a maths based board game, while Peter was in the bath and again when he had gone to bed.

Harry has been doing maths on the iPad this week using the Mr Thorne Maths Universe app and some Conquer Maths lessons on shape and parallel lines. He has also been playing cello every day as lessons start again on Saturday after the Easter break.

It was really sunny today so we went to the park for an hour. Harry and Peter wore their superhero costumes and we played football, which was really fun. 

Cello, allotment and soft play

Harry has been doing some great cello playing recently. He is working on this page of his book, which uses open string and two harmonic finger positions. He finds it challenging but has definitely improved and gets a great sense of achievement when he plays the whole line without any mistakes. 

We went to a large soft play centre yesterday with our NCT friends, who are now on school holidays. The boys had a great time and our friends came back to our house afterwards, so it was a noisy afternoon with 6 extra children! 

We have been at the allotment this morning and I am getting quite excited about all the planting. We put in our first peas and broad beans and carried on weeding the border ready for some flowers. We planted four trays of flower seeds when we got home, ready for putting out for the summer. A neighbour at the allotment, who is moving to a smaller plot, gave us some blackcurrant and raspberry bushes too, so we now have a well stocked fruit area. Hopefully the birds won't be too interested in it!

Music concert and family office

It was Harry's end of term ensemble concert at The Sage today. All the children did really well and we were very proud of Harry. They performed three pieces on a combination of cello, violin and viola, a dance and showed us some of the ways they learn bow control and rhythm in their ensemble class. He really enjoyed it and was beaming afterwards.

After this we went to Stuart's office. He moved office recently to a new, bigger building in the City Centre and they organised a family day to allow wives, husbands and children to see the new office. There was face painting, a magic show, balloon modelling, table football, a pool table and lunch and it was really good. They boys didn't want to leave! I used to work there too (Stuart and I met at work) and it was nice to see some people I used to work with too.

Harry pretending to be Daddy!

Chairing an important meeting.

Stuart assures me that this ball pool is not usually in the office.

We left with balloons. Peter wanted to go in the arty water fountain! 

Word game, numbers, clay and a piano!

It has been our first normal day after holiday today and it has dragged a bit (mainly due to tiredness from being woken at 2am by Peter!) but we have got lots done, which I always like on a Monday.

Peter had his enjoy-a-ball class this morning and Harry took his Lego reading books along and wrote a story based on them, in which the crooks tied up all the police and won! He has been doing great writing and spelling recently, which I am really pleased about as it has never been a favourite activity for him but he seems to have had a spurt of finding it easier.

He also wrote these newspaper articles at the weekend, unprompted, including bold headlines. I liked the 'Buy some soon' statement - I think he is trying to tell me something! 

We played one of our favourite reading games at home - pyramid reading from the great Games for Learning book. I gave each of us a blank pyramid made up of blocks. Harry was given a word to read and Peter a letter. If they got it right, they coloured a block. If they got it wrong, I got a chance to read it and colour my block. Peter loved joining in with this for the first time!

We also did three sections of this English workbook - 'ing' verbs, capital letters and rhyming. I am pretty sure that Harry understands all the concepts in this book so we are just going through to check before we move on and I am asking him some of the parts verbally.

We had a very exciting delivery after this - a piano! The parents of a friend unexpectedly offered a piano a couple of weeks ago (thank you Sarah if you are reading!) and we had been talking about getting one in the future so we jumped at the chance. I downloaded an app on the iPad and we watched some videos before practising some five-finger playing. I am really keen to learn and I hope Harry and Peter will want to as well. Harry also played his cello.

We also had a less exciting visitor - a gas engineer to fix our leaking boiler! 

We have really enjoyed reading our Wonderwise books recently. We have been reading this one on holiday and today we did one of the activities from the back (there are a couple of activity suggestions in each book). We used air drying clay to create snails for the garden, cups and 'jewels' which we will paint when dry. Peter squashed the clay into an old chocolate tray which made good jewel shapes.

We still have our paper mache earth and sun hanging in the playroom, which was one of the activity suggestions in the Out There Somewhere book from the Wonderwise series, to show that some parts of Earth do not face the sun and there it will be dark.

Harry wanted to watch the latest Deadly 60 Pole-to-Pole CBBC show so I did some number work with Peter. He used his sorting pie to identify the numbers 6-10 and count in the correct number of objects.

I put the numbers 1-9 on the magnet board and asked him to find particular numbers and then put them in order.

Harry had Beavers this evening and did some work on water safety, towards his safety badge. He also made something for a Mother's Day surprise, which I was not allowed to see! 

We have continued our Roald Dahl reading by starting Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator, after finishing Charlie and The Chocolate Factory last week. I read Harry two chapters of this tonight.

Sing a Song of Science

Harry had a day filled with music yesterday. He had his cello lesson followed by group ensemble session in the morning. This was the last lesson before an end of term concert next week.

We stayed at The Sage to meet some of our NCT friends for lunch. There were 5 boys and we all went to see a show called Sing a Song of Science together. This was great - the songs were set to popular music tracks (such as songs by Take That and Amy Winehouse and even the Hokey Cokey!) played on a keyboard, guitar and steel pans and covered a variety of science topics in a very engaging way. I was really pleased to notice that we have covered all of the topics at home, from forces and electricity to plant growth, pollination, teeth cleaning and fighting germs. 

Rainforest themed activities

We have been enjoying some rainforest themed activities this week. There were recently three podcasts on the BBC Learning Let's Move station based on the rainforest so we have listened to those on three consecutive mornings. They involved moving like sloths, leopards and flying dragons, making rain noise and listening to the noises of the rainforest.

I also found this book at the library, which the boys love. We have read it several times and Harry easily remembered the four levels of a tropical rainforest from the flowing, rhyming text.

We made colourful rainforest birds from paper plates. We folded the plates in half so they could stand alone and added feathers, tail plumes, eyes and beaks.

Harry and Peter created their own 'rainforest' in the garden and played there for nearly two hours. They packed rucksacks with towels, drinks and their 'scientific equipment'. They took their birds and perched them in plants.

They used long pieces of coloured wool for snakes, foam butterfly stamps and bright wind up caterpillars from the toy drawers for the other rainforest creatures.

They examined the creatures to see if they were new species and if they were poisonous! 

Harry made some drawings in his notebook of new discoveries to tell other scientists about. He seems to have been in his pyjamas a lot this week at home!

We also had a lovely outdoor story and snack on the picnic rug. We read Superworm and ate flapjack! Harry and Peter both love this type of imaginative game and absorb lots of facts in the process as I talk to them. They have previously been polar explorers wrapped up in warm clothes, collecting ice samples and volcanologists, looking for gems in volcanic rock!