Happy Birthday Harry!

Harry was 4 today! He seemed to be really excited about it.


We already had a celebration at the weekend with family visits, party games and pizza express. Harry enjoyed opening his presents in bed this morning.

Then we headed to the Washington Wetland Centre for a bright and sunny but cold play with our home ed friends where we shared Harry's birthday cake.

We have dipped into some of his presents this afternoon - we started a meccano forklift truck, had a game of alphabet lotto and built a train track with a new bridge. 


Happy Birthday Harry, you continue to amaze me and I feel very lucky to have shared your first four years with you!

Kitchen activity

We have been very active in the kitchen together recently and Harry has been showing huge amounts of interest, which I am trying to encourage as the cooking/eating experience is very important to me. We always eat together where possible and we have a mealtime candle on the table, which we started doing after we had some Christmas candles left over. Harry seems to enjoy this and blows it out when we finish. Eating with a 1 and 3 year old is not always the most relaxing experience but I am confident that family mealtimes at the table can only be positive for the future - we already use mealtimes to make up rhymes and songs.


Harry is so much more capable now in the kitchen than he was six months ago. He has always wanted to help but has not always managed what he was trying to do. He also now has the patience to prepare by weighing and measuring and following short recipes. 


Recently he has been very independently......


Making popcorn

Peeling carrots and anything else unfortunate enough to meet the peeler

Making rice krispie cakes

He has also been experimenting making pretend cakes with various storecupboard items - the combination of around 12 spices was interesting!

Sacred space

We were counting the daffodils in the garden this afternoon and decided to go and look for signs of spring along the track near our house - our sacred space. There were signs a plenty!


The landscape was dappled with sunlight through the trees, unlike the frosty last post.

We spotted dwarf daffodils the same as in our garden, hanging catkins, white blossom and buds on the trees and we talked about how buds and blossom fit into the life cycle.

We also looked at some of the multitude of blackberry bushes to check on their status - they provide regular feasts for Harry in autumn.


Peter enjoyed some freedom to explore. Harry collected some stones and berries to bring home and loved riding his bike, as usual. He is so proficient now!

Spring, not winter, was dominant today and it gave us a huge sense of wellbeing! I am very interested to see whether there will be a revival of winter weather and the effect it could have.

Chester park

What a great day - our first trip to Chester park which was well worth a half hour journey. Three hours of friends, sun, sand and busy, happy children, finished off with ice cream!

Mud!

A good example in our garden today of why my blog is called dancing in the mud!

Alphabet hunt

We had a fun alphabet hunt at home this morning. I hid each letter of the alphabet using our magnetic letters and Harry had to find them

He especially liked the two bonus letters with sweets attached - he said they gave him hunting energy to find the rest of the letters!

When he had found them all, we lined them up and he tried to think of a word beginning with each letter. We played the hiding and finding element of the game 3 more times and there were tears when we had to stop for lunch, so it's safe to say Harry enjoyed it! Very simple but very fun.

Loan box - Ancient Greek Olympics

Tyne and Wear museums have several loan boxes, each with a theme, which contain interesting articles to explore and relate activities to. We looked at an Ancient Greek Olympics box yesterday at the Discovery museum with some other home ed families, which was good as an introduction to both the Olympics and Ancient Greece. I am planning some Olympic activities to tie into London 2012 later in the year, as I am sure many people are, so we will postpone looking further into the Olympics until then. 


Harry was very taken by the story of the 12 labours of Hercules, however, which we had researched in advance and saw depicted on pottery in the box so I am going to buy a book of Greek myth and legend to explore at home. We also liked the discus and jumping weights, having watched videos of these events in advance, and a coin bearing the image of Zeus, which sparked some interesting discussions about whether you can actually throw lightning bolts!


I think we are so lucky to live in such close proximity to several very good museums, which have great learning resources and we will definitely be making the most of them over the coming years.