Category Archives: gardening

just call me mistress of puzzles!

Posted on July 1, 2006 by | Leave a comment

we have mostly played today. A lot of the time it was all three of us together rough and tumeble play and running about.

SB also did a hama cat to give as a present tomorrow while BB played with playdough. [cue small hama stuck in playdough!]
while BB asleep, SB wanted me to make her a dot to dot and a maze, so i did a number of these, and she was good at them. I also did some number puzzles [kakuro] and simple crosswords, and she thought this was great, so we did some more. I enjoy kakuro, and was pleased how quickly she got on with it.

We read a couple of books together and also listened to little toe - SB keen to learn the words of puff the magic dragon.

BB was awake, and SB went to get her, and some more hideous shrieking game that the 2 enjoy together but is an anathema to their parents!

I did a piano lesson for SB, as have promised her i will do this for too long. She concentrated hard for the short time we did it.

A CHEF home-ed family dropped by on their way home from a very succesful HESFES to store their tent – SB gave them the ground tour, and we got 0 out of 1000 for tidiness [oh the shame!!!!!]

Some weeding and hoeing and watering in the garden. SB picked some wok brok, and BB picked and ate green strawbs [sigh] and we all picked the broad beans. It was still a scorcher at 5pm!

Snuck in a bit of history discussing american independance day and canada day, and how europe sent navigators and explorers to seek new countries and goods, basically annexe them until eventually there was either civil war or the countries were ‘handed back’. and although the land itself wasn’t really having a birthday, the nation had survived an extra year etc.

I must now hem her ballet skirt.

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Posted in art and crafts, Butterbean, gardening, General, history, literacy, music, numeracy, Stringbean's HE

mum and dad

Posted on June 28, 2006 by | Leave a comment

mostly a day talking tactics for the future and gardening. its nice to have some help in the garden. Dad gave the topiary a good trim, mum and i weeded, SB watered and BB pulled up to veg – sigh!

SB did do some obvious home ed stuff – she did some explode the code, read some raiders and rioters book, and then some history with mum – mostly mediaeval bits and pieces. She is starting to read words out and a bout – which is nice, even if it was predominantly shed [garden centre] and getting more and more proficient with mental maths of adding and subtracting over a ten. She did some nice singing for my mum, and lots of maze books.
Most of the day was playing though. I think my uncertainty is not helping the girls, as SB more waily at the moment, and mimicking BB for the attention.

BB also had fun today. pottred around, started undressing upstairs as poopoo – so we might start potty training in the good weather. she enjoyed the sandpit and the brio track the most.

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Posted in Butterbean, gardening, General, literacy, music, numeracy, Stringbean, writing

Catching up

Posted on June 24, 2006 by | Leave a comment

kind of day. did some trrying to sort the veg garden – weeding, a bit of watering where desperate. the peas in their entirety didn’t survive us being at kessingland – very sad!

SB read to me the 9th ladybird phonics book, and did some explode the code. We also did some singapore maths thinking skills, and read a book all about how the body works. Mostly we played out in the garden though. SB definitely turning into a trapeze artiste.

i feel the need to be expanding on her home ed with resources we have, but not quite doing it. Luckilly she is very good at finding things to read/do, but I’m not keeping up with the piano, and would like to do the getty and dubay, latin and story of the world more regularly.

BB and I did lots of shape sorting and jigsaws before mostly playing in the garden. lots of running under water! [no hosepipe ban here, though this is the first use of hosepipe as most water butts now run out – unfortunately noticed one was full after i had watered! [we are metered]

chris made flapjacks, but neither girl really helped!

i am finding it difficult to keep my head in one place at the moment. Need a haven of tranquility – rofl! No news yet.

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Posted in Butterbean, Cooking, gardening, General, literacy, numeracy, SB-PE, science, writing

Rebalancing

Posted on June 7, 2006 by | 5 comments

Life at work goes from worse to, well, thoroughly awful. It looks like there are going to be redundancies. I am last in…

O today I chilled. After all, if the worst is going to happen, worrying about it for the 6 or so months before I know, will just make them that much harder, and not actually make it any easier then.

SB spent half of the day doing jump ahead maths – its the easy one, and she is desperate to get to the giants birthday, as she gets it to 90 odd candles, and then the computer goes funy and the hard drive replaced etc etc, and she has to start again. So today she got 50 of the 100 candles. [reminds me a lot of me on games such as civ...!] Anyway, well impressed by her ability to stick to a task!

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other than that, we were mostly playing in the garden.

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I did get to play a lot with BB so we read, shape sorted, ran, cuddled, tickles, and whatever else a mummy and an 18 monther could think of! As Chris mentioned, her continuous monologue on the world is rather cute.

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oh, and I think our bees swarmed again. there was a huge buzzing noise, and a veritable ball of bees flying near the chimney, so I tooke the 2 girls in, and got distracted, so I think the main lot must have flown off before I got back out a couple of hours later – so the photos are of perhaps the remainder going back in? there has been a lot of flying activity, and also a fair number of bees dying on the lawn, so i wondered whether it was a swarm or a mating flight??? i just don’t know that much about bees. There’s still a lot of bee milling about going on anyway. They arrived May 9th last year

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Posted in Butterbean, gardening, General, numeracy, photos, Stringbean's HE

Simple Pleasures

Posted on June 4, 2006 by | 6 comments

sitting in garden with laughing children running about – ahhhhhhh.

thats mostly what we did. SB did some computer games and the whole of the new webland as well. She helped me plant out the runner beans – as did BB. Hands off to those of you who regularly garden with two such avid helpers! mostly she climbed, swinged and jumped. we played a lot of hide and seek together – BB usually gives my hiding place away though! Chris found the very old pop up tent and tunnel – so a lot of fun with that. Oh, and we read half of the usbourne greek myths book.


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SB and I had a practice run at our Kessingland craft – see below and leave feedback.


IMG 5180Our paneer has worked well, and plan to eat it tomorrow – we were too tired to cook anything inventive this evening.


IMG 5176BB is singing and doing the actions – she likes twinkle twinkle, wind the bobbin and peter perkins
We have a ‘pond monster’ It was flailing in the shallow muddy bit, and I went to investigate – i could only see the tail end, which seemed long for a fish, and wrong shaped – @ small eelish? broen coloured. disappeared fairly sharpish, but don’t think long enough for eel – I wonder what it is? Maybe its the culprit for the declining goldfish numbers?

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Posted in art and crafts, Butterbean, gardening, General, photos, Stringbean

what a scorcher!

Posted on June 3, 2006 by | Leave a comment

suntan lotion – tick! hats – tick/cross/tick/cross etc!!

So today was an enjoy it while we’ve got it day! The MODHEU was put up again for some shade, and the girls whizzed and poddled about in the garden, climbing, swinging and sliding. Lots of giggles, laughter and ‘mine’ could be heard!

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Chris did a fair bit more weeding of the main veg bed, so when the temp drops a bit, I am going to go out and plant out squashes and sweetcorn [actually temp OK now, but bath and bedtime, so if I was outside it would cause mayhem!]

We did some home ed type stuff, when not running about aoutside, and some of it was simultaneous. SB made some more circuits with the brainbox primary plus kit – in fact she went and got it out and started without any assistance. It is a real hit. She has done half a hama butterfly and drew a lovely birthday card for my Aunty Margaret – writing and spelling herself on the back [except the aunty margaret bit] so slighty alternative, but no worse than my typing! She also did a wodge of explode the code 3 - this bit is about y’s and vowels at the end. SB was found reading a read nose reader as well – yay.

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Some mental maths today – mostly on number bonds for 10, and some ‘lumping together’ [aka multiplication] of 2 and 3 lots of … under the guise of running a shop, and how many egg boxes did I need etc. She suggested this btw!

Actually, we had a proud daddy moment in the shop when she added 12 and 12 and got 24. It seems to have been the only good moment of the shop as the post office queue was apparently hideous, and SB went into I want mode. [its also the 1 stop shop].

Last weekend, the grauniad had a recipe for paneer – 1 litre full fat milk and 1 lemon juice heated – so today me and SB made some. it is now wrapped in muslin in our jelly bag, and the excess whey dripping out. Cool! SB liked watching the curdling process, and we saw how little curds there were to whey. SB also helped me cook tea.

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We did watch the rest of Sound of Music. I am def depressed, as I tried hard not to cry as I discussed why they were running away. SB actually missed most of the overtones, and really didn’t understand. So I didn’t do that much explanation – war we can do later. She does want to see the sequel film, of them getting to america – i explained there is no film, I just read the book of their life, but to no avail! We’ve listened to little toe – now a daily occurence she is so fond of it. Before tea, as we had 2 exhausted little beans, they have been watching the blue planet – well SB watches, and BB dances to the music [cute]

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BB and I have mostly cuddled and shape sorted, chased, swung and built towers today. I do try and get a bit of as near 1 on 1 as I can – but SB not entirely amenable! [this is usually when she is match and sorting or hama-ing!] However BB is such an independent thing she is quite happy to have short bursts – as long as she can feed whenever she wants, and has prime control of lap time!!

Argh moment of the day was a thrush flying in, and then not flying back out again, ut being frantic by a non-opening window [eside a wide open door!] I psyched myself up to try and catch it in a tea towel, when finally it flew back out again.

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Posted in art and crafts, Butterbean, Cooking, gardening, General, history, literacy, numeracy, SB-PE, science, writing

Sunny day – AT LAST!

Posted on June 2, 2006 by | 3 comments

What a lovely day. We got right out into the garden and tried to catch up. so at last a garden blog!

We didn’t do any ‘match and sort’ today, but a fair bit of mental maths and spelling – SB and her teddy were playing at schools with me today outside. She insisted she had hard questions and the bear easy [cos he is 4!] I was weeding and hoeing at the time, and BB poddling about the garden – mostly climbing.

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SB painted her tile she made at the Abbey, nicely with black, yellow gold and silver at her choice, It looks very nice. And it was then lunch time. We listened to little toe and classic FM. SB very taken by house on the prairie and tom’s midnight garden. We had a spin off discussion on landgrabbing from Indians, and how to make a firebreak.

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After lunch we decided to ring a history book – so she chose a picturepedia book about the body! Anyway we went all the way through the book. She is fascinated about the body. It lead onto a discussion on oxygen, and how it was neede to make energy in the body, and how it was needed for things to burn. So we did some really cool oxygen experiments. we lit candles inside jars and watched them go out, and chris remembered a really cool one where you lit a candle floating on water with a jar over the top, and the water gets sucked up. Her Xmas tree crystal is looking good too.

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BB awoke, and so she read me a stack of books. SB went through some red nose readers, and the went into garden for a ‘school break’ while BB and I had some 1 to 1 with the fun blox and some wooden peg teddies. The all back into the garden. BB to run about wildly and giggle, and me to read Ulysses to SB [a firm favourite!] Actually BB and Guinness were doing a fair bit of bonding too.

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We all made the dough for pizzas tonight, and then more fun outside. BB loves the little car we got from Merry, and SB is totally wild on the swings – particularly the trapeze bar, andging from her legs twirling around. My Aunt lost her 2 front teeth that way…

Hmm, what else, well we ate the pizza outside [incorporating home grown asparagus, and in the salad home radishes], with the girls running around the garden thinking it was great fun.

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Sb went to bed listening to 5 children and it – at last she likes the more grown up story CD’s – though Winnie the Pooh still her favourite.

it has been a very relaxing day.

My Little Nanny not had such a good day, as her next door neighbour [since they moved in after the war] and closest friend in hospital to die from her breast cancer. Although late 80′s, their friendship has spanned half a century [more], her husband and Nanny’s brother were prisoners of war in thailand together [building infamous railway, and against all odds both survived] and they’ve seen children and grandchildren grow up. So wishing a peaceful crossing there. She is heavily sedated and not really ‘there’ due to brain mets, but even so, lets hope for diginity and a gentle passing none the less.

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Posted in art and crafts, Butterbean, Cooking, gardening, General, literacy, music, numeracy, photos, science

Tuesday Catchup

Posted on June 2, 2006 by | Leave a comment

Been all wonk this week as it was bank holiday on Monday, And Helen is off as well today, and being half term all teh various usual classes etc. aren’t running, so I’ve lost track of the days somewhat.

Tuesday didn’t get blogged, so here is what I remember – they were both up and at it pretty early I think, lots of clothes got washed and dried (including some that a had been up a couple of days…….), some more clothes got put away with children helping ;-) It’s ashame that Butterbean’s idea of helping to hang up usually involves drioping them all over the garden path though. Reading of library books – including SB reading a bit to me, we spent some time looking at her science encylopedia. Looked at/talked about matter, atoms, everything being made of atoms, how small they are, John Dalton , atomic structure, Neils Bohr and Ernest Rutherford and their model of the atom. what an element is, about Sulphur, different forms of Carbon, neon lights, looked at the periodoc table, she went through reading about half the symbols and I had to tell her the names of the elements. Touched on radioactivity as the radio active elements were labled with the radioactive symbol.

Ok, all this is at her level (sort of, she seems to happily listen to stuff that is way above her head I’m am sure, but then seems to remember a couple of salient bits) but I don like to use the correct words, so such as atom, element, proton, electron, neutron etc.

Some playing in the sun when it came out, we sowed her Seed Bunny seeds, I managed to plant a the Broccoli plants, out – but we are so far behind, and the weeds in the veg patch are mounting an effective counter attack.

SB did some more to her Solar System poster,

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stuck on the printed out planets in the right order, typed up (to my dictation) labels for the planets and other things, cut them out and stuck them on.

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Posted in art and crafts, gardening, IT, literacy, photos, science, Stringbean, Stringbean's HE

Yesterday, I sneaked away…

Posted on May 23, 2006 by | 2 comments

… as definately in need of r and r!

came home to find in-laws visiting, and much merriment. i had stopped off at tescos, and they were having a womens clothing sale, so last of the big spenders, I bought shorts for 2.50, top for 1.75, another 2 for 5 each, and then a 20% discount on the lot – v pleased!

And since miserable and no money whatsoever, i then bought a dinosaur testtube kit for Sb and some v cheap walkie talkies.

so we played with the walkie talkies. SB was fairly hopeless at keeping her finger pressed down! no doubt practice will improve things. BB was very jealous – so SB let her play too.

we buillt the glow in the dark dinosaur together. a t-rex, and then she and it squiggled into a cupboard to make sure it did glow in the dark. BB read books to me. She now says ‘mine’ well!
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She and BB then spent a considerable amount of time putting on a show for us – to the fimble radio! lots of dancing and twirling, with Sb dressed in her ballet togs.

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SB did some singapore maths 1B – 10s and units, which she is galloping through, and then Chris’s parents treated us to a curry. thankyou!! it was delicious, I was ravenous, and BB seems to be a real curry girl too. in fact i’m about to have some reheated.

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what else? Oh, SB insisted BB did some match and sort – counting to 10 flap book – rofl! And they both played with the ideal blocks.

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Earlier, SB had done some hama, some explode the code and lots andlots of playdough with BB while Chris did a good tidy up of the main downstairs – for which I was very appreciative [actually i thought his mum had done it - oops]

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Unfortunately the garden and gardening gone to pot. I am trying not to care.

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Posted in art and crafts, Butterbean, Dance/drama, gardening, General, literacy, numeracy, photos, science, Stringbean's HE, writing

Simple Sunday again

Posted on May 21, 2006 by | 1 comment

Had a lovely day. My lovely sister got up early and cleaned the kitchen – yay! the children all played nicely together, a bit of dashing outside, but rainy. They watched some more blue planet, and went finally mid afternoon.

SB then did the yoga video 2ce [thanks again Katy], and since SB was still asleep, we played games of set until she had woken up. We don’t play competitively yet, just take turns, but she doesn’t ail to spot one now, and is starting to be fussy about ‘what kind’ of set she wants! She had wanted to do some more electric circuits, but i couldn’t find those, and education city, but we have run out of free trial!

instead she made some more dream avatars, while I got BB up. they played bounce over mujmy and the bed and general rough and tumble for a bit [chris dug up some weeds in the rain, and had a shower to warm up!] . SB read me some say the sounds ladybirds books – she was very impressed, as was I, even though the imp and troll story must be one of the most phenomenally tedious I have ever read!.

BB practiced saying book to me, and brought me a fair few to read whilst SB played with the lego – so we did turn and turn about of lap and book or lego. i read SB some dr seuss. So BB gradually getting the hang of speech. [shoes, mummy, daddy and book are the clearest]

Rather hysterical was the pre and post bath olympics that SB and BB had, running the upstairs circuit again and again [naked as a nod to ancient greece!] while I counted, and SB tried to beat her own time. BB just chuckled madly. At bedtime Sb insisted on an encyclopaedia as bedtime story – so we did various pages of ‘C’ . We are so behind with piccies that I shall do some flickring.

Sorry we couldn’t go to Fran’s party – so happy birthday Fran.

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Posted in Butterbean, gardening, General, geography, history, literacy, numeracy