One Small Blue Bead

A Blogland friend of mine put me on to these. I thought they looked fun, so I ordered some from Amazon. 

The children have spent the entire day fascinated and intrigued by them :D

As an added bonus they make a great photography project 

~ I think there may be more to come...

In other news ~ I've been weeding & sieving the soil in our front garden. It's been three half-days of hard graft to get it looking decent, but it really does look so much better now. This morning Baby decided to 'help' me, and had a wonderful time playing in the newly sifted soil, getting thoroughly dirty (excuse the out of focus shot ~ I forgot to put the camera back in autofocus!) :D

And the girls put together a beautifully elaborate game with the farm out the back...

...whilst my Nan snoozed in the sun, and the boys bounced!

This weather suits us :D !

Life Right Now...

There's no two ways about it, Spring is quite possibly my favourite time of year: the clocks jump forward and, although we lose an hour's sleep, we soon adjust and suddenly the days seems so much longer. It's like the seasons know it's time to change too ~ and I wake up one morning to a world outside my window just bursting with life.

Not only does that life exude joy in all that I see outside my house, but the children inside my house seem to take on a burst of renewed life too and keeping them cooped up with books just would seem like a crime! 

So I don't! I declare the last week of term a non-book week, where they can fill their time with games (inside or out) & crafts ~ with only one catch ~ they keep learning!

Baby just is unstoppable outside ~ he LOVES being out in the garden, and wails when the fun has to come to an end. I got the water-table out on Sunday afternoon ~ it's his new top toy!

Aparantly, he's not the only one who loves it..!

He also has a huge fascination with 'orseees', but then wouldn't you if you saw this fella (and his lady friend) almost every time you looked out of your window! 

And so we come to the end of another term. I can't believe we have just one more term left of this academic year ~ this year seems to have whizzed by almost without me noticing. The children are so settled in their routines now, that most days and weeks go by smoothly and without drama. Stitch is a little pester-y in the afternoons (mostly about screens), but other than that all is pretty peaceful around here and everyone seems to be making happy progress. I'm hoping the pestering might subside a bit too, now Stitch can be outside more, burning off his unceasing energy!

Arty Crafty Update

I figured I ought to post something here ~ just so you know we still exist and are still H'eding!

We do art most Wednesday's (occasionally substituted with Cookery) & I try to focus on different artists.  Last Friday a friend of mine had mentioned that her daughter was enjoying trying her hand at some work in the style of Helen Musselwhite.

So I looked her up ~ and got busy :D

Today DD (age 6) made this lovely owl.

I downloaded a template from here; 

But I think this one would work well too.

We had lots of lovely papers left from when the boys got bored of this one year, but any funky paper would do fine.

I added the idea of the extra layers of circles for the eyes.

DD did almost all the cutting  by himself (twice ~ once for the template and once for the papers) and we assembled it together. 

I think this one earns a place on the wall :D

Minnie & Lilo are working on something different, but they're not finished yet...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Last week we took a look at the work of 'Joan Miro'

I printed out this , and a couple of actual paintings of his, as an example for them to bounce off & then let their imaginations run free :D

It was a lovely project, made all the better by two H'ed friends joining them for the morning :D. They did some gorgeous work too, but I can't showcase it because they took it home with them of course!

These were my children's works of art that came out of it...

TP (age 10) ~ 'Arty Party'

Taz (age 13) ~ 'Off The Pier'

DD ~ 'At The Park'

Minnie (11) painted a beautiful one too ~ "On the Beach"

 She made it into a Mother's Day card for my Mum, who has since departed home with it. 

You may notice Bugs did something different ~ his was 'Shadow Boat' and taken from a lesson over here

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

The week before that, we used a lesson from here to do these...

Lilo (8)

TP (10)

Minnie (11)

Taz (13)

Mine (not telling!)

Well, I hope you've enjoyed our little art tour!

I'll do an 'other stuff' blog later ~ tomorrow maybe..!