Stillness

There is a stillness around me.
We have separate adventures in the daytime now.
His day is filled with paint and flour, I know as he comes home covered in it.
Of stick legs in PE shorts and waiting in line to attempt a roly poly down a rubber mat.
Crusts left and swapping crisps.
Finally sitting down at a little table even though his body wants him to move so much more. 
Fidgets allowed to break up his learning, small steps. Immense pride. 

Learning about the Romans bringing a beaming smile to history mad mummy's face.
Digging in sand for artefacts. That's two of us that want to be archaeologists. 
Home starving and home tired, bed so much earlier and without so much fuss.
A picture of him laughing in the play area with a new friend.
He was ready. Was I? 

And so the stillness surrounds me like the mist that hung on the road until lunchtime.
I didn't enjoy my walk so much today without a little hand holding on.
Allowing myself to focus on the light through the trees, it seemed a little sad.
Small steps for me too, into a new life.
Paint splatters on his sweatshirt later will remind me that we all have to find our happiness.
Breaking free to move forwards. 

On finding a school place

This year I  have decided to put my son into school as I had been home educating him since his brief spell in preschool. Now was the time for the once anxious boy, now out of his shell to venture into the big wide world and burn off some of his energy. My nerves and my house can no longer take it but he needs to added input for his speech and language among other things. Little Bird is ready to play with paints and glue, to be in a stricter routine of playtime and lunchtimes with learning activities structured around him and this has become impossible at home as well....I'm mum and he can mess me around quite a bit. We need a break from each other, different adult in his life to have influence and provide encouragement. He needed the extra time at home but now he is simply too bored and needs more than I can provide Monday to Friday. I felt like I was giving up for a while but then I realised it was simply a case of things changing and our natural development as mother and son. I feel better now that I'm being a good mum and recognising that now my little boy needs more. 

At the moment I am in waiting situation with the LEA, despite him having a full statement it seems there are lots of meetings to be had, hoops to jump through and lots of red tape. It's strange how getting him into school seems so much harder that not sending him in the first place when the LEA were keen to talk. Now, it's delay after delay and meeting after meeting, panel after panel....time wasting. The issue is really that there are no school places left, unless somebody moves at the last minute or changes their mind. Where will he go? I perhaps will know later this week but it is frustrating and a bit of a worry. I'm staying positive and then I can start to buy everything he needs which will be really exciting as he's never had all those school type things before.

5 things we need for school:

1. A school bag for all LB's books, spare clothes, drink, pencil case and the passing to and fro of notes between the teacher and I. Probably a rucksack with a nice pattern on it like cute dinosaurs or animals that is easy to wipe clean and comfortable straps for his shoulders. 

2. One of the most important items for any school child are name labels for EVERYTHING! From his coat to his bag and lunch box, they will all have some colourful labels with a little picture beside them. They will help LB know which things are his, 

3. We will also need some stationery items for school, a jolly pencil case filled with pencils, coloured pens, crayons and a ruler. For home a new calendar to keep track of school events and a notebook/diary for my bag - after all with parent's evenings and future Nativity plays to watch I will need to make sure I can quickly make a note. 

4. I can remember my school lunch box as a child, it was turquoise and had little cherubic-like characters on it, plus stickers on the back - such was the craze in the 1980's. For LB I'd like to find a cheap and cheerful lunch bag that will last a couple of terms since they get quite grotty there is not point spending a lot as I will replace it every few terms. I would quite like to find a space themed set for him complete with drinks bottle. Then I will have to look to Pinterest and try and be one of those super Bento making parents!

5. 
5. Finally a PE bag for those shorts, t-shirt and pumps. I was not a sporty child and shied away from PE lessons but perhaps my son will enjoy sports day and the egg and spoon race - I bet he won't though he's too much like me. However, we shall see and he'll certainly have a smart bag to take his things in. 

Then of course there will be the new uniform, although until I find out which school he will be going to I have no idea what it will look like. Hopefully next week I will have some news......

*Collaborative post

Back to homeschool

After our summer break it's back to the home school schedule......of sorts. Our time is flexible and we can choose to learn about whatever we feel like on a day-to-day basis. if the weather is nice, it's off out on a day trip to a park, farm, forest or seaside and if it rains, well it's puddle splashing or a day at the table with books and crayons.

Little Bird changes his interests and I can change what we learn about to suit - one week it might be dinosaurs and the next it might be space. When Ocean Finance got in touch for their back to school without worrying about finances scheme, I had £50 to purchase what we would need. With no school uniform to worry about, we spent our money on some useful items for home education life:

For day trips a new brightly patterned dinosaur lunchbox and an extra shark adorned water bottle - all the exploring is thirsty work. Some lovely gel pens for scribbling with, we all love gel pens right?

At home with all our work sheets and resources, we have to me really really organised - after all the home is also our classroom so manilla folders for paperwork, index tabs to help me mark pages we are going to learn from and a sparkly diary (for me!) to keep track of home ed activities, meet ups and workshops. Home educating is a very busy social life.

I just adore the project book where we can keep all our learning notes organised and for when we need to write an annual report or look back upon all the topics we have learnt about over the year. All items from Sainsburys. 


Little Bird is an outdoor loving boy, no matter the weather it's rambles across the countryside collecting nature items for our little display and tramping through mud or stomping around the woodland looking for bugs and fungus so......a new warm coat was required.... I purchased this snuggly fleecy lined coat from Matalan that will see LB through the colder months. 

Hopefully we have a great home educating year ahead filled with exciting things that I will tell you about. Soon it is holiday time, quiet as most other children are back in the classroom but we will be on the south coast :) 

*Collaboration with Ocean Finance

Creating a fun home school room

Since home educating my son I have turned the downstairs room which would have been just a dining room into our play room/learning room. It's not a massive room but is open plan to the staircase and hence feels larger than it actually is. Last year it had a bit of a revamp and I repainted the walls and decided to paint the wooden floor white which for a dark back room has made it so much brighter. Combined with pastel colours it has lifted the space and now we have a blank canvas to making it our perfect learning area for years to come.

 I have plenty more ideas now to make it a fun room for learning in and here are some of them:

Quirky book shelves
We have lots of books and have a couple of creative ways to store them so they are easily accessible to my son and to me as the one teaching him. Some are on an old church pew that I found in a junk shop and have painted up in powder blue. Our seasonal and topical books are in Ikea spice racks on the wall, such a cheap hack and I think it makes a nice display too. It's great having out books to hand, although this is just a small section of them and I rotate them frequently depending upon what we are learning about.

Book caddies are useful too and I particularly love this smiley heart one made by Joni at Lay Baby Lay, very cute and great instead of having a pile of books just lying around. 

Joni at Lay Baby Lay

Notice boards and displays
Whether it's for pinning our paintings to, posting reminders of our activities or making a pretty display for the season, an area of the room for a board is essential for a home education space. As a bright and colourful feature for a room, rainbow boards from Teacher Boards are a practical solution - from felt notice boards to dry wipe boards in an array of colours. Super cheerful and in lots of sizes for any room. They come complete with the fixing kit and there are useful combination boards of felt and dry wipe available too.

Rainbow Boards from Teacher Boards

Clever Storage 
When home educating you amass a lot of items - toys, learning activities, puzzles, arts and crafts items and well...it can all get a little messy. Organisation is key and as I've found, I need to know where things are so that I can seize the opportunity and we can learn about letters or numbers or animals and it doesn't take me long to locate what we need. Coloured baskets, plastic tubs and patterned boxes to put our small play bits and pieces into on open shelves can look fun, organised and accessible. Labelling them up yourselves can be a little project for the children to customise themselves.

The Moffatt Girls

Decoration
Wall art to inspire us and learn at the same time such as maps or art such as this dinosaur picture fro Etsy brightens to the room and makes it a cheery, child friendly space. Storage can look decorative too - coloured maths counters in jars and door pockets of coloured crayons for instance. Educational charts can be picked up inexpensively and hence changed as our subjects change, we have one on shapes and numbers and animals of the world. It's your space to tailor for your child and their unique way of learning hence why animals being a huge topic for us are often to be found on our wall art.

Dinosaur print Etsy

Cosy nook
The next project I'd like to do is create a nook for reading and quiet play and learning. Maybe a fabric wigwam or a section of the room with a fluffy rug and fairy lights as a chill out sensory area with lots of cushions and a basket of calming items or a nature box to explore. 

Cup of Jo

For more playroom ideas, look here:


Follow Happy Homebird's board Children's Room on Pinterest.

Signs of spring: Blue tit in the garden

 Happily chinking the china in the sink as I washed the morning's dishes, I was accompanied by the sound of a melodic chirping from beyond the open back door. With blue skies and a sun with impending spring warmth I saw the neighbour starting the gardening again after the winter's break, the gentle rays encouraging folk out to clear away the brash from borders and prune overgrown shrubbery. Could he hear it too?

Up in the budding rowan tree is a small bird with a powder blue cap and a breast like the yellow daffodils starting to bloom already. The Blue Tit, an urban garden favourite and famous for its nostalgic cheeky piercing of the foil on milk bottles.

Nimbly its head bobs about and agile feet perch on branches with upside down acrobatic antics to match squirrels on the peanut bird feeders. This is the start of the breeding year for Tom Titmouse as he is colloquially known, an old Norse derivative for diminutive creatures. 

It's time to give the birds a little help, keeping the food and fresh water supply and also this week is time to put up nest boxes for the future generations of garden birds. It's worth a little research into this as quite often ones you see for sale are unsuitable and more decorative rather than practical or birds. Hardwood is best for insulation, 19mm thick and make sure it's located out of the way of predators and that the entrance hole is not facing the prevailing wind or strong sunlight. Lots of information can be found with the BTO and you can register to take part in the Nest Box Challenge, something we will do as part of our home education nature learning.

Martinmas & seasonal ramblings

We have a lot of seasonal traditions in our home, I've collected them over the years, a real mixed bag. Every week I seem to be decorating the house for some special day or just for the love of the current month - nature displays on the mantelpiece, books according to the current festival or the season. 

I've always been really driven by the seasons since childhood, excessively so, I don't know where it came from  - not my parents who don't really care for even the big events like Christmas. Maybe it was my primary school and the activities we did? I would spend hours making up poems about leaves falling off trees, snow on the ground and would then illustrate the edges of the paper. So.....now I home educate my son we can experience these things together. For me, it is my childhood all over again and over the past few years I have seen everything I loved creep back in again after a long period of suppressing these 'whims'.

Today is Martinmas, St Martin's Day , the day that St Martin of Tours was buried in 397AD
The legend goes that Martin met a beggar man in Amiens, France, who was cold and shivering. Martin cut his own cloak in two in order to give half to the man and so the day is celebrated for compassion and the hope of getting through the dark winter days.

waldorfmama.com

Martinmas is celebrated more in France or Germany with lantern parades and singing but the Waldorf educational approach which we follow parts of was brought into my life a few years back and it's a magical, creative way of learning that celebrates such days. 

Across the community we make little lanterns, whether that be paper ones or decorated jars. The light in the lantern represents our souls, a tiny light for protection through the dark whilst we sing lantern songs.

I go outside with my lantern, my lantern goes with me
Above the stars are shining bright, down here on Earth shine we.
The cock does crow, the cat meows, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom.
‘Neath heaven’s dome till we go home, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom.

I go outside with my lantern, my lantern goes with me
Above the stars are shining bright, down here on Earth shine we.
So shine your light through the still dark night, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom
‘Neath heaven’s dome till we go home, la bimmel, la bammel, la boom.

Other traditions we do for Martinmas are baking cookies, shadow puppet plays and St Martin bags filled with treats.  In the UK there are various Martinmas fairs but mostly it is just us at home with our pretty lanterns. 

Waldorf inspired learning

The eve of St Martins is associated with eating roast goose, Martinsgans, with red cabbage and potato dumplings.  The legend is that whilst trying to avoid becoming an ordained priest, Martin hid in a goose shed where the noisy geese caused him to found. 

Mili Weber [Swiss painter and illustrator 1891-1978]

source

Follow Happy Homebird's board Martinmas on Pinterest.

Halloween crafting #BostikBloggers

 A whole box of Halloween coloured crafting delight - ribbons, felt, embellishments, black, white, orange. Now step in and mind my broomstick, lets weave a crafting spell......To make a black pumpkin plate decoration we used:

1 black paper plate
Bostik Blu Tack Glu Dots
Scissors
White foam sheet
1 white pipe cleaner
Green ric rac
Sticky tape

Cut triangles of white foam sheet for the eyes and nose. Then cut a jaggedy mouth.
Glue to the black plate using the Blu Tack Glu Dots. Cut out some circle for freckles and glue them on to to make a pumpkin face.

Loop the white pipe cleaner and attach to the back of the plate with sticky tape to make a hook to hang the pumpkin decoration from.

Tie a short piece of green ric rac around the pipe cleaner, a little pumpkin stalk.
Next for a spooky jester's stick (or maybe a pumpkin wand)

Orange felt
Black felt
Selection of pipe cleaners
Polystyrene egg
Black and green ric rac
Orange pumpkin ribbon
Scissors
Blu Tack Blu Stick

Twist several pipe cleaners together to make a firm handle for our wand (leave one aside) Place the egg in the centre of the orange felt, place the pipe cleaner handle under the egg and scrunch it around and then secure with a pipe cleaner tie.

Cut out eyes and mouth for the pumpkin from the black felt. Glue on using the Blu Tack Blu Stick glue. 

Tie the ribbon and ric rac around the wand

Cast a spell

Owl decoration

Silk leaves
Owl embellishment
Black feathers
Black felt
Bostik Blu Tack Glu Dots
Blu Tack Blu Stick
wooden dolly peg

Using the Blu Tack Glu Dots fix the silk leaves together into a rosette.
Stick the owl embellishment into the centre. 

Onto the back, stick the feathers with the Glu Dots and a small piece of felt over the dolly peg. Secure with extra Blu Stick. 

 Happy Halloween!

Last month was not back to school crafting.
The craft box was provided to me by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club

Not Back to School #BostikBloggers

 The latest Bostik Bloggers theme was back to school but with home educating we decided it would be our not back to school project. As we go to the library as part of our home school week, we have made a library book bag. We used:
Quarters of patterned material
A pen
Ric-rac
Colourful foam sticky letters
Bostik Glu & Fix, clear extra strong - great for fabric
A plain cotton bag

 Draw the letters onto the back of the material with a pen, my son's initials for his own little book bag.
Glue the material letters on.
 Then make a design with ric-rac and the foam letters. My son picked out the colours of ric-rac that he liked and then we found the letters of the alphabet so it was a great learning activity for him too. All were glued on into a design underneath his initals.
 Ta da! A cute little personalised cotton bag for our library trips or for mummy to use to avoid a 5p charge on a little shopping trip!Last month was holiday crafting.
The craft box was provided to me by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club

Collecting autumn treasure

 Stepping into the garden as its colours start to fade and spider's weaving webs across every walkway. Be careful for you may find yourself dancing about the lawn trying to rid yourself of them from your hair.

Gather late summer flowers and drying hydrangeas for the home. Mind the snails and leave some berries for the blackbirds.

Find a feather or two. Barn owl and rook. Stripy brown and a shimmering navy blue sheen. Soft beauty and pretty textures to add to the mantle nature display for a little boy to look at, feel and learn.
 Late summer walks with chestnuts on the floor already, padded cases and tiny conkers inside.

The joy of randomly stopping to look whilst in the countryside. Observing the leaves already changing colour, patches of trees turning yellow with streaks of umber. Noticing how some trees change quicker than others.
 Treasure to take back into the home and arrange for a splash of colour and to inject late summer magic into the rooms. 

Mix up the magic - Tuff Spot play

Part of our regular play is using our fabulous Tuff Spot, a huge plastic mixing tray that can be used for all kinds of imaginative and messy play. I keep Toby interested by changing the theme and using lots of different materials and textures. This week we had a farm set up where tractors and cows crunched around in pasta and a dog came along and ate the dried pasta (silly old girl) whilst a little boy fell about laughing and sat in the pasta.

Home educating is better with cake

It is no surprise that I have a son who loves cake.

From the first ever piece......

 ...to the parties from age 1-5.
And for all those occasions in between.
Or just because it makes us happy.

Just because it is a rainy day and we can't go out to play
Or the day has started badly.
I quickly grab some cake and Toby and I have a little party.
During the holidays, well it's all the same to us as we home educate so our holidays are whenever we choose but we do love a slice (or two) of cake whilst we learn and play at home.

In fact, cake motivates my son when he's struggling. It cheers him up and puts a smile on his face. I love the process, it is pure magic - eggs from my father's chickens, flour, sugar, butter and a dash of vanilla. Warm cake shortly after with crunchy edges and a soft, crumb texture. I have the art perfected, rustic of course but delicious.

Cake baking is also part of our home education and the boy will be a great baker one day :)

We bake cupcakes and then take them on our day trips for we venture out a lot, so a tin full of treats is always there ready. Over Easter we had chocolate egg cakes and ate them in castles and parks. Through tantrums and tears and our tired cross moments, cake made it all better.

This post is an entry for #betterwithcake Linky Challenge , sponsored by Mr Kipling. Learn more at https://www.facebook.com/mrkiplingcakes