"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."

 

                                                                       Day 1... (part 2)

With another 4 weeks of national lockdown starting now, I'm feeling like the only way through this is back to daily activities concentrating on creativity. The creative lockdown project really helped to keep us in a Calm and focused headspace while the whole world was falling apart. So for the next 4 weeks our home-ed will be focussing solely on a variety of creative activities base on a word of the day. It's been a really tough month emotionally and I think we both want to be feeling better about the path that we are on. I'm kicking off our project with our LEGO Halloween build for this year, an explosion of black and orange.

Stay safe people and keep on creating.

“There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.”... and LEGO

As the school year comes to its final week I am reminded that it's business as usual for us homeschooling families. There are no term times for Opeie and although he gets to spend some awesome quality time with his brother over the 6 week holiday, our learning continues because the home education has become a way of life now. This morning as we chatted about what we were going to be doing, I said 'time for us to wind down a little this week' but with out realising we transformed our morning game of hockey to a fun spelling exercise. This is the magic of being a creative and ever evolving teacher to an equally creative 6-year-old.

There is something to learn in literally everything we do and LEGO has added creativity into so many of our fun activities. The building, following instructions and symmetry of many of the builds have been such great lessons for home education and the huge variety of parts, figures and animals mean that there is no end to the mini role playing we can do, which does wonders for both creative thinking and confidence building. Remember our post about the Berlin wall?



The great thing about LEGO is that they are constantly reinventing themselves with new themes and when it comes to their brand, LEGO City has for us been the strongest line for its educational value. This range has given us the chance to talk about volcanoes, arctic exploration, Space and last year the Fun in the park kit gave us such an amazing chance to talk about diversity throughout the world.





LEGO has now joined forces with National Geographic kids on their LEGO City jungle range, which has again given us everything that we need for another LEGO themed project. Weve been learning about the wildlife that can be found in the jungle, different foods that can grow in the climate and about indiginous tribes that live in these jungle areas. as with many of the newer city kits we've also been able to cover the importance of gathering information and learning from these areas and what a huge part science plays in findings.



"The partnership has come about to inspire children to explore, discover and learn about jungles and the importance of their preservation", Which really is a great reason to be partnering up. I like to think that a lot of Opeie's learning is making him more aware of his surroundings and he is also receiving a great understanding of the amazing world that is out there for him to investigate.









the new range has been a huge hit with the boys and Opeie's new love of jungle animals has got him looking at the Jungle exploration site kit and the Jungle halftrack mission kit so that he can roleplay with the new jungle cats from the range (I'd like to get my hands on these myself).

The entire range can be found HERE.

This amazing team up also offers LEGO fans the chance to win a very exciting prize with the LEGO City Jungle competition. Further details can be found at www.lego.com/jungle

Good luck to any of you entering.

"The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality."

Remember those days when if you wanted to take a photo you had to have an actual camera with you? my first mobile phone didn't do ANYTHING! apart from make calls and send messages, which at the time seemed amazing. I am the first to moan about people being glued to their phones or tablets, but despite the frustrating rise in antisocial behavoiur, technology has made everything easier. Documenting Opeie's homeschooling adventures has been amazing and as a lot of our learning is done organically outdoors, being able to capture the amazing things we see and get to talk about means that those things can stay with us.

This week, while scooting home from an eventful homeschooling adventure we spotted a huge cobweb with a very busy spider wrapping up their dinner. Opeie was fascinated and we stood and watched for quite some time. This for me is one of the big plusses for home education, we fill our days with all sorts of little events like this. As we scooted the rest of the way home we talked about what we had seen and the interesting sighting spurred on many, many questions from Opeie, exactly what I want from a day of learning.

"Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character"

Since becoming one of the LEGO family bloggers we have been sent some amazing things to review. Recently after returning from an awesome day out adventuring with the boys we arrived home to find one of the most exciting yet. Ever since Opeie had watched the unboxing of a whole box of series minifigures on Youtube (yes he's even more of a geek than me), he had longed for the excitement of having a box ourselves. That day, as we opened the front door, there on the sofa, was one waiting for us.

The boys got stuck in straight away, feeling up the bags and trying to guess which ones were inside. I'm a HUGE 'monsters' minifigures fan and loved the Monster fighters range a few years back so for me LEGO Minifigures Series 14 was a series I had been counting down the days for. With such an amazing line up, for me they are the best series yet.

I wanted us to be a little more creative with these and rather than write a post about them all, showcase them in their own posts. So there will be a series of posts coming up this week where we have had fun with each one (yes we love LEGO that much). Plus we had lots of spares after our unboxing so stay tuned for what we did with those too...

Enjoy!

'The product was provided by LEGO GmbH without any obligation in regards to the content of the review’

"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

All has been quiet on the blog over the last week and may be for another week or so as I'm in LEGO mode at the moment, We're building something big (all will be revealed soon) and also building lots of little things for some lovely people to say thank you. Because of these addictive bricks taking up so much of my time i managed to skip a Halloween post so i thought i better do a little catch up.

On the build up to Halloween Opeie informed me that he wanted to do some spooky themed painting so we had a fun afternoon painting skulls, spiders, ghosts, bats and pumpkins.

 

 After our trip to the pumpkin patch a few weeks back we had four pumpkins to carve, Opeie requested a 'Mickey Mouse' first which me and Mrs M attempted (apologies for the quality of the pic)...

And on Halloween we were invited around to out friend Tabiitha's for a pumpkin carving session, It was great to hang out with friends and stab fruit together.

If I'm honest I'm not a huge fan of Halloween (said like a Halloween scrooge). Spooky craft sessions are great but that's where it ends for me. The thing i find most irritating is the door being knocked late at night, usually by kids who clearly havent made the effort with their costume and are just wearing a black bag with some fake blood on their cheek (i guess that makes me a spooky costume snob but I'm fine with that). We did however leave some lollipops by the front door for our doorstep visitors. Surprisingly though the door was only knocked once but as we were eating we looked at each other and neither of us made the slightest effort to go to the door (like i said.. 'Scrooge). I hope you all had a fun Halloween.

"Then toads and beetles, bees and bugs, Brother snails and sister slugs, Uncle ant and earwig aunt Clap and cheer and chant this chant."

If your children have a keen sense of adventure and curiosity and you are creative in your parenting then you can find all the fun you need on your doorstep or rather in your garden. It was another glorious day in sunny Shropshire and a chance discovery of a magnifying glass we thought we had lost a while back kick started an afternoon of discovery and learning.

I asked Opeie what he wanted to go searching for and he said 'bugs', so with magnifying glass in hand we began our investigation into the greener areas of our lovely garden. It really is amazing what you can find when you are really looking and with every different species found there was more excitement from our little adventurer.

When it comes to creepy crawlies Seth is pretty much frightened of everything but Opeie is so different, he thinks everything is 'cute' and if I catch spiders in glasses in the house he has to kiss the glass before saying his goodbyes and setting them free, so as you can imagine our bug hunt this afternoon was lots of fun.

We searched the ground, found webs high up, a colony of worker ants in one of the compost bins and some big fat slugs in the other compost bin that Opeie calls the 'smelly bin'. And with most of the things we found Opeie either picked them up or was happy to have them running over his hands. I don't want Opeie to be frightened of anything so i try and treat all bugs and spiders as friends.

Opeie was fascinated by the snails and we lay on our tummies and watched them for ages before Opeie picked them up to have a closer look. Our garden seems to be some sort of meeting ground for all of Shropshires snail community I've never seen so many hiding under all our bushes and plants.

We even spotted a very rare breed of snail too later in the day...

I try and get Opeie to do some sort of writing during each day and i try to keep the theme of the words relevant to keep him motivated, so in keeping with our mornings fun I wrote down some of the things we had found for Opeie to write also while I hung out the washing to dry. He was so proud of himself when he had finished and called me over to show off his work. His handwriting is coming along great and we 're so proud of the way he is progressing.

When mommy got home from work we continued our day of Entomology (thanks Google, hahaha) with some relevant literature. Superworm and The Hungry Caterpillar were part of today's reading, read beautifully by mommy. A fitting end to a creepy crawly yet creatively cute day of fun learning.

"I am the one hiding under your bed Teeth ground sharp and eyes glowing red"

I'm not a huge fan of Halloween, it always seems like a bit of a pointless holiday, maybe I would feel different about it if I was in the US. Seth gets a little excited though and although Opeie finds it all a little scary he loves to copy his big brother, so despite my reservations it was important that I indulge them both. Whatever time of year it is we always have to fit in a relevant Lego build and this Halloween was no different...

Seth wanted to decorate his room so we made a giant spider to hang from his ceiling and got him some inflatable pumpkins. Opeie wasn't sure what to make of it all but thankfully he didn't freak out.

While we were out at the shops earlier in the week, Seth spotted a 'decorate your own plate' and asked if he could create a Halloween plate. I'm so glad he did because the finished piece looked amazing, I love Seth's drawings...

Opeie joined in the fun too with a little help from mommy...

I know the post is a little late but i got side tracked doing other things, I was pleasently surprised that no one came knocking on our door on Halloween (yes I'm like the all hallows eve scrooge). I'm not surprised though, the only trick or treater i saw was a little girl wearing a bin bag. I wont lie I'm glad its over so that we can concentrate on the real holiday, Christmas. You can be sure that there will be many Christmas posts coming your way

Happy belated Halloween from us.