Ah - sunshine! Abundant quantities of vitamin D for us all and don't we all feel better for it? I know that some of us are blighted by hay fever but even sneezing, wheezing and itching seems less depressing when the sun comes out. My children's legs have been out this week - no waterproofs in sight!
As regular readers of my blog might expect, we have been outside even more than is usual. Our garden is a mass of leaves and flowers, the woodland is alive and abundantly full of new sapling trees, plants, creatures and extremely long grass. This year has certainly been a good one for nature.
We have had some spectacular games of hide and seek now that the foliage makes the game easier to play. We have watched birds whilst sitting like statues in the grass - Theo is really taken with this. We have planned out a new den to make, spotted flowers, learnt about trees and dandelion life cycles, waded through water and built a damn. It has been a great outdoorsy week.
One of our great adventures this week began with a spotting activity from the Nature Detectives website. They looked for flowers and learnt the flowers correct names as they went along. We had our first nettle stings of the season - an inevitable injury when wearing shorts in long grass and a true sign for us that summer is nearly here. A dock leaf and a bit of soothing camomile cream from mums cure-all bag soon took the sting out especially when accompanied by a cake.
We came across a dead magpie which didn't phase either of the boys having seen many dead creatures over the last few years. Death is a natural part of all life cycles which the boys fully understand the only curiosity we had related to the actual decaying of the corpse so we will have to think about how to learn more about this soon.
The majority of this particular adventure was spent in the water. They began to build a damn but could really have done with a bit more help. I think it may be something worth attempting in our home education group meet up on a warm sunny day in the summer when many hands will make lighter work of damning the stream. Despite the less than perfect final damn they had oodles of fun and both learnt about the strength of water currents.
Theo challenged himself to follow the stream as far as he possibly could and rather amusingly got stuck after a while. Tristan and I rescued him although his giggling made it nearly impossible.
Look very closely to see stranded Theo!
Time outside gives my children the chance to really explore their own limitations physically and mentally. I love to watch as they attempt various balancing, building or climbing activities as I can see that they are learning about their own capabilities, I can watch as they push themselves to achieve and I believe that this rolls over into more academic pursuits as well. Once they know that by overcoming the instinct to give up and finally reaching that higher branch they know that the same is true of figuring out a complicated sum - with dogged determination they can solve the problem.
The sunny weekend will mean that Theo will be with his friends pretty much the entire time and Tristan will spend his time outdoors with Paul and I and the local youngsters. I have stocked up on ice lollies and bottles of water so we are good to go.
I hope that you all have a beautiful weekend in the sunshine!
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