Wise

This is my time table what im doing every day but today,s Tuesday. It was a big day

so i made a felt owl.

It was made out of green and blue felt mixed together.

We also stuffed the owl with stuffing NOTE: not the food.

Sew it together

and its done.

Here it is next to mom,s owl NOTE: mom,s owl is not finished.

My best bike riding

and swapped cookery books for sewing books at the  library.

St Barts x2

Blue: Mum

Green: Sarah

Today began with  a mammoth Spanish lesson because Sarah wanted to improve her skills. She just kept going! 

this morning at the post box because i was posting a letter to Claire at Weston park to say thank you

we went to the st bartholomews church (Penn!) for coffee morning

this is st bartholomews church in Tong Albrighton. It is a very pretty church which you can see from the A41 close to Weston Park. 

Here we  are

in the pulpit

There are lots of tombs inside the church.

It's good to see that the proceeds from the V Festival, which is very disruptive to the locals, are being put to good use. The profits also funded the new restaurant and gift shops at Weston, so they've done pretty well out of it themselves!

This is Little Nells grave she was a character in a Charles Dickens book The Old Curiosity Shop. In 1910, the vicar of the church realised that lots of people were coming to visit the place where this character had supposedly died. He built a 'grave', adding the plaque which states "The reputed grave of Little Nell". He even forged an entry in the burial register. This was very lucrative as it brought visitors from as far afield as America, at the cost of a shilling per visit to the grave.

We saw bullying ducks back at Bratch for our lunch

PE lessons are so much fun these days!

WHEE!

Today it was WHEE! Wolverhampton Home Education Environment group in Bradmore. 

There were lots of different activities. First of all, Sarah made a bunk bed for her mini Loopsy doll out of clay. 

After this, she tried doing a drawing in invisible ink. She had to leave it to dry. 

We ate lunch, and both enjoyed our double yolk eggs!

The invisible drawing had dried so Sarah was able to go over it with a colour wash. Guess what? It's a Lala Loopsy. 

Next, we explored Continuum Mechanics with some non-Newtonian fluid. A Newtonian fluid, said Newton, is a normal one. How you'd expect a liquid to behave. Only he put it in a slightly more complicated way. Whereas a non-Newtonian fluid doesn't behave normally. 

The cornflour and water mix is solid when you squeeze it, and drips when you pour it. It can also pour in squiggly lines rather than straight down. Weird. Tomato ketchup, though still a non-Newtonian fluid, is the opposite of this, in that if you hold the bottle upside down, you can wait for ever for it to come out, but if you shake it, it comes out super fast. 

Sarah enjoyed building some very tall towers, and made some friends too as they found ways to help each other out. Excellent team work. 

With grateful thanks to Ange, Erma and Jenni for this event. 

Playing and a boat watch

Code Blue: Mum

Code Green: Sarah

We've decided that one of the best parts of Home Ed is all the deserted parks and places we can go to. 

We decided to go to Baggeridge Park. We hadn't been for ages so I stuffed my pockets full of small change knowing how rapidly the car park charges increase there. However, it still wasn't enough. Now you have a choice. You can stay for 1 hour for £1.60 or all day for £2.60. We paid for 1 hour. You can get a 6 month pass for £22 or a 1 year pass for £38. We'll consider that. As we only had one hour, we stayed in the playground, ate our lunch and enjoyed the space and peace. 

Incidentally, if you're thinking that we do an awful lot of playing in parks and having fun, you'd be right. How much quality 1:1 time with the teacher does a child normally get in a class of 30, during the average day? We do our writing, maths and Spanish for around half an hour or so every morning, while Sarah has her teacher all to herself. During our car journeys, we have some lovely music lessons too, courtesy of Classic FM. 

I made a sandloopsy and I sprinkled sand on top.

We noticed a funny texture in the sand, and realised it was caused by the heavy rain a few minutes previously. 

It was Ellen's 10th birthday, so we celebrated with our first pizza meal of the week. The next one will be on Saturday. 

NB Legend

Back to Bratch locks again for lunch today, with a different viewpoint as the lock man was strimming our patch. Sarah chose the baguettes whilst shopping in Lidl, and we filled them with goodies for our regular picnic. 

Whilst there, Sarah asked if Dave and Ann-Marie (our friends who live on their boat) had been through Bratch locks. I said that they were there when we first tried to find their boat 2 1/2 years ago. But they must have heard we were coming..... We found them in Brewood. There's the lovely NB Legend in Bratch middle lock. 

Then we got talking about another kind of boat: the working boat. A boat came past us with lots of shiny brass engineering exposed. Daddy reckons that, as we saw only boats going UP the locks, that they were on their way home from the Stourport festival. I googled a picture of NB Alton, a boat which delivers coal and diesel to other boats. This belongs to a different Ann Marie, and Brian, who were the very first people I met when I joined the Citroen 2CV club 23 years ago. 

We walked down the canal to Bumblehole Lock. Very little compared with the grand Bratch. We noticed a bee hive next to it. Sarah asked where the first lock was built, so out came Google again. Well, the first major British canal was the Bridgewater which opened in 1761. Designed by James Brindley, it was used to transport coal to Manchester.

The first locks were on the Trent and Mersey canal, built in 
1776. These locks measured 22.1m long by 2.3m wide, which set the dimensions for the boats which could travel through them,
which then became known as narrowboats. (NB used as a prefix for the boat's name). 

Evacuated!

Today we had an exciting trip to Weston Park for a World War II experience day. So exciting, in fact, that Sarah is tired which is why Mum got the job of writing today's blog. We learnt about being an evacuee, so Sarah had to have a name tag, an ID card, a ration book and a box in which to put her gas mask. 

We experienced an air raid with lots of scary bangs and noises, but we were safe hiding under the furniture. We learnt that sometimes people slept in cages called Morrison shelters to protect themselves in case of an air raid at night. 

A Morrison shelter

We made our own gas mask to put into our boxes. 

Apparently, the real ones contained asbestos. Interestingly, although everyone had gas masks, they were never used because there was never a gas attack on our country. 

Here is Bea Spells-a-Lot enjoying a ride on a rocking horse.

Here is the 1940s room with lots of interesting old things, like the pram here, a huge old radio, a mangle and a treadle sewing machine just a bit newer than the one we have at home!

After all of this history, we had the whole adventure playground to ourselves, where Sarah and I made new friends in the Home Ed group. 

The zip wire was amazing! 

Many thanks to Liz Wise for organising this excellent trip. We thoroughly enjoyed it!

Sunny Monday

We went swimming at Bently brige.

After swimming we went to West park.

There was so many things.

 Lunch time.

We like this kind of PE

After shopping in town for Ellen's birthday presents and cards, we went to the Green for an icecream and to meet friends. 

Sarah played with her lovely friends Beau and Cara. Here are Sarah and Beau in the field.