We were up and out early again this morning. Thanks to various confusions we were off to Home Ed book club for one of the craft sessions as the group is doing the Summer Reading Challenge display for Bognor library. (As an aside I am very envious of not thinking of this idea first for Lancing ;)). There are four sessions planned with various Space related themes and ideas. But before we went there I had some books I was waiting for to collect from the library. So we dashed there first, handily used my key to go in before they opened (causing much confusion and consternation 😉 ) and came back out again. We needed petrol so stopped for that and were still at Caz’s by 930am as she needed to follow us to Mel’s house as I could take her there but not give any sort of coherant directions.
Arrived there for 10am and chatted with Clare and Mel who were running the sessions. Today Clare was doing Factual Planets and had cut out more or less to scale planets from the solar system along with the sun to be decorated. Scarlett chose the Sun and Davies chose Neptune. Clare had brought loads of newspaper to tear out small sections and cover the planets with words to tie in with ‘facts and figures’. Various words jumped out for various planets though so they particularly chose those to be obvious (eg ‘energy’, ‘star’ ‘hot’ and so on for Scarlett’s sun). I read to Davies from one of the many books there about Neptune and he chose 1846 (the year it was discovered) from sudoko numbers, the words ‘freeze’ and ‘sea’ and then found all the letters from ‘Neptune’ and stuck those on too. Next he used green and blue tissue paper to colour it while using lots of glue so the letters showed through. It looked ace 🙂
. Finally I read a section of the book out and Davies recalled the most interesting facts about Neptune and I helped him write them out for an information card to attach to the planet. He wrote ‘A Neptune year is 165 Earth years, Neptune has 8 moons, Neptune is 4.5 billion km away from the sun’.
Scarlett decorated her sun with red, orange and yelllow tissue paper and then was persuaded to write ‘the sun is a star, it is in the centre of the solar system’. Her sun also looked fab and will be the centrepiece of that particular display :).
I was really proud of her on several occassions this morning as she willingly gave things to other people that they wanted and although she found it really hard she was good about not being allowed to go outside. Mel has a dog, kittens, guinea pigs, ducks and chickens so her garden was something of a paradise to Scarlett but she’d asked if she could go out and Mel had said ‘not today, there are too many children and the animals need a space to escape to’ which was reasonable (and actually even if it wasn’t, it’s Mel’s house and she gets to make up the rules ;)) but not everyone paid heed so Scarlett was in the tough position of having asked and been directly told no but watching other people out there.
We headed for home as we were getting hungry and had decided to have the afternoon at home playing for D&S and sewing for me. I’d found a pattern for some reusable sandwich wraps to make with plastic backed fabric and had got some yesterday so was keen to have a go at making some. I’ve made four, one each for all of us and decorated them too – well I decorated Ady and my ones, Davies and Scarlett decorated their own. I think they all look great and will be so much nicer than using cling film for our next picnic aswell as wipe clean afterwards.
That done it was time for tea for Davies and Scarlett before we went to Badgers. Tonight we had a talk from the man who runs Badger and Cadet camp with his wife. He talked about setting up a campsite and where to put everything then handed out sheets of paper with ‘cadet and badger tents’ ‘adult tents’ ‘kitchen tent’ ‘food preparation area’ ‘toilets’ ‘bins’ ‘marquee’ and so on on them and split the Badgers into teams to set up campsites with them. The twins who can be tricky were tricky today so I had to do some squabbling refereeing which I struggle with a bit. Justine (another adult helper) and I then took them outside to play games on the lawn. We started with stuck in the mud by popular vote and then I set up 3 markers (using coats from my car) and split them into three teams to do relay races. I’d been encouraging them to be quite loud and Julie came out and told them off which I thought was a bit mean :(. She then gave the Badgers a bit of a lecture about behaviour and talked about some sort of sticker chart type reward scheme for them behaving well. I *really* struggle with that and was trying very hard not to pull faces and heckle her :lol:.
We got home and while the kids made themselves some toast I dismantled the swatch books I’d got yesterday to get the material out and chopped some of it up to make patchwork with. I now have a small rectangle of very lovely rainbow patchwork but not enough to do anything with really – will ponder further. But I am loving my sewing machine :).
Scarlett was keen to get to bed and listen to an audio book so Davies and I took the opportunity to read part two of Clockwork which Scarlett had found too scary. I then did more sewing til dinnertime before having a late bath and spending far too much time unsucessfully trying to sort out the old laptop which is virus ridden again :(.