Mildly Manic Monday

Hooray for Pyjama Days - especially on days like today... there's nothing better than being snuggled up all cosy indoors while the trees outside are blowing in the wind and the rain is beating against the windows :)

Mondays are usually our lazy days, although today was a bit more manic than normal for a pyjama day - excitement levels are rapidly rising in anticipation of Youngest's birthday tomorrow!  Fortunately he was happy to sit and play on the CBeebies website - he's having a break from Reading Eggs (I know; I was stunned!).  Anyway, he sat and played, oblivious to the card-making and gift-wrapping going on in the next room.  However, I'm going to have to bake the cake on my own for once after he's in bed, as I think it's a bit much to try to do that without him noticing!

So other than the birthday preparations, we had a nice arty day today.  Pyjama Days seem to lend themselves to arty projects: the slow pace of the day working well with needing to leave paint/ glue to dry, cleaning up etc.  Today we used paint & oil pastels, inspired by Klimt's "Tree of Life" thanks to a lesson plan from the gorgeous Deep Space Sparkle website.  I do find the website owner, Patty's lesson plans inspiring, but we don't worry too much about replicating them - I am NOT an art teacher, so I'm not au fait with advanced techniques etc - we just use her lesson plans as springboards to give us ideas to start from.  For example, today my own piece of "art" was a pretty boring copy of what Patty had asked her class to do.  The boys however started off with the gold tree and black outline - and then decided to adapt as per their own ideas - and again were really pleased with the finished results...

  

"Tree of Life" by Eldest            "Tree of Life" by Middle
(he added lots of colourful birds)  (he added Christmas lights,

                                                   birds and cocoons)

 

  

"Tree of Life" by Youngest           "Tree of Life" by Mummy

(he just had fun with gold paint                                                     

 and swirly pastel patterns)                                                    

 

We also made some coconut mice from the Yummy Little Cookbook for Youngest's birthday celebrations - often the boys take it in turn to bake cakes as it doesn't always work for us all to do it together, but everyone joined in with the mice today, which was fun :)

Then there was plenty of train-track building, Reading Eggs (for Middle and Eggspress for Eldest), Youngest played with his wooden Alphabet Puzzle, Eldest read a Horrible Histories book - The Woeful Second World War, Middle and Youngest played "the buttocks game", aka Body snap with me, and of course, Eldest continued writing his diary, today adding a full-size picture of colourful slugs...

Sept 23 2012
Thinking about the slugs that already have colours, now let's see there's the
Banana slug
Sea slugs
The rest you find out later...
There now, mission one: find more slugs

7:48am
Middle and Youngest invaded my room.  I got them to play in their room.  Middle doesn't know any new coloured slugs.

8:13am
Finished playing explosive attack with Middle.  He kept on getting shot in the face and exploding himself and other stuff.

Sept 24 2012
6:42am
Just woke up...
woke up at 6:03 and couldnt go back to sleep.  Still no slugs.
11:47am
Just been on Reading Eggspress.  Almost lunchtime cause I'm HUNGRY, very hungry
12:58pm
looking up colourful slugs I found the
leopard slug
yellow slug
garden slug (has orange on the bottom)
field slug (sometimes pink)

And banana slug and sea slugs
Cool 6 slugs "WOW"

Eldest's Multi-Coloured Slugs

So today wasn't that manic at all really, just nicely busy with a hint of hyper owing to the very important day only one sleep away! (I may not have time to blog tomorrow - if not, see you Wednesday!)

PS Today I read another encouraging blog post from one of my favourite HE authors, with great advice for those taking first steps into Home Education, so I'm including the link here - enjoy!