Round-up post

I thought I had better do another round-up post considering I have done few posts over the past few weeks.

It has been a very busy time - we have had a new edition to our family, my son had a little boy, I had the pleasure of witnessing his birth to my great joy, and had the pleasure of feeding him his first bottle. He is lovely, such a sweet little soul. I am the ever proud grandma and the twins are very proud aunty and uncle.

This gave rise to a few discussions about childbirth and gender issues which I wont go into here but may do a separate post about how we handle such topics.

The twins and I have been on our annual Halloween Muncaster Castle jaunt with our very good fellow home educating family companions. This was such a lovely time as we do not get to see these particular home educating friends very often but they are my very favourite to spend time with, so it is lovely to spend some quality catch up time just nattering and putting the world to right without having to rush, we can relax and just have some fun. This was extra special for us this year as it was our first getaway of the whole year. I decided to hire a car to be on the safe side so I did not have to worry about break downs which would have been an adventure but would have taken away from our limited time with our friends.

The twins have been working hard on their Maths and have been loving their new program Doodle Maths which we spend a good hour on or two hours for me as I go through questions with the twins individually, so I spend and hour with one and then spend an hour with the other most days.

Their English has been taking shape with Skoolbo and Olivia has the addition of Literacy planet, they both work through the daily challenges on Skoolbo independently and I work with Olivia through Literacy Planet, usually daily for as long as she wants to, fortunately she really enjoys the program so we tend to spend around an hour each day if we have time working through the different levels going over old stuff and discovering new things.

It was a good month for awards, Oliver won badger of the month award and they both were awarded their Discover Arts Award which made them extremely proud of themselves and they now cannot wait to start on the next award.

Olivia is getting more keen on learning the guitar, her singing and musical talents are starting to blossom, she had an opportunity to sing outside a supermarket with a busker to kindly let her take centre stage, this gave her such a buzz that she is now more determined than evert to learn to play the guitar. 

Oliver has been working on languages, he has always had a fascination with words and he asked me about Latin, so we talked about Latin and where it can be found and he is keen to learn more, he also has a fascination with Russian, he has been spending quite some on Duolingo, last time I looked over his shoulder he was looking at French and doing a quiz about different countries and various questions based around the languages.

Olivia has been doing quite a bit of cooking this month, she has wanted to do things herself without my interference unless asked for, from planning meals to cooking them from scratch, she has done well and nothing has been thrown in the bin, she is turning into a good little cook.

Coding has played a massive part in the twins learning the past month or two Oliver particularly likes coding and has been bamboozling my head with coding talking about Coffee, Java and blocks. Olivia was not so keen in the past but the new programs they have been using have obviously had some kind of effect as she is taking part with Oliver a lot lately, she has also been playing a lot more chess than she usually does. I think the interaction with other people on these programs has had an effect on them both. Being able to interact in various ways on these programs with other people has given them a competitive streak.

We went to the Trampoline park in Manchester with a couple of other home ed families and decided to set up a monthly meet for home ed families, the first one starts this month,  the price is fantastic that they have given home ed families we are looking forwards to this meet as we will get to meet families we have not yet met and some we have met but have not seen for a while.

We have gained a new home ed family for friends that live very near to us. She is lovely, just like me in personality and the kids get on great, we have met up with them a number of times and been to parks and bike rides, we all really enjoy their company.

We went to Lancashire mining Museum with another of our home ed family friends and this place is fantastic, we did some mushroom hunting and found some fantastic specimens, the mining museum is a fascinating place and the volunteers are extremely knowledgable and answered many questions that we had which lead on to us doing some research on South Africas mining where they have the largest Mine in the world, although Lancashire mining museum had a depth of an impressive 879 yards. we learnt a lot while we were there and we also had the pleasure of looking at a monument the colliery had rescued recently for WW1 Soldiers who once worked at the mine, research has been done on the names on the marble plaque and they had managed to put together information about their births, lives and deaths of each one of the miners. Very impressive to say the least.

 There is obviously more that I have missed off but I think this rounds up our month nicely...