Some books we have enjoyed

The girls have been enjoying these books by Patricia St John, they are Christian novels.




David Livingstone is a missionary story we have shared as a family, I loved reading about his adventures in Southern Africa, so many memories of African landscape were evoked in my mind.
Although we have read about Corrie, Eden was keen to read it again, in fact she often reads books over and over.

Some more Eden has enjoyed. She says there are quite a lot of words she doesn't understand in some of these books, so now she has started a vocabulary notebook while she is reading of any words she doesn't understand and we get to talk about them and she writes down the definition the next day.

Another 2 books about remarkable women that we have enjoyed reading together

Our new study - learning about light.

Our Sonlight Science curriculum is covering light, and we decided to turn it into a bigger unit study. I remember studying light in Std 6, and it was the first time that Science was actually interesting for me.
We made a box, decorated with a lot of stickers and cards inside, but then sealed it up completely so no light came in. The little ones got to look in when it was dark and see nothing, and then we opened up a little sunroof and the whole scene inside lit up. A simple experiment yes, but it led on to some interesting discussion as to what light from the sun is actually doing, and how we can see colours.

This cool pair of glasses splits white light into all it's colours, quite a surreal thing to wear as you walk around staring at various light sources.


Eden and Niamh discovering what Translucent, transparent and opaque means.
This is one experiment I particularly liked at school, so I was chuffed to find a prism. The sunlight is coming through it as white light.
But as we turned the prism we split the white light up into the spectrum of colours.

Finishing off our Netherlands Study

It was good to go over Vincent van Gogh again, it has been a long time since our study of him.


The girls made posters!


Eden wrote a story about Aardina, a Dutch girl.

And some facts about windmills in The Netherlands.

Some books about Netherlands we enjoyed

These are two books that has been added to our collection, the pictures and stories are captivating, I especially remember the one about the boy from my childhood.

Learning about The Netherlands

After reading a book on Corrie Ten Boom, we decided to start learning about Holland, and we have all enjoyed it thoroughly. The country is so close to us, hopefully we can get to visit one day soon.

We have tried many ways to present and keep our unit studies. When the girls were younger, everything went up on the wall, and they loved admiring their work, I think it was suitable for them at that age, as Ciara loves to see her work up on the walls now. Unfortunately though with that method, everything eventually gets thrown away, and we have nothing to go and look at once the children have finished a unit study(except for photos of course). We have tried lapbooking, but I feel it is too fiddly for me, and one has to always be so well prepared to create all the mini books. But it finally dawned on me just to keep it simple and save everything in files. The added bonus of this is if they come back to a subject later on to study it further, they can just keep adding to the file. We will have different files for History, Writing, Geography etc and these will not need to be thrown away from year to year, they can just keep adding and adding. It was a simple decision, but one that already works well and feels comfortable to us all.

We have been incorporating more map work into their studies, I have just felt now is the time to expand on this area of their education(more about this later).
A stained glass watercolour tulip. - Niamh.
Eden's.
A poem about tulips.

A spring watercolour by Eden

Jude reading!

Jude loves reading to me everyday, and he now reads all the Tintin and Asterix books and library books by himself which has given him a lot of confidence, his reading is coming along in strides!!