Art by Eden

Watercolour of a misty castle.

Marker dragon.
We went around to a friends house for some Christmas crafts on Saturday, and she had three beautiful cats. So Eden sketched this as a Thank you card for her.

Learning to sight read

Up till now Niamh has been playing violin by ear, but now the teacher is showing her how to sight read. She has picked it up very quickly, and loves just doing drill sheets to learn the notes. The tunes she plays by ear are a lot more advanced than this one, so it will probably take a while before her sight reading can keep up with her level of playing.

Hama beads and plasticine creations

Jude enjoying some Hama beads.
His finished creation.
Niamh's plasticine butterfly.

Learning about the Tabernacle

This has been such a rich subject to learn about with the children as it ties in so many Biblical truths and spans the Old and New Testament.
Eden's drawing of the tent of meeting with the laver for the priests to wash and the altar. The cloud is rising out of the Holy of Holies at the back of the Tabernacle.
Eden's drawing of The Golden lampstand which was never allowed to go out.
Uncle Grant got us these books at a discount price through the website he purchases his church books through.
This book has the model of the Tabernacle to make, so we should have fun building this. What is interesting about this book is that it tells the story of the Israelites and the Tabernacle as if it was a story rather than the truth, and the girls picked up on this straight away, criticising it for it's approach. It is great to see they are developing discernment even now.

Eden loves English

Eden really seems to have a passion for reading, writing and grammar/spelling. She has been doing synonyms and antonyms and when she struggled to find a synonym for one of the words in her workbook I showed her our Thesaurus. She was quite blown away that someone had made a book just listing many synonyms for so many words, that she just started reading one after the other. But that wasn't good enough either so she pulled out some paper and just started copying them. Needless to say I had to stop her after two pages so that she could finish her work.



Another narration piece, Eden chose to do it on "The Sun and the North Wind", the above piece has not been proofread yet.
Often Eden will ask me to read words out of our Essential Spelling list book so that she can test herself, she just loves to spell things right.

This is Niamh's narration of "The Sun and the North Wind". She has taken to writing really quickly and did not seem to have to get over the writing block that Eden struggled with when she was the same age. The only thing that gets to Niamh is that she remembers so much of the story so feels that she needs to write down so much, and then gets frustrated because she takes so long to finish.

More Desert Crafts

The final display(well nearly, we added some more to it this afternoon after the photo was taken).
A gila monster, one of the only two poisonous lizards in the world. We have enjoyed watching some youtube vids on this lizard as well as a lot of other Desert animals on the National Geographic channel.
Another Gila Monster.
Jude painting a camel.
and gluing brown sugar down for the sand.

Eden has a hand at a bit of origami with this camel.

Jude's first sentence

Friday afternoon was such a lovely afternoon, we spent it in the playroom, it was cosy inside and raining outside. Jude said he wanted to write "I have the best dad" on the board for his dad to see when he got home. He did the whole thing himself I just had to tell him to put an "e" on have. He was so chuffed to write it by himself. I tell you I wouldn't swap these firsts for anything in the world, I wish I could just imprint on my mind how special they are.

Niamh got busy painting, and with Guy Fawkes just past she decided to put some fireworks on her painting using glitter glue.
Not sure if you can see this one, but they all took the pattern blocks and got very creative tracing around them to make all sorts of pictures.