Today I'm joining in with Evi with her colour of the week photos. What a great reason to go through old photos and reminisce :) Thanks for the idea Evi!
This week: Pink.
Pink to me is all about my two daughters.
Above is Lili as a very young baby, and below at about age2.
Pretty in Pink, always.
Then along came beautiful Amy...
From an early age she has been inseparable from "Bed Ted" who is quite possibly the World's Most Important Teddy. He is not quite so pink these days.
Here they are together a few years ago....
These days the girls are branching out with their colour choices, but they will always be my pink ones:D
After a bit of a sleep-in this morning and because I am not feeling completely well, I had a slow start to the day and didn't achieve much. Sometime after lunch, my desire to eat something yummier than some plain rice crackers(all I could find to snack on) overtook my desire to sit around and do not much more than read the newspaper.
I dug out the cookbooks for inspiration and, happily, gathered some momentum as I measured and mixed. First up was an oat and choc chip slice, especially for the kids. I have switched from using packaged choc chips and now use sweetened cacao nibs instead.
Next a recipe for Butterscotch Curls in my Womens Weekly Old Fashioned Favourites cookbook took my fancy. It calls for copious amounts of butter and sugar and so seemed completely appropriate for a cold and windy Saturday afternoon.
Here is the pan prepared with butter, sugar and pecans...
The dough rolled out ready to be smothered in more butter and sugar.
Cut into rounds and placed on top of the prepared base.
Ready to eat with a cup of tea :)
Weekend baking wouldn't be complete without some music to cook to and I was listening to Sometimes the Stars by The Audreys.
I may still quickly throw together a batch of vanilla icecream for the kids. This is my easy recipe:
Blend 1/3 cup water, 2/3 cups sugar and 1 cup powdered milk in a blender.
Add 1 egg, approx 150ml cream, 1 teaspoon vanilla essence and enough milk to bring it up to 1 litre. Blend well.
Place in a sealed container and freeze for 30 minutes. Stir and pour into an icecream maker. Process in icecream maker for 30 minutes then return it to the freezer.
We have only just got our vege patch back up and running after a long time of being without one. We had limited success with the last patch becuase of some large gum trees that were too close.
The new vege patch is in raised beds and gets sunshine most of the day.
The rocket is growing well.
The sugar snap peas have started to grow. I had quite a few attempts to get the seeds to shoot, with this last lot successful. Can't wait for them to grow, they are one of my favourite veges :)
Pak choy gone to seed - it's so pretty I'm leaving it there, and hoping the flowers attract some predatory insects to help take care of the caterpillars.
Pak choy and shallots picked and washed ready for tonights dinner of noodle and vege stirfry.
I also picked rocket ready to have for lunch with some scrambled eggs, tomato chutney and this yummy bread we made this morning.
Knitting some more slippers. I hope to sit in the wonderful Autumn sun this afternoon and knit a few rows.
Rediscovering a love of sewing clothes for myself. I love that I can make clothes that are "me." I have realised that I need to sew each pattern more than once so that I can tweek it here and there. That is the secret to successful sewing (for me) and creating clothes I really like to wear.
The fabric for this skirt was designed and handprinted in Australia.
Mmmm...leftover rice balls with freshly picked lemon for lunch. I did share some of these with the kids!
Lili (6) has just discovered a love of writing to tell stories. She is unstoppable, writing almost constantly! She has only just started to put words together herself and is loving her new-found ability to communicate this way. I love that because we home school I get to share the joy of her discovery and that it enables her spend as much time as she wants practising.
And watching my lovely daughter Amy do her ballet lesson this morning. I forgot the camera :( but she really was a beautiful ballerina! What's making you smile today?
I am a picture person, I like to see ideas in images and so when it comes to planning for our home educating, I find that I like to create a diagram to express what we are trying to achieve. I find that once I have this image in my mind, I can easily evaluate whether the things we have been spending time on are the things we are aiming for in guiding the education of our children.
For most learning areas, the kids choose what they want to learn about, with me guiding their learning towards the things we feel are important. I find a diagram a really helpful way of keeping this in mind as the kids initiate new topics to learn about.
I shared my diagram for our approach to history in this post.
This is the diagram I have come up with for our approach to Science.It is loosely based on the new National Curriculum for Science. If the children don't know what they might want to learn about I just mention some of the suggested topics and they usually choose one pretty quickly - they all love Science, especially anything hands-on.
This term Nathan decided he wanted to learn about rocks, so we borrowed a stack of library books and I threw together a notebook of sorts for him to work through. He can work through it fairly independently, and it allows for a degree of creativity which he enjoys. I also find that because the note-taking parts of the page are smallish and offset by daigrams, boxes and other elements on the page, Nathan finds the idea of taking some notes less intimidating. Once he has finished we will have the pages bound into a booklet.
I have added the Rock Notebooking Pages to the blog and you can access the pdf here. I am happy to share this resource with you, but please use it just for personal/family use and do not reproduce any part for profit or to put on another website or blog. Thanks! I hope it is helpful.
Here's some pics of Nathan working on his Rock Cycle experiment today.
We have been eagerly awaiting the arrrival of baby guinea pigs and two weeks ago Patch delivered one little baby- a female. We found her just moments after she delivered and the little baby was still wet and very still. Quite soon little "Smudge" was walking around and eating.
And then we waitedfor Cocoa to deliver her babies. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, 11 days after Patch, and on the coldest night we've had lately, Cocoa delivered four tiny babies.
Here is "Num Nums" a few days later...
Not sure which one this is...
This one is "Curly"...
Here they all are, so cute!
Now we just need to agree on how many get to stay!
