Mushrooms

Recently we have been learning about mushrooms and have gone on a couple of walks to find some.

Did you know that mushrooms don’t have seeds? They drop spores so we picked a few and made spore prints with them by putting the mushrooms on white paper. Some mushrooms drop brown ones, some drop white ones and some drop cream ones. It was quite an interesting experiment.

We learnt about the parts of a mushroom, the life cycle of mushrooms and where they grow (mushrooms grow in shaded damp areas, some grow in mossy areas, some grow on dead trees branches and some grown up live tree trunks).

On one of the walks we saw lots of different edible mushrooms from blewits, which are pretty as they are purple/pink underneath, jelly ears, which are very weird as they look like ears stuck to branches and some type of bracket mushroom which grow off the side of dead or living tree trunks.

On another of our walks we saw red mushrooms (Fly Agaric), which was the first time we’d ever seen them and it was very cool. We didn’t pick them though as they are known to be poisonous.

We are not brave enough to eat any though as you have to be 100% sure if they are edible or not.  We will keep looking and learning and maybe one day we’ll be able to eat what we find.

Cupcake Decorating

We have been cupcake decorating at a local cafe a couple of times. There we have made Christmas themed cupcakes and most recently, Harry Potter themed cupcakes.

For the Christmas themed cupcakes we made a wreath, a polar bear, a Christmas pudding, a Christmas tree, a snow flake and a poinsettia (a festive flower).

For the Harry Potter Themed cupcakes we made Hedwig (Harry’s owl), Ron’s jumper, a house scarf (Anna and I are both Hufflepuff), a potion scene, a golden snitch and the sorting hat.

We used buttercream and fondant to make the decorations.  The lady told us how to make the decorations.  They looked really good when we’d finished.  (They tasted nice too).

It’s great fun and we hope to go again soon.

If you know a nearby cafe that does cupcake decorating I fully suggest it.

Making our own soap

This year we wanted to make our own gifts for families and one of things we decided to do was make our own soap.

I found this video and thought we’d use this one but amend it a bit.

We bought some goat’s milk soap base and chopped it into cubes ready to melt. We grated some lemons to get the rind.

  

We melted the soap base over a pan of simmering water. This took quite a while.

  

We then mixed in a few drops of  both lavender and lemon essential oils.

We poured the mixture into our moulds and let them set. removed them from the mould to let the other side set.

Finally, we wrapped them in cling film to prevent them from being affected by the air and then in brown paper with a ribbon.

These looked and smelled lovely and worked perfectly. We will be doing this again.

Easter 2016

We don’t break up officially for any holidays.  If we fancy some time off, we take it.  This is one of the beauties of Home Education, however we do learn a bit about all of the various holidays we would be taking if we were at school.

This includes learning about the proper meaning of them, why we celebrate them and doing various crafts.

One of the Easter crafts we did was some decoupage. I’d never done it before and we saw it mentioned online, so we popped in to our local Hobbycraft to see at what they had available.  The girls each chose a basket and a rabbit, which were cheap at £2 and some papers (which varied between £2 and £3.80 for 3.

We just ripped the paper into smaller pieces, watered down our pva glue and off they went.

It’s great fun, it kept the girls occupied for ages and as it doesn’t really matter how much glue you get on it, little ones can do it independently.

IMG_7548 IMG_7549 IMG_7553 IMG_7552

Elsa did a co-ordinates sheet which we found on Activity Village, she had to place the co-ordinates in the correct squares to produce an Easter picture.  She thought this was great fun.

IMG_7577 IMG_7578 IMG_7583

I found a great little Easter Maths booklet on Twinkl.  🙂 Anna decided she’d like to start on that, she started with her least favourite pastime of colouring.  I don’t understand why she doesn’t enjoy it, she’s really good at it.

IMG_7575 IMG_7576

After that she wanted to do a number sheet.  She’s really doing well with her number work.

IMG_7580 IMG_7582

There was a great game in the maths booklets which we all played together.  You had to throw 2 dice and add them together and then colour the relevant egg.  The one with the most eggs coloured at the end of the game (in our case 10 throws each) won.  It was a bit easy for Elsa, but we all enjoyed it and Anna won. 🙂

IMG_7584 IMG_7585  IMG_7586 IMG_7588

What a busy Easter. 🙂

Christmas Fun – Christmas Crackers

For the last few years we have made our own crackers and this year was no exception.  They are really cheap and easy to do.

I bought hats and snaps off ebay, very cheap and very quick delivery.  Elsa wrote some jokes, (typical of an 8 year old) :)and we put in a chocolate as the gift.

IMG_6802 IMG_6827

Next we wrapped up toilet rolls with Christmas wrapping paper.

IMG_6828 IMG_6824 IMG_6826 IMG_6823

We put in the snap and closed one end of the paper with ribbon, then put in the hat, joke and chocolate. Then closed the other end with the ribbon then used pinking shears to pretty the edges.

IMG_6830

Tah dah, all finished.  They look fantastic.  Let’s hope they work on Christmas Day.

IMG_6831

Merry Christmas and enjoy the holiday season.

 

 

Christmas Around The World

I thought it would be interesting as part of our Geography curriculum to add a Christmas Around The World theme throughout December.  I chatted with Elsa about how some countries might celebrate Christmas differently to us and that it would be interesting to see the differences in food and traditions of number of countries.

I downloaded some Christmas Around The World sheets off Twinkl, which gave us 12 different countries to research.

Then I found an amazing website where I thought Elsa would be able to find the information required without too much input from me.

She chose UK to start with as obviously it was the easiest one for her.

IMG_6552

She then found information about Denmark, China, India and France.

IMG_6801 IMG_6800 IMG_6799 IMG_6798

This has been really interesting and we would have liked to have finished the others, but we went away on holiday in the last week before Christmas so ran out of time, however we will just have to do them next year. 🙂

Christmas Fun – Gingerbread House

Anna attends nursery and their school encouraged all the children to decorate a gingerbread house (which they had made at school).

Both girls enjoyed doing this although gluing it together is great fun. 🙂  We ended up using superglue to stick the roof on.  Glue was a last resort as the icing and melted sugar hadn’t worked.

IMG_6544

We used royal icing to stick a variety of sweets on it.

IMG_6553  IMG_6554

IMG_6556

We decorated the roof with crushed up shredded wheat.

IMG_6555  IMG_6561

The end result.  It looked great.

IMG_6564

Such a shame it wasn’t edible. 🙁

Christmas Fun – Sock Snowmen

I love the run up to Christmas, we get all festive and do lots of lovely crafts.  The internet is such a fabulous source of information, you can never run out of ideas.

After seeing this cute little video on You Tube, we decided to give these lovely little snowmen a try.

Firstly, cut off the foot part just above the heel then fill the foot part with rice (or whatever you want).

IMG_6568 IMG_6569

Tie some cotton to make a head and body.

IMG_6571

Glue on buttons, eyes and nose.

IMG_6573 IMG_6574

Then put the top half of the sock on as the hat.  (easy peasy).

IMG_6576

The finished items look so cute 🙂

IMG_6580