Fun At The Farm With Friends

This week we paid another visit to the local open farm, this time with another homeschooling family who are good friends of ours.

 The chickens thought it would be fun to share our lunch!

 The butterfly house was open - it only opens for short periods so we hadn't seen the butterflies for a long time.

 In the soft play barn.

Lego and Hama Beads

Hannah has had a cold this weekend, and needed a quiet day yesterday, so we stayed at home and Hannah played lego.

She built a village, and then decided to have an arty lego character photoshoot - she really likes to take photos!

She also rediscovered her Hama beads which haven't been used for a while. The American girl dolls were the lucky recipients of the Hama gifts!

Snow...............finally!

Yesterday morning we awoke to a sprinkling of snow - the first snow we've seen in two years! Hannah was excited, very, very excited!

Footprints in the snow.

There was just enough snow for a dinky little snowman!

I thought we'd take some pictures of our (very old, blind) cat in the snow - she had other ideas though and shot back inside before i could focus the camera - this is all I saw of her!!

Obviously this has just made us want more snow, come on weather, send us some snow!!!

Home Educators Matchbox Swap

Hannah belongs to a monthly matchbox swap for home educated children. Each month the children are given  a topic and can choose whether to be part of the swap that month. January's theme was World Oceans, and Hannah chose to make her matchbox all about The Great Barrier Reef.

She received a great matchbox in return, all about the Greek God of the sea Poseidon.

It's a really fun, simple idea - fill the matchbox with whatever you like about your topic. It's also a great way to learn about new topics that you might not otherwise have come across!

Clanfield Observatory Trip

Last night we wrapped up warm and went up to Clanfield Observatory (the largest amateur observatory in the country) to learn all about astronomy. The staff there were great, really knowledgeable and friendly and Hannah learnt a lot.

Waiting to start

Inside the first dome to find out about the huge mirror telescope ,

 outside at the sundial,

 inside the second dome with the lense telescope which is over 100 years old.

After visiting the telescopes we went back to the education centre where we were shown a presentation of the night sky. The children asked lots of questions and took part in some astronomy based activities .

We also got to see a a piece of 4.5 billion year old meteorite!!

It was a great trip and one we would definitely like to do again!