Hands-On Fun

A few things we've been doing recently.....

We made corn cobs from coloured paper and popping corn to stick up on our autumn wall.

Everyone had fun making these, even Will!

Our corn cobs drying before we added their "leaves".

Saraya and I studied the history of the Sumerian civilization (facinating!), and Saraya made her own cuneiform tablet from clay.

Carving in letter symbols. There were apparently 600 symbols in the Sumerian alphabet!

The finished product! We let it dry and harden and it's now sitting proudly in her bedroom.

She went on making a few other clay objects while we had it out. This was a cute little bird.

We had another butterfly hatch this week, much to our amazement! This one from quite a large, pretty caterpillar we found devouring the leaves on our orange tree. It formed a cocoon in the box Saraya prepared for it - but we were a little sad when it hatched out as it's wings were all folded and bent. I'm not sure what went wrong. Perhaps it made it's cocoon too tight, or stayed in too long? The children still thought she was beautiful and we took lots of photos and examined her colourings. She spent most of the day in my pot of herbs on the verandah before disappearing. I'm hoping she got those wings sorted and managed to fly away!

The children have spent most of the past couple of weeks playing outside, no prompting from me. This makes me a very happy Mama, and makes for happy kids who sleep well too! Through the summer is was just too hot for them to be out of doors between about 9am and 6pm! :( So we're all enjoying the cooler autumn weather very much.

Today we blew eggs for an easter activity! Our first time egg blowing, and it actually worked really well. I'll reveal what we do with them in the next couple of days!

Scrambled eggs for lunch, and a tray of drying eggshells. :)

Hands-on learning is great!