September 3

Thought you might like to see what Thea thought was important to put in her "me bag" to introduce herself to her new teachers. They were supposed to put in 5 things that represented something interesting about themselves.

September 2

What is a good thing to do when you are 9 and 5? Make a camp in the living room and sleep in it! They slept here all night!

You need all your most important things - a little sun (solar powered light), a watch (hung from your tent pole), and a fossil collection to examine.

Then you invite other friends, build a cave for them, and all sleep in your camp for a second night!

September 1

Whenever we get back from a big adventure, we're never really ready to be inside. So instead we made fires outside.

And made hot chocolate.

And although we couldn't manage wilderness, we did romp around Beningbrough, avoiding the natives and admiring the local exotic fruits!

July 2

So at last the end of term arrived. And there was much rejoicing.

It was pretty sad saying goodbye to Mr Knowles who has been an ideal headteacher, but we are told that the new (mystery) head, who'll be starting in January (Miss Bennett is in charge until then), will be as keen on all the good bits that Mr K was good at.

Thea is tired, but proud of herself for completing her first year.

If we were at all interested in what the DfE thinks children should achieve in class reception, then we'd be incredibly proud of what her report said. As it is, we think she is just the most amazing, inventive, generous, adventurous, intelligent, hard working, thoughtful, determined, imaginative and emotionally mature little person!

We celebrated the end of term with pizza in front of the first Harry Potter film,

And now the holidays are well underway.

Ian has been working hard in Siracasa,

And we've been doing some serious playing and appreciating of the british summer weather! Day one involved children disappearing into some woods while their parents sheltered from the rain and walked briskly to keep warm.

Day two involved more running in different woods with different friends,

while I found down-wind positions behind trees to enjoy my book and coffee in relative dry.

And then they cooked.

We had mexican food with friends last night (and a very late night!), and today we hit the river. There was quite a lot of river (see previous comments on the rain levels), and one of the jetties was totally submerged, necessitating a group effort in launching the boats into the current (!) one at a time, with the smallest crews already in position.

But the wind was brisk and all children had lots of fun whizzing around. I was ballast for N which meant I could attempt to take photos of everyone.

July

Um, yes, we're okay. We've just been a bit over-programmed.

But this week......

We had more fun avoiding the general public at Moorlands. We hid from natives in the rhododendron bushes and were generally stealthy. We decided that the rhododendron flower skeletons were poisonous spiders. And it was fun.

There was a cello concert and Thea played Wake Up, Shake Up (known as Allegro by the violins and cellos). She played wonderfully and impressed everyone with her ability to fudge a note and to pick up with the piano instantly with no pause - if the audience hadn't had allegro flowing through their veins, they would never have known that she'd made a mistake!

We had the school summer fair with the theme of Harry Potter. We ran a potions stall where you could make your own sparkly slime to take home. There are no photos because from the point that the gates opened we had a queue of a minimum of 15 kids. Fortunately, they were all entertained by playing with the left overs and once we had taught them how to blow bubbles with it, the queue was quite enjoyable!

We made about 80 lots of slime and when I first properly looked up, most of the dock was deserted - the tables taken back into the church, the gazebos down and the litter all picked up. It was manic! But so much fun!

Like all good families, we made a replica of a ancient Egyptian house for Class 3's Egyptian museum. Nathaniel has really enjoyed this topic (so maybe the Ashmolean won't be so frowned upon next time!), and had very clear plans for his exhibit. Fortunately, I had been paying close attention to the Great British Pottery Throwdown, so we had the skills at hand to build a clay house with relative ease. According to his teacher, he is the first person to ever bring a house to the class museum!

The kids have been on their whole-school-trip to Newby Hall today, and then we've only got 2 days left of term. Thank goodness!

March 3

Despite a sudden downpour, we had a great afternoon of branch drums and sardines at Moorlands. We avoided the Sunday bimblers on the paths and headed deep into the rhododendrons to make percussion instruments out of the bare branches.

Ian returned from Paris and so we celebrated his birthday.

The hockey obsession continued as we invested in four sticks and balls. Every evening is now hockey evening and I've had to learn all the different moves and lots of different techniques!

And the practice seems to have paid off as Nathaniel was awarded the trophy for great wonderfulness at hockey at the club on Friday. He was soooooo pleased with himself.

Grandpa Beard came to stay and we destroyed things. Thea now tells me that this is her favourite sort of gardening - she tells me that cutting and chopping things is better than planting bulbs.

The first summer-den building of the season:

And he brought the best presents - new dragon suits! Thank you Granny Janni, they love them (and Thea didn't change all weekend!)

March 2

It's all been so busy! This week has been dominated by zooming around York to go to fun stuff. Firstly, as part of National Science Week (do you remember the days when this meant that I was at work until 9pm escorting thousands of kids around the university?), we headed up to the AstroCampus for a workshop on shooting stars. Some really good students told us loads about meteors and meteoroids and meteorites (ask Thea - she'll explain), and then we played with fun stuff. The kids enjoyed the ball-bearings-into-flour-and-cocoa experiment (and we got some good crater-ray formations).

And they both had great fun with the pressurised air rockets, having made their own rockets from paper.

But the highlight for me was getting to play with the big telescopes (they've got more since we were there), and the clouds clearing so that we could get a good look at the Orion nenula. We also discovered that Nathaniel isn't quiet or shy when it comes to talking to students about space - he was happily chatting away to them about star nurseries and Betelgeuse and star mapping software. Nathaniel the extrovert - who'd have thunk it?!
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For Thea, it was a fun week as she became Thea-Three-Cellos-Graham. She's starting to grow out of her 1/16 size, so we headed to Koplins to look for a 1/10. But in their wisdom, they also sent us away with a 1/8 to try as well. So this week she has been playing them all!

And surprisingly, the 1/8 is the winner. It looks pretty massive, but she is playing in tune and making a decent tone, so it'll do us.

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This Friday was history day at school. They've spent the week on all sorts of fun activities with each class having a different historical period to focus on. Thea has been studying the Romans and went to the Yorkshire Museum and the Holgate windmill. Nathaniel has been studying WW2 and went on a scary trip to Eden Camp and .... the Holgate windmill. For the finale, they were all invited to come to school dessed appropriately, as a Roman soldier and an evacuee. There was limited interest in preparing costumes until Thursday evening at which point the three of us knocked up two rather fine outfits including a tunic from a pillowcase and a gas mask case.

This is Thea's fierce soldier face.

There were some amazing costumes, especially Mr Thompson's Henry VIII. Here is the photo of them all (yep - that's the whole school).

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And no week would be complete without a picture of my view while I read my book while Nathaniel was at his choir rehearsal.