A dirty day

It kind of started off slow today with the kids just mooching around the house.

We played a few games of memory and Nathan is right into a new puzzle with sides and markings for the pieces underneath - I just clicked the other day that this style of puzzle is quite different to the big floor puzzles where you really need to look at the picture (and straight edges) to put it together. I noticed with this puzzle that he was matching the baseboard markings and it wasn't about the picture on the puzzle that interested him so much. He then seemed to have a speed contest (about 5 times lol) with himself as he remembered where all the bits were to go.

When setting up the memory game we need to lay out 9 cards across and 4 cards up - I have started to verbalise the way I use simple maths on a day to day. I thought that since we don't sit down and "do maths" that I should really be talking a bit more about the maths in our day to day life (I do for things like measuring when cooking, counting and subtraction etc) but realised that I use it much more than that and a simple way to just introduce him to number concepts was to just "talk out loud". I showed him how I counted in 2's, 3's, 5's etc - not in a lesson way, but just that I found it interesting and then the multiplication of 9 x 4 was an easier way to work out how many cards there are rather than individually counting them. Not sure at what point this approach will annoy him, but I'll just go with it for now (and follow his cues) as a means of exposing him to the ideas rather than thinking he should be absorbing what I say lol.

Around 11am I decided to go outside and plant some daffodil bulbs and Nathan was keen to come and join me (Danielle spent a lot of time this morning drawing and wrapping up things using sellotape and scissors). I have a garden bed in front of the house that was perfect for them. I asked Nathan to figure out even spaces for the 7 bulbs that we needed to plant, and his estimates were great. We then dug the holes, added some compost and we figured his hand was about 10cm long (the depth the bulbs needed to be planted), so I suggested he burrow his hand in up to his wrist and then put the bulb down that deep and then cover them over.

I went inside to prepare lunch as we were due to meet some unschooling friends at 1pm. Meanwhile Nathan continued to play outside and rediscovered his well from yesterday. He decided to fill it up with water again - when I came out to let him know lunch was ready, he was covered from head to toe in mud. Jumping down into the muddy hole proved much more fun than winding his bucket up and down too many times LOL.

So we eventually headed off to the playground to meet our friends. The kids discovered two huge dump-truck sized piles of damp sand that had been delivered down in a lower field and proceedded to jump and slide all the way down. Another set of clothes were needed once they were done lol.

Nathan then made a friend at the playground and they headed back down for another play before heading off home for some stories while waiting for dinner to finish cooking. Nathan asked me to help him read his Dick and Jane book again (it's the first time he pulled it out for about a month and remembered quite a few of the words from last time).

The bathtub definitely had the signs of plenty of dirty play today.