Sunday was Fathers Day so we decided to go on a family bike ride and take a picnic lunch with us.

Where we ate our lunch we could hear the miniature trains running, so jumped back on the bikes and made our way over there where the kids and Simon had a ride.

On Monday, Nathan sat down with Simon while he was reading his mountain biking magazines and wanted to cut out pictures that appealed to him. This morning he wanted to paste his pictures on a piece of paper (found some artwork from playcentre) and write (is into speech bubbles, so I cut out shapes for them) what it was about each of the pictures that appealed to him. I encouraged him to think specifically what it was about the pictures that he liked rather than just a generic "I like this picture".

Nathan spent a bit of time drawing this picture of a castle and wanted me to write out a story that he dictated to me.

This is Danielle's picture that she made her nannie (and used about a whole roll of sellotape lol).

Yesterday we took a day off playcentre as Danielle had an ENT appointment in the city. So to make the most of it, we decided to spend the day in there since we rarely make it in.

We started off visiting Te Papa (our national museum) and it was the first time that Nathan in particular was into the displays themselves rather than just enjoying the experience of being there. Danielle loved pushing all the buttons of the interactive machines and displays.

Then, since it was raining we headed out to the airport since we couldn't do any of the various walks or parks. So we watched aeroplanes and drank coffee.

Off to the hospital where we waited for an hour for our appointment before heading to a friends for dinner and the kids to have a good catch up and play.

Today our unschooling group came to our house and we spent a few happy hours outside in the pleasant afternoon with the kids entertained on the trampoline or in the sandpit.

I was writing an email this morning with Nathan hanging over my shoulder. He's showing an interest in noticing words within words and likes to point out that if he removed several letters what the word would say (ie look). So we talked about look, looks, looked, looking.

Nathan got out the cuisenaire rods this morning and started making shapes and talking of the numbers used to construct them.

Danielle's carrying on with her keen interest in asking and pointing to words when reading to her.

Nathan wanted to help me cook dinner tonight and cut up the silverbeet, turned on the element, put the onion and garlic in the pan and cooked it till soft, added all the chopped up veges, cracked the eggs and whisked them up, helped grate the cheese and opened the tin of salmon - I think he can make the entire frittata next time...;)

We've had several extended conversations over the past week...

Erosion - man-made and natural (saw some for ourselves and made a decision to not contribute any further, saw some footage at the museum yesterday of natural erosion)
Tornado's This has been an ongoing discussion for a while
Volcano's This topic also comes up almost every week and has done for months now - saw plenty of footage at the museum yesterday which renewed his interest
Sandstorms (started off telling Simon that he looked like someone in the desert when Danielle put her muslin blankie around his head) - so we googled images of desert headwear and then YouTube'd sandstorms.

Thursday...
We've finished My Side of the Mountain and started on James and the Giant Peach which we're over halfway through already since he loves it so much. We spent a couple of hours today reading it along with a few new library books we got out.