Today started as usual with me on the computer while the kids watched some TV.

I had the kitchen clean and the washing on by 9.30am and we sat down to read together.

Nathan was going through his bookcase to find something we hadn't read for a while. I spotted our Dick and Jane book and asked if he'd like to have a go reading from it. This book used to drive me bonkers from the time it was given to me by my mum (surely only bought for the trip down nostalgia lane lol) and it's been probably 6mths that I have read it. Prior to reading age, it would send me around the bend reading the nonsense sentences, but now I can see the sense in reading it together now that he is at the age of knowing some words and having the ability to sound out others. We sat down to read and got through 55 pages (if you are unfamiliar with these are books, they have pages with maybe 4 lines of writing and each line with 4-5 words on it). Each story is perhaps 4 pages long and this book is a bunch of stories one after another and each builds on what was read in the story prior. Kind of a cool idea now that I can see how it works lol. Anyway, he was so into it and it gave him such confidence that he knew almost all of the words or was able to think on them for a few seconds with just the occasional help from me to get him going that he didn't want to stop.

We then found a spider that must have somehow fallen into the washing machine and it tumbled out dead from the washing. The kids were fascinated with it's large size (well, large by New Zealand standards, but my Australian friends laughed at me lol) and Nathan raced off to get his New Zealand Life Size Guide to Insects and proceeded to identify it. We weren't too sure though and googling images of them just gives me the creeps after a while lol.

After lunch we met up with our unschooling group down at one of the local playgrounds for a few hours before returning home to let the chickens our for a run around, check out our pond to see if we could find our new frogs that we were given yesterday (but not to be seen, although Simon and the kids spotted one poking it's head out from under a lily pad yesterday evening) so I'm sure they're in there somewhere.

Random daily maths...

Yesterday I made a bunting for Danielle's wall and Nathan was asking me how I made my cardboard cutout of the triangle. So I showed him how I had made a rectangle, found the centre on one of the short sides and drew lines from the dot to meet the corners of the opposite side and how that gave me an isoceles triangle.

After feeding the chickens this morning, we stopped on the way back up the front path to the door and munched on very plump sweet peas for a while. Nathan showed me that the peas when split open had alternating patterns of peas and was adding the sides together.

We were looking at one of the sunflowers that has gotten quite tall just in the past few days, so we measured it and I popped it onto a piece of paper that we can look at once it's fully grown.