Bits and bobs ....

We discovered, by chance, this interior design software called Sweet Home 3D which Ben has enjoyed using and also this free software to assist in making your own computer games. At first I thought it would be a little too confusing for Ben to pick up; how wrong I was! We started ploughing through the instructions together to start with, and then he carried on without any problems, made the game work and then went ahead and altered it without any further reading. Why are children so good on computers compared to us adults (in most cases)? Also, along the build and design theme, Ben has been creative on the Bekonscot Model Village site too.

Katie had an absolutely fabulous horse riding day at Holkam Bay a couple of weeks ago. Starting at 8 a.m., she helped get the three travelling horses/ponies ready and load them into their horse box, had a drive in the horse box and experienced 1 1/2 hours of fun riding (where she nearly reached a gallop racing another pony) along the beach. Doing this has been on her list of "must dos" for as long as I can remember, so she was thrilled to have the chance to take part. She and the other five children had workbooks to complete too and write a picture story to be entered into the school's competition. On return, she had to help unload the horse box, sort the horses/ponies out for re-stabling and clean out the box before heading home about 5 ish. Lucky girl.

School work hasn't really featured much at the moment. We've been doing bits and pieces whenever we have a spare morning, but with our Wales trip and Katie's visit to my Mum and Dad's and then P taking last week off, things have really slowed down in this department! We did manage to read more from our "Serious Survival" book about the rainforests and take a peek at this nice site giving us an idea of what it would be like at night. Katie and Ben have been updating their lapbooks with bits of interesting info too.

We've done some art, producing scratch paintings using acrylics. We've also started to contribute to Sketch Tuesday (see side panel) which Katie and Ben are enjoying. Last week they had to draw something that "comes out of an egg" and they were really pleased to see their pictures on the web page the week after. This week the brief was to draw a flashlight.

Have been interested in the Petits Haricots blogging of "Music Monday" for some time now and with the view to enlightening my two on the joys of a wider variety of music other than the local radio station (actually, to be fair, Ben enjoys Classic FM in the car when Katie's not there!) have decided to do our own Music Monday. Ben was talking about drums this week so it reminded me of my Music Monday mission and we found different drum recordings on You Tube, all of which went down very well. Here's a couple that were more of a hit then others.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=osHT73lWMD0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MZcStceKGTc

After these Ben went off with P's drum sticks and made suitable drums to perform his own piece of music; luckily he didn't use his head (as in the second You Tube video). We also came across my sister-in-law playing live with the Royal Philharmonic in Leicester Square for some Star Wars tribute which caused quite a stir with them.

Yesterday we met up with friends to visit the Batemans Brewery Visitor's Centre in Wainfleet. Weather was good enough for a picnic and there were loads of outdoor games for children and adults to play. We went round a "Brewery Experience" mini tour which was full of information but the children weren't really that interested! We kind of whizzed through it, but it was well thought out with lots of models, bits and bobs, etc. Because of this we decided to experience the actual Brewery tour which was more of a hit for us all. The witty young lady leading us round was truly brilliant at telling us the ins and outs of making beer from the very start (with tastings of various kinds of Barley) to the actual bottling. We even had samples afterwards to try with free lemonade or coke for the children. Planning to take P sometime soon.

Katie had her riding lesson and a morning of stable management (now it's the summer hols) today so Ben and I enjoyed spending some time together. This afternoon the temperature soared and so we attached a sprinkler (which I found in the corner of our shed earlier in the week) to the hose for some water play. Lots of longing looks at our rather sad looking swimming pool - just not sure if it's worth sorting out - but today, it would have got a lot of use!