Grey Dawn Breaking

Read about Attila the Hun and Fredegund this morning, also farmyard cats and the tradition of scarecrows (aka tattie bogles) in rural England. We set up some crystal growing and now one of the kitchen windowsills is full of experiments! The crystals, a gummy bear 'growing' in water and lots of orange peel drying to to be punk (firelighter) for forest school.

Papacrow moved the home ed white shelves along their bit of wall so that he could put up another set and now we have lots more room, hooray! So we spent some time this morning moving things round and organising books in the front room, moving some to the new shelves, as well as ordering the craft stuff.

I also turned out the airing cupboard and I did three kitchen cupboards at the weekend. I always feel the urge at this time of year far more than in the spring. I want everything neat and tidy and ready for winter, somehow!

A Wild Call

One of the table-time tasks Fluff, Petal and Dot do most days is handwriting practice. Those books, with all the lines... it's one of those things that kills several birds with one stone because we use poetry for this. They choose a poem out of one of our many anthologies and I write out a line in pencil each time for them to trace over with biro or a gel pen until we've finished the poem.

It's always interesting to see what they choose... Fluff has a love of D.H.Lawrence and Robert Frost, all of them adored Bishop Hatto and Dot likes nonsense verse. Petal is currently working on 'What Is It?' by Joan Poulson and I thought these lines from it were deeply profound and very apt, especially as applied to home edding-

and I'm always being told

that I should be more sensible

use less imagination

but that's the way

I find out things

a sort of education

The wind's song

 This is one of the books we are using for our current Survival Skills project. Ray Mears has written many others of course, some detailed survival handbooks but this has proven the most useful as it consists of some of the many photos he has taken on his travels, and explanations about the skills or points he is illustrating.

 As such it is perfect as a table time read aloud, and we've been doing a little most days.

It is also, quite simply, beautiful.