The faithful subject...

Phoebe's latest strong interest is in taking photos....and Luke is one of her favourite subjects...

pure appley fun!

one day last week, I was a little pre-occupied, working away steadily with my seedlings or seed sowing or something...and a little voice asked "Mum, what can I do apple-bobbing in?" Quite a surprise and yet, not. We have apples dropping in luscious red and green striped blobs all over the ground under our old Cox's Orange Pippin at the moment...and I now remember we'd thought about this game for playing at Phoebe's party...and not followed through...
So, as resourceful as Phoebe is, it wasn't long before she'd filled this large container with water, watering can by watering can-full, found said apples and begun anticipating and dipping and dripping and giggling and wiping and beginning all over again...for a very long time, it seemed...delicious, pure appley fun. Of course, the apples in a game of apple bobbing never get cornered with a nice, wide, round barrel for playing with...
All the same, it was her fun, generated by her and she thoroughly enjoyed herself and even built a little more confidence with getting her face wet...+ some progress in that department is wonderful!

the kitchen table

...where we find ourselves writing, reading, creating, (homeschooling), eating, communing and generally living the most...the kitchen table... built lovingly by Aaron from reclaimed timbers, bolted solidly together - he would call it "rough as guts" - I call it a little bit of "French Country Chic". Anyway you look at it, it sits very happily amid the cosiness of our tiny kitchen in our "worker's cottage" in the country.
The center of our home, the centre of our lives, much of the time.

A Very Pretty Experiment...

We love putting bursts of colour around our home. One of Phoebe's favourite past-times is wandering around the garden, cane flower basket over her arm, carefully holding her scissors by the blades, looking for just the right flowers for all of her arrangements. Little smiles pop up all over the house.
We had these 'surprise' Calla Lillies shoot up along the eastern side of our house, after re-locating a huge patch of Rhubarb, lest the painter trample it all, whilst painting our house. [we've finally decided on colours and have gone with a charcoal grey for the main timbers, a dirty white for all the window surrounds and other trims and a Brick Red roof - so still with that country solid strong colour and white demarcation - just not the verdant green I'd originally had in mind!!] Ok - so I digress...so the Calla Lillies artfully placed in the retro milk bottles and holder were looking pretty cool (well, we thought!).
And then an idea... 'cos they were kinda plain...let's add colour to the water!
SO the food colouring came out - with suitable protections in place for clothes, precious ancient terrazzo surface on kitchen bench, etc - and the experiment began.
What we did was create the 3 Primary colours straight and then the 3 Secondary colours from proportions of drops. Very simple, very effective - and a neat home school lesson for Phoebe where she made colour using particular numbers of drops. So we counted as she droppered the colours. Since the instructions on the food colouring packaging for how to create the secondary colours were in different proportions, I worked them out so we would get the same dilution. And then I thought of the extra lessons in the future - adding in the concept of proportion and eventually teach Phoebe how to do this herself. And then another time we could work the tonal concept of colour - with less and less number of drops for a weaker dilution, etc... We love home schooling - and it is still, technically, the school holidays - why oh why do we need a holiday from learning ;-) ?? It doesn't stop in our home!

...and the answer is...

...ORANGE JUICE!

We were certain after all our talking about acidity and it's effects that it would either be the Coca-cola (which, by the way, was purchased specifically for the purpose of this Scientific Experiment!!) or the Baking Soda/Vinegar mix.

And the second most effective was...milk! Go figure!

We learned was it was fun to devise a way to find out the answer to a puzzling question right here in the house and to lead ourselves in the direction of the resources we'd need to find out.
We also learned some more about waiting and being patient for the reaction to occur (on it's own!).

Friday, Baking Day

We've moved into a bit more of a weekly rythym, Miss Phoebe and I, heading towards a homeschool rythym that we can achieve in keeping with our Rudolf Steiner Education philosophies and meet the requirements of the MOE - once she is 6.
With that in mind, Friday is baking day at the moment, measuring, thinking about shapes and sizes, what happens if it is a bit wet or a bit too dry, etc...lots of science in there...and yummy fun!