Project: Garden (15.4.15)

Well Barnaby has been a bit disengaged since the Easter break, has to be said. He came back from his Dads totally exhausted and though he's now back into a sleep routine it's taken flipping long enough! Consequently I've had a few days of a stroppy, argumentative, rude shitbag to live with. Oh it's been a joy!

Today has been the first day he has shown much interest in doing something of his own accord without me cajoling him into it.
We have been playing a great game I bought last week called Brain Box. It's all about the world (they do other topics too) and simply each card has a country and various pics about that country - flags, food, animals, neighbouring countries/oceans etc. You just need to memorise it for 10 seconds (I changed to 30 so he had time to read difficult words) then by rolling a dice you read the correlating question on the back of the card ('what is the Capital city' or 'Does Afghanistan share a border with Pakistan', that kind of thing).

Well we thoroughly enjoyed that and he's asked to play again later. We have got a large map of the world to put up in his room so I'm going to get that out at the same time and find the countries we are looking at.
This is really helping me because my geography is diabolical, my knowledge on countries even worse so we are learning together!!

This afternoon, despite originally being excited about going to home ed meet (we haven't been in 3 weeks so I'm missing it!)  he did a sudden u-turn after lunch and asked if he could do some work at home so we started our new garden project. 

He has chosen a new exercise book to keep a garden diary and has noted down what we completed today:

Drainage holes made in pots
Blackberry and blueberry planted
Lavender and fuschia repotted
All fed and watered
200 solar lights put up

We took photos of the plants today on day 1 and he is going to document how they grow in his diary, take more photos and even measure how big they grow (from there we will have more data for me to use to teach graphs & charts with him)

So, I think that basically covers environmental studies, maths, science, writing and reading, ICT and whatever bracket 'hammering a screwdriver through a plastic plant pot' comes under :)

We've got his new library books to go through later on, more boats and ships to read up on. He had a good time at Beavers last night and is looking forward to their adventure day on Sunday. 

The next few days entail various activities including a trek through Crickley woods so we are both looking forward to that!