Swimming in the rain....

no, not sam and I but the young rogue. Sam, S and I took the dogs to watermead between showers today and got rained on-what a shock!! Anyway as the park was empty I let rogue off his leash to go swimming. He had blast and looked so cute, all you could see were the tips of his ears,his little black eyes and a tail wagging like mad. I think he would have spent the rest of the afternoon in there had it not started raining and I decided to call a halt to his fun. Miko seems much more enthusiastic about the water now she has seen rogue go in and next time will take the retractable leash so she can go in if she wants to. I don't trust her off the leash because I am not convinced that she will come back.

We were supposed to be camping this weekend but that was cancelled due to the weather so sam and I had a quiet weekend just pottering. M is on long days so he hasn't been around to enjoy the lovely weather with us. Yesterday we cleaned, ironed an watched doctor who. Today was the last tennis until sept so made sure we were on time. After tennis a few errands then home to get things ready for home ed group tomorrow. The theme is transport again and this time we are doing things to do with air and water. We have lots of fun activities planned and sam has been very good about getting them ready and helping to plan them. If he had his way we would make robots from scratch and do very hard science experiments each session, regardless of what everyone else wanted to do!!

E posted a comment on my last post about sonlight and I thought that I would answer it here rather than in the comments section. Sonlight is a literature based curriculum that relies heavily on good children's fiction for all aspects of study, not just learning to read. In science for example, they use a lot of magic school bus books, which are about a class with a zany teacher who have great science adventures. One series they don't seem to have included yet is the magic tree house series about a brother and sister who journey through time in a tree house and have lots of fun adventures. We use it a great deal to back up history lessons. Core to the programme are the read alouds-fantastic books that parents read to their children and discuss with them. This year we have read Charlottes's, Web, Mr. Popper's Penguins, Understood Betsy and The Wheel on the School to name but a few. All of the books have been excellent and held both of our attention with gripping plots and likeable characters. They have also given us an insight into new lands and people-such as The Wheel on the School, which is about a group of school children in holland who bring the whole village together to attract migrating storks back to the town. The books are so good and so timeless that I can see us revisiting many of them again, especially when sam is more confident to 'read in his head" as he says. Sonlight is very Christian and not being a very religious family, nor creationists we tend to not use those books which deal with this topic in great detail. I am very happy with the curriculum and I think that both sam and I get a lot out of it, he loves the science experiements and the readers and is already pestering me to start on the read alouds that arrived last week.