Rainforest Centre

Today we went to the rain forest centre in Newbury. It was amazing and we had a great tour from a lady about all the edible things. From coffee and vanilla to insects, rodents, birds and even turtles!

The fish were incredible, so big!

My favourite part was the Sloth.

We learned about the symbiotic relationship between agouti and the brazil nut tree (google it, it's cool) and how over hunting is causing problems. 

We learned a little about climate and the four different layers of the rainforest, as well as animal adaptations that allow them to live there. 

It's a great centre, with a wide range of work sheets to keep little ones interested. Well worth a visit if you are in the area. 

The children's favourite bird was a curacao called 'Luigi'

Not Back to School trip

This week is Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish new year, and generally when we would restart our homeschool after a loooooooong summer break hanging out with daddy. It's a fun day of starting out with fresh curriculum and books; and eating lots of sweet things (we have fruit, yoghurt and honey for lunch!) to remind ourselves of how sweet and good God is.

Our home-ed co-op. however, prefers to start a little earlier, and this year, we decided to join them on a trip to Prestatyn in Wales. It was so much fun to go with our cousins and the kids had a fantastic time.

We went to surf school at Surf Snowdonia, to great Orme copper mines and on a fossil hunt; we played on the beach, in an incredibly mild ocean; we went to Conwy castle and on an audio tour of an Edwardian house.

It was great fun to catch up with old friends, as one of Cosmo's favourite buddies who left our co-op last year made the effort to book in to the same resort and hang out with us all.

On the way home we stopped in at Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the MAD museum. It was incredible and the kids loved playing with all the exhibits, particularly a typewriter that was attached to fishing wires, which tapped glasses that had been tuned to different pitches.

You can see our video of what we did below:

Butterfly World

Today we went on a trip with our co-op to Butterfly world.

The kids had a great workshop where they got to hold different insects and even giant snails (both my kids refused to touch anything "Mummy! That's absolutely disgusting!") but really enjoyed the leaf cutter ant exhibit. 

  

They also loved being in the butterfly house with all the butterflies floating around. Lychee and her cousin Bon had a lot of fun seeing who could get closest without touching one.

 

The musical garden was a great play area too and inspired me to get some larger items for ours.



Everyone was exhausted on the way home, especially having spent the weekend at Alton Towers already, but we had a really fun time.

Community Tree Trust

Lychee went for a play date with a friend today, and Cosmo went to an activity day with the community tree trust organised by our home ed co-op.

He's had so much fun, taking plant cuttings, building scarecrows, identifying nuts, pressing apple juice and so much more. He particularly enjoyed learning how the storm kettles work (like a chimnea with a water jacket).

Here's the video:

Wicksteed Park

It's the end of the summer term and our home ed co-op decided to celebrate with a visit to wicksteed park.
It was awesome.

Swimming Break Through!

This is not Cosmo swimming
It's a generic picture I stole off google because we're not allowed to take pictures at the swimming pool. :0(

Anyway, we had a major swimming breakthrough today. My initial frustration at him not staying through a whole lesson subsided when I spoke to some other parents of ASD children and realised that I had under appreciated how far he'd come.

I didn't have to remove him from the pool because he was having a melt down, he calmly told his teacher he'd had enough and got out of the pool. Those were some great communication skills that he hasn't always been so great at using.

Anyway, this week was the real breakthrough, because he stayed in the pool for the entire lesson. Not only that, he swam across the pool four times without holding on to his teacher.

The pool is a really challenging place for Will, sensory perception issues mean he finds the echoey sounds stressful. He is fairly confident in the water, but the class environment is stressing him to the point that he clings to his teacher the entire time he's in the pool, until today.

One of the things that really helped was that his teacher took the time to send all the other children across the pool (at least half way) until she set him off. Seeing this made me think that some of the other parents had been right; ASD children learn to swim much more easily in a 1:1 tutor session.

But isn't that true of most children? And most subjects?
And how important is it, really, that he learns to swim quickly?

He will learn eventually, and right now in really happy to see him interacting with the other children and getting more comfortable in a class environment.

Another little boy gave him a hand on the last metre or so when he started paddling backwards by mistake, and he was so happy about it. I really love seeing him so excited and making connections with new kids.

It's totally fine if it takes years instead of months to learn to swim.

We're just going to enjoy the process.

A Spring in our steps...

Today Cosmo had his first ever session at gymnastics club! Some Home educating families near by invited us along to MK Springers with them where he was the youngest (by quite a long way!) but the coaches were brilliant at keeping his attention and keeping him involved.

Towards the end of the session he got a little tired (it's an hour long) but I was impressed. Not only was he exerting a lot of energy physically, but he was being mentally challenged and attempting to co-ordinate his body in ways that were completely new to him. He learnt forward rolls, backward rolls, balancing on a beam and several positions on the bars.

I'm sure he is going to benefit massively from this activity.

There is another gymnastics club which is on at a more appropriate time, and is aimed at children his age, which is located on the other side of town. It's slightly more expensive (50p a session) but I'm not sure yet if I'll make the switch. The other mums at MK Springers are really nice, but it really is a bit to close to nap time. I think we'll keep going for the four weeks that we have paid in advance for and see what happens. If it turns out he is exhausted every week then we will try the other group.

My concern there is that the other group is not specifically for HE'd kids, so when they hit school age he will be the only one left :-(