Flowers and chocolates

A few weeks ago, we received a box from Grow Wild, a charity which promotes the growing of wild flowers. Our pack contained 15 packs of wild flower seeds, seed markers, a DIY bee house and an instruction booklet. I have kept one pack and a bee house for us, but sent the rest of the packs on to the woman who runs the local home-ed group, so that they can be distributed amongst the community.We are looking forward to planting the seeds in pots or any containers we can find and to making the little bee house.

Maths has been a struggle recently, with Charlie groaning his way through lessons and flopping dramatically onto the table when asked to do any calculations. He claimed to have forgotten all about division until I brought out some pasta and showed him how to divide them up into equal portions. That was one of our more successful lessons.

Luckily, a friend recommended a maths student who is offering cheap lessons and he started here last week. He was an instant hit with Charlie, who came away from his first lesson with a new method for adding, of which he was very proud. The new tutor will be coming every week from now on.

An additional - and unexpected - teacher appeared in the form of Charlie's brother, Tom, who decided that he would take his younger brother in hand. It was amazing to see them working together and, I must say, Charlie was a lot better behaved for Tom than for me.

We have been covering a 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' theme in our English studies, using the relevant chapter in the Galore Park English textbook and some Twinkl printouts. Charlie and I agreed that we needed chocolate to get us into the mood.

There has been plenty of time for Charlie to pursue other interests. He would happily spend all day playing Minecraft, if he could, but when the internet was down the other day he branched out into playing an offline game of chess instead.

Having not played chess for a while, he was very frustrated when the computer kept beating him. However, a friend of ours gave him some tips and he's improving now. 

Baking has been a popular pastime again: this week, Charlie made banana and cinammon muffins. There was a lot of measuring involved and Charlie also worked out how many muffins there would be left if we shared some with our next-door neighbours. I don't think he thinks of any of this as maths, but it's all good practice.

Charlie and Tom continue to enjoy each other's company on our daily walks to the local nature reserve.  We are very lucky to have such a beautiful space available so near to our home.

Both boys seem very happy at the moment, with Tom settling in well at his new school and Charlie enjoying his last few months of home ed, but looking forward to his new school in September. This week, he will be spending a morning at the school to meet his new teacher and get to know his classmates a bit better.

The last word goes to Tom, who left this affectionate note on my laptop for me to find the other day: