The Tale of Two Brothers

When Ferdy was about three he became rather consumed by the Beatrix Potter books. He had received all the original tales for his third birthday, and we also got him the audiobooks. I soon regretted this. Despite the lovely stories and sophisticated vocabulary, some of them are slightly tiresome to read, especially when you have to read four books an hour. And when they were lost on a rather high shelf, I was in no rush to take them down.

It was therefore with a little trepidation that, when Ferdy requested a Beatrix Potter day, I sought out the books again.

The Tale of Jeremy Fisher

He was quite excited to realise that he could actually read some of them himself, and read us half of The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher and all of The Story of Miss Moppet. What a relief that he can now read...

Then it was off to Calke Abbey (with the Beatrix Potter audiobook for our journey) for Mr. Ptolemy Tortoise (Ferdy) and Peter Rabbit (Gil) to seek out their friends.

We found Squirrel Nutkin's tree (top left), they ran away from Mummy McGregor in her vegetable garden (top right), located and fished for minnows in Mr Jeremy Fisher's pond (bottom right) and even discovered Peter Rabbit's father's secret network of tunnels (bottom left).

We also saw an array of butterflies including some common blues mating, and although we were a little tempted to copy Mr. Jeremy Fisher and make butterfly sandwiches for lunch, we decided that there are no longer enough insects to do things like that. And that we already had cheese sandwiches.

Watching butterflies

Both boys remained in character for most of the day, and later on, when I was saying goodnight to Ferdy and he told me lovingly that my top was like butterflies and my arms were as soft as rabbits (?!), I felt that we really had immersed ourselves in the world of Beatrix Potter.

How to Train Your Children

The current obsession in our house is the How to Train your Dragon books, which we listen to in the car on the way to and from school, in the playroom before and after school and at bedtime every night. Ferdy's excuse for not being able to read his own writing is that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third (the hero) can't either. We are currently on book 8 (we have had a few long car journeys) but the first book begins with the young Vikings trying to train their untrainable dragons, and Hiccup works out that actually the best way to train his maverick dragon Toothless, is to be nice to him and treat him with respect, rather than 'yell', the one word instruction in the tome used by Vikings for many years.. I sometimes find myself needing some tips from Hiccup.

It's proving a bit tricky to get Ferdy to do things at home at the moment, and he once again seems to be very tired and getting upset about doing any work related stuff. So, after some yelling (only joking), we decided to play a Vikings game. He and Gil set up their Viking ship (The Hopeful Puffin) to set off on a voyage to America.

tl-br: setting up The Hopeful Puffin; Stoick the Vast;
sailing in the Green Sea; the ship sets sail

Ferdy's been learning about positions at school and we'd watched a few videos earlier, so the (Mummy) goddess Aphrodite (my name chosen by Ferdy but I'm not complaining about being associated with the beautiful Goddess of Love) shouted out positions from the sky 'turn a quarter left, a quarter right, half right, full turn etc' and displayed cards with things like 'straight on, up, down, beside etc directing them towards the treasure/glasses case with Smarties in.

Just because there is a How to Train Your Dragon obsession in our house, it doesn't mean Star Wars has been forgotten about so Ferdy then read us a book and did some writing (albeit a bit reluctantly) about Luke's Jedi training. And I learnt that when you want to write a capital A, you have to turn your page upside down and write a V first...

Then it was off to the library to read books to a carrot.

Our afternoon's activity was to see Horrible Histories Dreadful Deaf at Derby Theatre. It was all about deaf people in history, of which not much has been recorded. We'd discussed a little in the morning about what being deaf was and also watched a video about a deaf boy communicating in sign language with his classmates, who had learnt some. Both boys were quite intrigued although Gil did shout 'is him deaf?' quite a lot whilst we queued up to go in to the theatre.

We learnt some good facts like that the Romans didn't let deaf people marry or have children; that Alexander Graham Bell (who invented the telephone) got the use of sign language banned and claimed that all deaf people should be taught to speak (despite having a deaf wife and mother); that Prince Phillip's mother was deaf, and that it's funny to shout Deaf and Dead at the end of a story...

It was a good lesson in historical oppression, something I don't think kids are ever too young to learn about. And also in treating people kindly and with respect. In book 7 of How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup (the hero) gets a slave mark, and later as an old man and great King and leader, he suggests that all kings should perhaps get a slave mark so that they understand what it is like to be oppressed. He's a wise man, that Hiccup is, who needs to read their own writing anyway...?

Rain, raining. Rain, raining. Rain, raining.

We decided to embrace the rain today.

Since we saw Michael Rosen at Hay, Ferdy's been looking up a lot of his poems and one of his favourites, which we found this week, is The Rains. Ferdy loves his voice where he says about the rain stopping, 'there were birds! It was light, warm in the sleeping bag, cold on our faces'. And whenever I've heard the rain this weekend (which has been often), I drum 'Rain, raining. Rain raining' in my head.

We'd been to Ferdy's Fathers' Day service at school this Friday and Ferdy is always a little edgy (and grumpy) after an hour of sitting down, so, armed with raincoats, wellies and lunch, we went straight out to search for rain (our obvious theme for the day), muddy puddles, things that like rain (ducks, geese, slugs) at the Wolseley Wildlife Centre.

tl-bl clockwise: the biggest muddy puddle; looking at bank voles; building a den;
in the meadow; in the tunnels; drawing the weather (sun, rain and rainbow)

Finding rain wasn't hard, and, thanks to one of the regular birdwatchers at the centre, we found a few extra things like baby bank voles (look closely in above top middle pictures), some muddy tunnels, a large den, a robin and a flash of kingfisher. Ferdy was most excited about the bank voles to whom he fed some of his duck food.

Back at home we measured how much rain we'd caught in cups placed outside. Annoyingly the rain stopped in the afternoon so we only got about 25ml.

We read some fact books about the water cycle (unpopular because they weren't stories) and then some other books with stories about rain in them (popular because they were stories). Favourites were The Rhythm of the Rain, a beautiful retelling of the water cycle, and Sam Usher's Rain.

It wasn't easy to get Ferdy to do any writing today, he seems to have decided that he can't write again (writing currently is a very loud affair with lots of ohohohohohs and OOOOOPSes whenever he forgets to space his words, writes a letter the wrong way around or forgets a capital), so instead of a poem (which we'd agreed on the day before), we compromised on him writing 10 words describing rain and the sound of rain. My favourite is pffffffff. Michael Rosen didn't start writing poems 'til he was 11 anyway, so there's loads of time...

A Home Education

We have been flexischooling for almost a year now and it has been pretty easy to incorporate Gil's needs into our Fridays.

Not this Friday however. Gil was ill (on his birthday poor darling!) and basically needed to be carried or on my lap all day. This meant we couldn't go anywhere, and everything we did had to be done sitting down plus I couldn't even put the telly on for Gil as there's no way Ferdy wouldn't watch it.

We are quite well set up for learning stuff (without Ferdy realising it) at home though, so, all plans scuppered and a trying day with an ill child ahead of me, with a small amount of trepidation I decided to entrust the day to Ferdy.

Set-up for home learning: the book and nature corner; the chapter
book shelf; the adventure corner; the Star Wars corner (I defy anyone
who says Star Wars isn't educational...)

Ferdy doesn't like to sit down very much, unless he is reading, looking at or listening to a story. Miraculously, he can then sit for hours.

So he decided to read some Star Wars books (and did some comprehension questions for his writing):

We have these brilliant
Star Wars workbooks

Then he proposed that I read: The Tale of the Castle Mice; How Many Legs; Mudpuddle Farm; The Big Book of Birds (and at his request we looked up some of the birds of youtube, including a Kakapo performing a mating ritual on a cameraman, and a puffin chick hatching).

His next plan was that we listen to the Moomins on his audiobooks. And then for his numberwork he suggested watching Numberjacks... (although he agreed on some Star Wars subtraction as well).

Getting a slight sense of how our day was panning out, I posed the idea of playing What's the Time Mr Wolf. Ferdy's been learning about telling the time at school so he rather enjoyed this. Especially when he won.

At lunchtime he made his own sandwiches.

And I have to confess that, after we had designed and set up a space scene in his bedroom and he had made a sun for it, Ferdy seemed to have not only lost any attention span (and me too from holding a sleeping/crying/coughing/crotchety 4 year old all day) but started wheezing, so we settled down to read more books and finally to watch Star Wars VIII.

I love the sun

Ferdy was ill and in bed all day on Saturday but having all recovered by Sunday (I'd been ill all week - for six and four year olds, illnesses last 24 hours, for 43 year olds, illnesses last 168 hours), we managed to carry out my original Friday plan which had been to go to the Lego exhibition in Derby.

A Lego sun

Imagining the World: A Hay Festival Special

Considering the fact that we have been to a literary festival for the last seven days, I find it very hard to put into words the gloriously sublime and truly illuminating experience we have had.

Who can really describe what it is like to witness Julia Donaldson, dressed up as Madame Dragon from Zog, singing Happy Birthday to the Gruffalo (it's his 20th birthday this year), to be in utter hysterics at Michael Rosen's funny stories about how he went to school in the Stone Age, or to create leafy pictures in a foraged art session?

Foraged art

How can we convey Ferdy's glee at meeting Andy Stanton; nearly falling off his chair laughing at how Andy described his experience of getting kicked out of Oxford University, and his joy at realising that the young Andy coveted many of the books that Ferdy currently loves (The Beano, The Dandy, Just William, Roald Dahl)?

Waiting to see Andy Stanton

Is it really possible to communicate the delighted expression on Ferdy's face when his hand shot up and stayed up for Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet (of Supertato fame) who asked: 'put your hand up if you have picked your nose today?', 'put your hand up if you ate it?' and 'put your hand up if you don't like putting your hand up'...?

Waiting for Sue Hendra

It would also be insufficient not to mention the awesomeness (Ferdy's word) of the black sicklebill's mating display, the dismay we felt at walruses in Greenland fighting for space on land (there is no longer enough ice for them to live on) and the overbearing sense of guilt we adults endured seeing far too much glacier crashing into the sea (twice as much as a decade ago), as shown by the directors of Our Planet.

And one of the absolute highlights was on the penultimate day, when we attended an evening performance of Spell Songs, a musical interpretation of a book we own called The Lost Words. This book centres around the concerning removal of various words like bluebell, otter and raven from the Oxford Junior English Dictionary, and subsequently from the language of the next generation. Each folk song, sung by a band of award winning folk artists focussed on one of the words in the book and our favourites were the one about the heron, and Ferdy's the barn owl.

All of these talks and shows were punctuated with frequent visits to the make and take tent, (Ferdy's heaven on earth), lots and lots of cake and chips (and beer for Mum and Dad), building dens with new friends, marshmallow toasting at the campsite (well actually it was morelike a glampsite, as electric blankets on real beds with a log burner can't really be called camping), reading books, jumping on trampolines with more new buddies, making dog buddies, playing frisbee, jumping in the hay barn, having arguments with new buddies, reading more books, herding geese and sheep, listening to How to Train your Dragon, reading even more books. And a tiny bit of boring sleeping.

tl clockwise to middle: in the make and take tent; playing with friends; eating doughnuts; on a literary giant;
boring sleeping in a bed with an electric blanket; on the trampoline; cafe games; in the make and take tent x2

We have come back with a ton of books, a load of inspiration, a bit smelly and with fat, cake-filled tummies. I asked Ferdy how he'd sum up his experience and he said: 'it was great, awesome and best buddyish'. Perhaps we had better work harder on introducing a few more adjectives to his vocabulary. Or perhaps, he too finds it difficult to embody our experience in words.