West Park
Yesterday was West Park day, a home ed group we go to in Leeds. We were first there for the second week running - not sure why that is when I’m the one with the small baby, maybe it gets harder to get out with 2 as they get older? Perish the thought LOL!! It was fairly quiet there yesterday in terms of number of families, but ear splitting in terms of volume. I love going and seeing everyone and having some good chats, but it’s heavy on the ears and I’m glad to go at the end of the afternoon. It seems as though the more boys arrive, the madder it gets!
M played with C, but they seem to have a love hate relationship. They played Lego together happily (making guns, why is everything always a gun?) but seemed to wind each other up the longer we were there. C seemed really excited to be at the group and was rushing around, and it doesn’t take much for M to get hyped and go a bit mad. The more over stimulated he gets though, the worse his temper gets and he loses the ability to be calm/rational, so a bit of a disagreement came to pushing and shouting at each other til they both got hurt. Ugh.
We don’t have a theme at West Park, but each week we try and have a couple of activities set out as well as alot of the toys out to play with. There are alot of younger siblings as well as school age kids, and M is one of the eldest at turning 7. The older kids all stopped coming because they thought the activities were too young and they were getting bored (and didn’t seem to want to do the educational activities for older kids their parents were pushing either). Seems a bit of a vicious circle though, because the next eldest then stopped coming and the average age is dropping. I don’t want it to turn into a preschool group. I think sometimes we get out too many toddler toys and clutter the floor up and perhaps we should make the older age stuff more obvious? Just thinking out loud. Anyway, D got a table set up with painting things and I put out the birthday cake craft from Enchanted Learning.
Then later in the afternoon A took all the children outside to run off some energy while I set up some science. Most of us in the group clubbed together to join the BA science club scheme earlier in the year. They send a set of experiment ideas that are simple to set up, and they are aimed at 5-8 year olds (also older age groups available) and learning to think scientifically, make predictions and test theories. I brought the things to do the Separating Substances project. We had bags of rice & flour, popcorn and paper clips and popcorn and rock salt to separate, and some other suggestions to try if they wanted. Everyone joined in to see what they could separate. Some of the children got stuck into eating the flour, salt and popcorn kernals - no accounting for taste LOL!
As we tidied up M showed the older children how to do an “exploding paperclip” trick he’d seen on Big Bang yesterday morning. Then J sat down with her guitar and did some singing while tidying up was done by the adults and we finished with a game of Pizza Chips.
I plucked up courage and took the potty with me this week and left it out in a corner so I could take L easily. I didn’t have any wierd comments, thankfully. One mum said she’d just been reading an article in The Mother about EC, so that was nice. Only had one miss, when J was holding L for me - I thought he’d need to go soon but got distracted and when she handed him back he had already gone. Haven’t had such a successful day at home today with it though. Perhaps I concentrate better away from home.
Today we’ve not done that much. We went out to get some Tescos shopping and to close a building society account M has had since he was a baby. We’re going to open new accounts at the Halifax because it seems to have the best rate of interest and is easier to get to. L got some money given so we’ll open accounts for both. M is getting old enough to run his own account now too.
