Around the corner

We went for a walk around the block just to see the river Mororó flooding yet again (se pictures in my other blog). On our way home we found this big bush in front of an abandoned house. We went to take a closer look...

... and realised it's passion fruit. The flower is so interesting and different.

We also spotted lots of fruits that are't ripe yet. I'll make sure we'll get back a little later hopefully to pick some fresh passion fruit for a yummy juice :)

Ice cream

This idea is yet again from Kids Craft Weekly and I've been meaning to do this for a while already. The kids have been into playing in their little kitchen so I thought this one would fit in nicely.

Cutting all the ingredients.

Lucas making ice cream balls.

Luana cutting decorations.

And finally the ice cream parlour opened!

My cone with strawberry ice cream, cherries, strawberries and a waffle.

Cold porcelain jars

We made a cookie jar with our teacher last week. These cookies are made with forms but I made some at home by myself and they look quite real too.

These small jars are for my kids. I wanted to practice making little people without forms and I had as a reference two key chains that someone else had made out of cold porcelain. It took me ages (an hour and 40 minutes) to complete these two and there are still lots of things to do better next time... The kids loved them however :)

Green Hour challenge 15

It's been raining hard for several days and this morning was no different. I've been postponing this challenge for a while now because it's been impossible to go out and draw anything. Today I decided we'll do the challenge no matter the weather. So we took a virtual tour of our garden and looked at the pictures I've taken of our flowers.

We counted the petals and looked at the different shapes. We first drew the flowers with pencils and then coloured them using water colour pencils (you colour normally with the pencils and then paint over them with a wet paint brush in order to create a water colour effect).

Blogger unfortunately turned the pictures around but I guess you'll get the idea :)

Cold porcelain with the kids

On Saturday I sat down with the kids and let them play with cold porcelain. We had a couple of colours and my intention was to make play food. Lucas came up with super cute popsickles all by himself. Luana made a fantasy cake as well as some smaller things and I "baked" some cakes for small dolls. It was so much fun that we'll definitely do this many more times together.

First works

We finished our first jars on Friday. The one on the left is my mum's and the one on the right is mine.

Our hands are itching to get new forms, colours and empty jars! :) We'll learn new things on Wednesday and will buy some new colours on Tuesday. There's supposed to be a fairly good shop with crafting supplies in a town about 40 minutes from us and we're hoping to visit there soon.

Cold porcelain

Yesterday I was invited to a friend's house to learn how to make cold porcelain (or biscuit) as it's called over here in Brazil. This is a technique that apparently started in Argentina and is very very popular in Brazil. There are some Brazilian websites here (she also has things in English), here and here. The paste is extremely easy to make (the link above has a slightly different recipe from the one we used but I'm sure that'll work as well) and it can be moulded by hand or using small silicone molds.

You have to excuse me for the quality of the pictures. The light was all funny and somehow the macro wasn't working as I wanted it to... I'll post more pictures as I get something done myself. We'll have our following lesson next Wednesday and I have some homework to do :)

It's great fun and highly addictive. I borrowed some molds off my friend but I'm dying to get my own already! The opportunities are endless and we just bought a magazine full of great ideas and models.

Green Hour challenge 14

We finally managed to find some wild flowers (it seems this just isn't a good wild flower season in our neighbourhood...) and pressed them last week. A few days later we took a closer look at them and the kids absolutely wanted to use the magnifying lense again. We had three flowers; some species of clover, a flower from an acerola tree and a red unidentified flower. The acerola flower was so tiny and became so transparent after pressing it that it was hard to even see it properly so we ended up with just two flowers to take a closer look at.

We also observed the plants we planted a few weeks back. Now I really have to admit I'm no good for seeds, sprouts and growing things in general. I do like the idea but somehow I always manage to forget about taking care of the plants... :) We had planted marigolds, leek, basil and zucchini. Some of the seeds were a little outdated but we thought we'd give it a try anyway. Well, basil and leek never even sprouted but zucchini and the marigolds did. It was all very exciting and in the beginning we'd take the pots outside when it wasn't too hot and inside when the sun was too bright or the rain too heavy. We forgot them out in the rain a few (?) times and at the moment we've got a few sprouts of both zucchini and marigold going strong. I'm hoping to plant them on the ground this week.

We then took a look at what's happening in our garden at the moment. That same morning our lovely plumeria (or frangipani) had fallen all by itself and that had left a gap in the garden. Here's that lovely orange flower again, I still haven't managed to identify it... :)

Fortunately we have a smaller plumeria growing in the garden too and it's about to bloom for the first time. Can't wait as I love the way the flowers look and smell!

Several red ixoras are about to bloom as well.

And to our surprise we also have a yellow ixora. When my husband got them they were supposed to be pinkish but it turns out most of them are red and at least one is yellow :)

English

We've had really good moments studying English. Especially Luana is enjoying it a lot and Lucas is picking up a few words as well. We've been going over the colours to start with. This is something they've also covered at school last year so they remembered some colours already. They both have their notebooks and I prepare some simple tasks for them. I try to speak as much English as I can and I give them all instructions (like "look", "listen", "draw") in English and use gestures as well.

This British Council's website has been great with lots of resources for teaching English to kids. We've already listened to a song about colours as well as a story in English. I have to say I'm amazed at how kids can cope with a new language. Before we listened to the story I told the kids something about it in English. "Billy and Splodge visit different planets that have different colours." Luana nodded. I asked her if she had actually understood and she said yes. What?! She doesn't speak any English so how on earth was she able to understand that? Then I thought how the same scentence would be in Portuguese and there are so many similar words: "Billy e Splodge visitam diferentes planetas que têm diferentes cores." So that explains. You can't do that with Finnish at all though, the same scentence in Finnish would be: "Billy ja Splodge vierailevat eri planeetoilla, jotka ovat eri värisiä." :D

Luana just had her English lesson at school today and she came home all excited about having finally learned a nursery rhyme they'd been practicing. It took me a while to understand but I finally got it: "Five fat sausages frying in a pan..." I had to look it up on the internet as I'm not that familiar with nursery rhymes in English :)

We have a small bag with nursery rhymes in Finnish that we use at home. There's a song that goes with it and after the song the child whose name was mentioned in the song gets to pick one card from the bag and that rhyme is read out loud. I'm thinking about having a bag like that in English too.

Homeschooling this year

Over here the new school year just started and the kids have been at school for almost two weeks now. They have new teachers and some new classmates and they come home every day so excited about everything they've done that day. It's a joy to see that.

We continue homeschooling activites in the afternoons after lunch and napping. As the kids are still quite small I don't really have any academic goals for them for the year. What I want to focus on with my kids is giving them an understanding and appreciation of nature, teaching some basics of English, keeping up and developing their Finnish, doing a weekly Bible study and doing lots of arts and crafts.

For nature appreciation we use Green Hour Challenge and we usually do one task each week. We have all really enjoyed the tasks as they're simple and even the smaller one has the patience to complete them. Notebooking happens most of the times but not always.

I teach the kids English mainly because Luana really wants me to :) I hope that as they grow up they'll speak fluent Finnish and Portuguese as well as good English. Should they want to learn some other languages I'd be more than happy to help them in doing so (I also speak Spanish, German and Swedish and would be happy to teach them any of those or then find a teacher of another language). At the moment they've got half an hour of English at school per week and they love it. At home we've started to have a moment of English every day. We play games and do some excercises in their notebooks. I also try to speak only English to them during that time. So far they've been really excited about it and they ask me to tell them how things are said in English instead of speaking to me in Finnish. For example Luana wanted me to tie her hair so she asked me how to say that in English. Lucas had hurt his finger and wanted to know how to say that in English. I think it's so cute when they do that!

Finnish language is something we don't really "study" but I speak it with the kids all the time. Thankfully so far they don't even try to mix languages but always speak to me in Finnish and to their father in Portuguese. At the moment we read a lot in Finnish, sing a lot in Finnish and most of the DVDs and CDs we have are in Finnish. Luana just started to read today (as in took a book and actually read some of the words herself) and I'm obviously teaching her to read in Finnish. I don't want to rush her into reading but she's really keen to learn so I help her whenever she wants me to.

We do Bible studies at home roughly once a week. At the moment we use a lovely children's Bible with good illustrations and lots of additional information. We often do some crafting related to the story we read. I try to do this in the middle of the week as they get their weekly dosis of Bible study at Sunday school twice every Sunday (in our church we have Bible study on Sun morning and Worship service on Sun evening).

Arts and crafts is what we all like to do and I'm trying to come up with new ideas most of the time. I work around Brazilian, Finnish and international special dates, bank holidays etc. and always check them when I'm planning ahead. I like to have a weekly theme but that doesn't always happen. I'm planning to start arts and crafts lessons for kids aged between 4 and 6 (at least to start with) here at home and I'm hoping to start in the beginning of March. This means we'd be crafting with some other kids twice a week as well as doing our "own" crafting other days.

So this is pretty much what we do in our partial homeschool. I just read again what I'd written about homeschooling a year ago in here. Some things have changed in a year whereas some haven't at all. It was so good to write this all down. Even when everything's really clear in my head writing it down and reading it through makes it even clearer :)

Learning new things

Luana learning to crochet with grandma. She's well on her way to become a craftster like me and my mum... :)