Today I did something brave

I invited some local home education families

To come to our house and play

It is something I have wanted to do for so long

Share our resources and equipment

With other families

Share our garden space and toys

Esther, William and Bea love visitors

And this year I am determined to take a more active role

In our local home education community

By attending more groups, meets and events

And by organising some of our own

With four young children it is not always easy to get out and about

But I love planning learning and play activities

So it made sense to me to offer opportunities for other families

To come along and join us here

Every Thursday this year

We are running a history through drama workshop at our house

Led by Bindlestick Theatre Company

And after the success of today

David and I are buzzing with ideas

Of other opportunities we can offer

We have talked about animation and programming

Go Kart building

Putting on a pantomime or other drama production

I am keen to start some Messy Maths sessions

For children Bea’s age

And also some creative writing workshops

Inspired by some of our favourite picture books

Today was all about play

And inviting people to come along and meet us

Meet each other

Have a chat and a picnic

And lots of chances for the children to play together

I set up a range of activities for the children to try

But on the whole they were very making up their own games

Exploring the garden

Many adventures were had in the treehouse and the playhouse

Games of football and basketball were played

Inside there was colouring and painting

Children creating stop motion animated movies

And Esther and her new friend made a dinosaur museum

With exhibits, pictures, fun fact cards

And they even made a treasure hunt

Through all these different kinds of play

There was also a whole lot of learning going on

I loved having the opportunity to talk to other homeschooling parents

A chance to find out why other families home educate

And begin to understand how other families do it

I also loved that David was a huge part of today

Talking to the other parents

Playing with the children

It has made me feel very excited about the future

And it has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration

For the kinds of events I would like to plan next

Today I felt happy and confident and like I had a purpose

It was a good feeling

I was very scared this morning that no one would turn up

Or that people would come and not like us

But I think it went okay and I am hopeful that it could be the start of

An exciting new year of home education

Today’s dinosaur day was great fun to plan and set up

This is what I made available for our friends today

Dinosaur Play Day

Dinosaur Mapping
Use an atlas to locate where different kinds of dinosaurs lived

Dinosaur Reading
A selection of dinosaur books, fact and fiction, for children to read

Dinosaur Colouring

Dinosaur Painting
This was a selection of paper and paints. Children could paint their own pictures, paint a dinosaur shape or paint with a dinosaur so printing their footprints

Dinosaur Dot to Dot

Dinosaur Anagrams

Dinosaur Wordsearch

Dinosaur Discovery Jigsaw Puzzles

Dinosaur Bone Hunt
Children had to find bones hidden in a tray of cereal. They could then measure the bones, order them, create skeletons with them. We also hid some metal nuts in the tray and the children enjoyed playing hide and seek with them and a metal detector

Dinosaur Skeleton Kit
Children could work together to build a small wooden skeleton of a T-Rex or Diplodocus

Dinosaur Swamp

Deep Sea Water Table

Dinosaur Stomp Sandpit

That’s Not My Dinosaur Baby Area

There are so many ways to play and learn with dinosaurs

I am collating all our ideas here

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/Edspire2017/edspire-loves-dinosaurs-and-all-that-rubbish/

Here’s to the next Edspire Edventure!