Today is the first official day of the kids’ summer holiday from school – and my first day as a very informal home-schooler. 
We started off with nutrition – amazingly, this hasn’t been touched on yet at school. We made food pyramids and spent time talking about what was in each food group (I admirably overcame my reliance on the old four food groups and old pyramid structure). Then we talked in more general terms about health – exercise, the heart, etc. – and watched a short online video about the heart & circulatory system. The kids were totally riveted – I could hardly believe it. Then we did some exercises (remember the hokey pokey? LOL!) and showed off how we could do different kinds of rolls. With the mats out, we put Arden on the floor for his crawling practice and I got this great picture of all four of them. 
We did some great cooking – Greek kofte, homemade pretzels, meringues, milkshakes, and even homemade peanut butter (it takes a long time to shell that many peanuts!). And when we went shopping, we discussed everything we bought and where it fit into our food pyramids. I was really surprised at what a good grasp the kids had. We attracted a lot of strange looks in the store, but I tried to ignore that. When we got home, each of the kids chose one or two colors in the food pyramid as their own, and then had to rummage through the pile of groceries and pick out what belonged in their part of the pyramid. Very fun. 
Because Arden had a bit of a cold in one eye, I made up a tea bath for him (excellent stuff for minor eye irritations) and was left with the extra tea and tea bags, so I popped some linen in and came out with this. Not bad, I think!
It was a great day and the kids gave it all thumbs-up. The dinner we made together impressed Niek to no end when he arrived home, and everything else tasted great, too. There were no real discipline issues and it seems that the secret is to have a slow but steady stream of interesting activities. Wish me luck tomorrow!!
The give-away winner for the CEC chart is …. Marlies!! Congratulations, Marlies!!!
