cards, eggs and buttocks

I think there are few ways to wake up on a grey rainy morning that can beat having my children snuggle into bed with me, armed with books for us to read together!  And yep, that's another gloating HE Mummy moment right there ;)
We didn't mind staying indoors so much today, having been outdoors for most of yesterday :)  The boys were all able to settle down and concentrated on some work for a decent amount of time :)
DS1 tackled a page from his Maths workbook - today it was using negative numbers which was a concept he hadn't tackled before, and he just sat down & worked it out, with very few mistakes.  After a page he'd had enough, but I was really pleased he'd wanted to do it at all, as Maths was one of the things he had really lost his enthusiasm for while at school.  He also found something that he wanted to do from our 365 Things to Make book, and took his time over it to produce a really nice card...

DS3 spent quite a while on his Reading Eggs "game" this morning - he loves anything on the computer as it makes him feel big like his brothers/ Daddy, and he loves learning his letters too... in fact, he is enjoying it enough that we'll probably subscribe fully - especially as I discovered they offer a nice discount to Home Educators ;)
I've been trying to think of ways to work with DS2's learning style, as he is apparently highly visual, so after he finished his Funnybones Skeleton (see below), and labelled the basic bones on a skeleton printout, we built on his "my body" project with a few games of Body Snap.  It's basically a set of cards with pictures of body parts, that you have to match to other cards describing the functions of said parts, plus where they belong in the body etc.  He absolutely loved it, and when we used the cards to play 'pairs', he was extremely good at remembering where he had seen things:)  This game was aimed at age 7+, but DS2 (age 6) had absolutely no problems - this is definitely a good way of learning for him, and after we had played it a few times, he had all the body parts & functions etc thoroughly learned. Incidentally, his brothers played too (we helped DS3), and all three of them really enjoyed shrieking "buttocks" at the top of their voices when said card was turned over.  Great fun! :)

Of course, we also checked in on the NTU falcons this morning and found that the third chick had indeed died, as we thought it would :( really sad, but it has led to some helpful conversations about 'survival of the fittest', and the impact of weather on wildlife etc. Hopefully the last chick will survive - the boys are all still really interested to see how it does, we're rooting for the little chap...
All of this was completed during the morning, which left the boys with a free afternoon to spend as they chose (watching CBeebies, building lego constructions and making works of art with drawing and cutting out, and of course, DS1 checked his weather station during a break in the rain), all while Mummy got some washing clean, dry, folded & put away (you know the routine).  I can almost see the bottom of the laundry basket now!   Not bad for a rainy day, really ;)