What the sparrows get up to together..... Gabe made this Playmobil setup that he called "The Battle for the Lost Island". He took an hour painstakingly putting it together for his brothers to play with, it filled the lounge and looked like a shop window display. They played for 2 hours with it.

We bought some threadable letters, which have gone down a treat.

And we completed our Monet masterpieces. A friend lent us her extensive set of soft pastels, which were wonderful to use. Jesses' version of Monet's garden and bridge was so beautifully interpreted and he really concentrated. I had them fill the page with background colour before they put in their focal points; the bridge and the haystack. They enjoyed using the pastels and using their fingers to change and smudge the lines they made

I got to do one myself, it was fun!

Pellets galore

More information on how to find your own oiwl pellets because some of you have asked and it's so much more fun to find your own. We saw them for sale on Amazon, not half so much fun as knowing your owl lives just down the rd and has been hunting and catching animals whilst you've been doing your maths work....

Daddy Sparrow's top tips for pellet hunting......

Barn Owls like to hunt in open spaces and roost in barns/sheds. They may perch and eat their meals on branches nearby, but most of the pellets will be near the roost as a pellet can take up to 16rs to leave the gizzard. We found this abandoned shed in an overgrown field near our local allotments. The first pellet we found was on the grass just outside.

Barn owl pellets are black (ish depending on age) and you can almost always see bits of bones sticking out. They don't smell and are not easily confused with dog poop.

We found 2 more in the shed. Look for bird poop on 'look out' branches/roost rafters, it gives you a clue as to where the owl likes to sit, the scour the area around that.

In the middle of the field was a large pile of weed covered rubble, that his expert eye spyed as a potential perch. We looked and found a Kestrel's dinner table....complete with kestrel pellet (small, grey and tufty looking). Birds of pray do leave pellets but they are smaller and not so good for dissecting as they have powerful beaks and talons that pluck and rip the pray apart, before and during eating. Owls on the other hand swallow their's whole.

Oh and we (the dog...) found a whole dead stoat, just look at his teeth! The sparrows asked if he would have turned white, stoats in colder climates do...maybe if we had more weather like the last few weeks!

And this is just because he's cute...these glasses belonged to Colin when he was 11, he must have had a tiny head!

Aconites at Anglesey...

Also known as Wolfs bane or Monkshood in Britain..... Used extensively in traditional medicine wherever it is found, aconites are well known for their toxicity, from which lethal poisons have been made over the centuries....

They brightened up our day, adding splashes of colour to a winter drained garden. The snow drops too, bowed gracefully before us. The oldest sparrow took this lovely picture of them;

Anglesey Abby is an enormous National Trust property that the sparrows love to visit. As well as beautiful gardens there is a wild woods, a manor house and a water mill. Armed with a picnic and an explorer pack, it's a place they can run around ALL DAY.

We were treated on this wintry visit, not only to splashes of yellow and white from the aconites and snowdrops, but to bundles of bright red ladybirds, waiting for warmer weather. We were serenaded by a robin and I had an 'up close and personal' visit with a Goldcrest- the UK's smallest bird

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As a mother of sons, it is my experience that the sparrows are happiest out in the wild, where they can run, jump, climb and shout. And I am happiest in the wild with them because barking out orders gets tiring and out in the wild there just aren't as many rules...

We stayed until the sun started to set.

From the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.....

.....Was our topic scripture at our Friday meet-up. We are following a neat Superhero series, based on 1Timothy 4:12, created by a blogging mum, you can find it at...

http://impressyourkids.org/how-to-be-a-super-hero/

So far the sparrows each have a personalised superhero cape plus insignia and lovingly decorated swords (which are still around and have not buckled under the play of rambunctious boys- kudos to Matt the engineer!!).

Our scripture of reference for last week, "From the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks." Part one of SUPER speech...

Jen led the activity and did a great job, in the snow she sent the kids out with cups looking for all kinds of yucky things, with one rule- nothing alive!!

They dutifully came back with rosy cheeks and handfuls of garden mulch. Jen had the kids tip all their 'ingredients' into a large glass jar and mix it all up with some soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, oil and water .....mmmmmmm!

Then she set the garden milkshake aside and had the kids fill a blender with yummy things...ice cream, milk and bananas (strawberries too were in a bowl ready for the blitz but you'd have to ask 2 of the youngest heroes what happened to them all!).

The cups were laid out on a tray, did anybody want to try the garden shake?....The girls put their hands up!!

As Jen poured the shakes she asked the kids what would happen if she didn't stop...one bright spark pipes up...they would overflow! As our scripture was explained using the shakes as an example, the heroes gave beautiful answers on the sorts of good things that can pour out of our mouths as an overflow from our heart.....'Being Kind'.........'Obeying our parents'........'giving things to the poor'. ....

Do you notice the two milkshakes mixing? From the same mouth cannot proceed both blessings and cursings, one pollutes the other...nobody is going to enjoy the banana milkshake on the tray now....

The milkshake was DELICIOUS though, and the kids had a go at reading out the verse and singing a cool 'Seeds of Faith' song whilst they drank it up.

Thanks to Jen, the sparrows loved this activity, looking forward to the next one :)

You know you're a homechooling family when......

Dad takes a snow-day off work to build an igloo in the back garden.....

Tribute to friends of ours who made this amazing snow house, the kids had a blast!

Snow is falling all around us...

So we bought some sleds, on the off chance it would actually snow....And when we woke up this morning we felt so smug! 17cm of snow on our patio is not something to be sniffed at in this good country of ours! To the sparrows delight, this is how we got to church....

After Chapel we braved the roads, which turned out to be fine, to one of the few hills we have in the fens....

It was so much fun. It turns out I can steer a sledge better than Mr. Sparrow...but don't tell him I said so. He says it's my Swiss blood....

Sparrows are tucked in their beds snoring contentedly, wondering if their world will still be blanketed with white in the morning.

Impromptu ice sessions

Four days of freezing temperatures = heaven to little boys. If the house has gone strangely quiet I'm sure to find them out by the pond or the water table, tool in their grip, chipping away at the ice. They have tried with varying degrees of success...bricks, paving slabs, sticks, trowels, spades, shoes and fists. So the other afternoon I gave them a couple of rulers and a clipboard and told them to investigate. They were intent on finding the where the thickest ice was and how deep it measured.

The pond was the jackpot in the end, with deeper ice than the water table at 4cm thick. Gabe has been desperate every morning since to measure the increase....

The sparrows also noticed that the ice in the pond looked like glass whilst the ice in the water table was misty, and on closer inspection they discovered it was full of tiny bubbles.

Toran, testing out our discovery.

A trip to the Botanical Gardens in Cambridge to meet up with friends was a winter wonderland, a treasure for 3 little ice lovers.....

The still part of the fountain was frozen down a good 30cm, it was so tempting to walk on it!

Coats off despite the cold.......

The fun to be had at a a Pellet Party!!

For nature study this week we dissected an owl pellet. All you need is :

• One beady eye for finding the owl pellet: look under perches (straight branches near open spaces) in the 'wild'. Luckily we have a daddy sparrow who is an expert at this.
• Some warm water and disinfectant.
• Tweezers and a thin paintbrush
• 2 angle lamps
• Tray for collecting bones
• One enthusiastic student!

Soak the owl pellet in the warm water with disinfectant. After 30mins/1hr (the older you think the pellet is the longer you should leave it in) you can begin to tease the pellet apart. Use the paintbrush to clean off the bones that you find.

Our owl (it may have been any other raptor pellet, although the number of bones we found suggest it was indeed from an owl) had eaten 2 moles and a mouse. We found skulls, jawbones,shoulder blades forelegs, vertebrae, digits....

The above photo is of the mouse skull and jaw. The two mole skulls were more slender and had serrated teeth all the way along the jaws.

We have kept the bones to label and mount.

And in case you are squeamish, pellets aren't poop, they have never passed through the digestive system of the bird, the 'bony bits' are stored for up to a day in the bird's gizzard and then coughed back up ;)

Happy pellet hunting!