July Recap

July is my favourite month of the year... mainly because it is my birthday, but also because summer sets in and we finally see the sun! This year was no exception and I feel like we waited ages for it and July definitely gave it its all. We have definitely been treat to the beginning of summer now, I just hope that it holds out over the rest of the summer and that this wasn't it for the year!

We had an adventure packed month, including but not limited to some of our best days of the year so far! Bobfest, our local music festival at The Milestone pub at Crystal Peaks is a two day, outdoor music festival to raise money for Bluebell Wood. We spent both days there, despite getting rained off the second morning, and got to see some amazing bands play, including Daddy with his band, Angry Jesters. Both boys love music, and have been lucky enough to have live music in their lives since they were born. They absolutely love seeing Daddy play live, as do I, and we are lucky that they get to play several festivals over the summer where we can go to see them. 

We fit in another trip to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park before the schools broke up and it got busy, spent time in Withernsea meaning multiple beach trips and a visit to The Deep, went strawberry picking with our besties, visited Matlock Farm Park with Nannie where Bear got to ride a horse again, and loved it just as much as he did last year - he totally takes after me and I hope that I can get us all on horses eventually, just waiting on The Cub to grow a bit! We had a play date at soft play with friends, again, before the schools broke up, and an epic weekend trip to the woods with Daddy where we found a rope swing in the trees, collected multiple sticks, balanced on logs, climbed trees and enjoyed getting to spend time with each other with no other plans on the horizon. We went to another of Daddy's gigs, this time at a biker's rally, where the boys stole the hearts of multiple bikers and had an amazing time watching Daddy up close and dancing the night away till the early hours! 

And my highlight of the month, an epic day trip to Blackpool for my birthday. Me, my boys, Daddy included, and my parents. Sun, sand, sea, fish and chips and so many memories made. We get out to a different seaside town every year and I love adding to the memories we make. 

On top of all the adventures, most of which are outdoors as we prefer that to being inside, we have spent an inordinate amount of time in the garden. The boys have enjoyed helping out, both with Daddy and I when we did the lawn and the hedges, but also with the gardeners we had in to do the back yard weeding and tidying up. 

We regularly take books, colouring or Lego outside into the garden to play, and the boys love water in their mud kitchen and water tray. It has even been warm enough to crack out the paddling pool and water bombs for a water fight. 

The littlest helped wash and hoover out my car one afternoon, we have learnt how to play draughts on a huge board at the farm, played with playdough, had meals outside, and even taken naps, (for The Cub, obviously) and we had a lovely afternoon with friends doing a sporty afternoon in lieu of a Sports Day.

Our hours total did not seem to reflect what I felt we had spent outside for July, at only 85 hours outside, bearing in mind in June we managed 98 - it did bring our total to over 400 hours though... For August, I have my sights set on a 100 hour month!

As for intentional learning - we have written letters to friends, done nature journal pages for the summer solstice and our summer tree study, meaning that we have done a full year of study on our chosen tree. I plan to do a page with images from all four seasons together so that Bear can see the changes side by side and we can talk about the differences and what the tree went through over the course of the year. Then we need to choose another tree to study next year - I'm thinking one that fruits!

We have been working our way through a "Starting School" workbook for me to see what skills we have already covered. This is purely for my own curiosity, and not something that I am using to benchmark Bear with per say. I just wondered what we had and hadn't covered so far.

We have done lots of work on numbers this month and have moved on to the teens, working our way all the way up to "twenteen" which is wrong, but cute enough that I haven't overcorrected yet. Bear knows that it is the number twenty, but regularly calls it twenteen and it always makes me smile!

And we picked up an old Orchard Toys game from the charity shop at the start of the month too, Race to Count, which I've struggled to find a link for as I assume it isn't made anymore... but it's a simple one that covers many maths skills including dice recognition, number conversion from dice to numerals, then adding up the trophies at the end of the game. The Cub has joined in a couple of times too, enjoying throwing the dice around a little too much!

The Cub has also done more jigsaws, including a number one, which we did as a matching activity. It's one that comes with a giant poster the size of the jigsaw, so we laid that down and matched the pictures, then matched the coloured doors to the pieces we'd already put down. He's coming on quickly and matching is something he is very good at now!

And lastly, the book I chose for our focus title during July, The Boy and the Octopus by Caryl Lewis was much more of a hit - a full post on that to come as soon as we complete our book review!

What did July hold for you?

Mama Bear x