Mini creations from the school holidays

I adore the downtime of the school holidays and the opportunity it gives my children to be creative without any constrains on their time. It’s also wonderful to see them create with the freedom to go with whatever is currently in their hearts and minds, rather than have to work on something within the guidelines of a lesson.

Over the last fortnight of the Easter school holidays each of my children enjoyed creating and this is where I take a moment to share those creations (which I will undoubtedly look back on with fond memories in years to come!).

First up has to be these beautiful words from my daughter Sophie, who put together a little hand-made tube of messages for my Birthday.

My youngest, Alice, enjoyed creating with different mediums, a gorgeous heart shaped pebble, painted with love, bead creations, carefully placed and ironed to fix together (Mum on hand for the ironing, of course!), a painting and a beautifully written Birthday card.

My oldest daughter, Charlotte, spent a lot of time designing houses on Minecraft and browsing interior-design magazines. She loves organising and has the most incredibly well organised room. She took her organising skills out of her room and into the kitchen, deciding the pantry cupboard needed a thorough sorting out before the new school term started – and I’m so grateful that she did! She also did a cute ‘bead doll’ –

I spent a relaxed hour or so of colouring in Mandalas with my two youngest, on a rainy spell of the holidays in Martinborough. It was a gorgeous moment, between showers, holding up our work to the light, which kept playing with us from behind the clouds.

Aside from the creations, there was some diligent school work going on in the background too. My oldest, Charlotte, has been working her way through a book that was assigned to her in English last term. She’s been struggling with the book, but has a wonderful English teacher and thanks to that inspiration, Charlotte has forged on, and self-assigned herself a certain number of pages to read each night of the holidays.

Sophie, who started school at the beginning of this year, after a few years of home-schooling, due to anxiety (which still troubles her every day – but she keeps striving to be on top of it), read through at least four books in the series ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid‘, whilst passing on the wisdom she’d learned in school about primary numbers.

As well as all this creativity on paper, rocks and whiteboards, there were hours of unscheduled play – the best part of the school holidays! There was time to swing on the trapeze in the garden and jump on the trampoline, time to go swimming and exploring, geocaching and cycling.

Now we are back to routines and reality with a thud. It is the first week of an eleven week term, and we are slowly – and a little reluctantly – adjusting.

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