Day of the Dead

I made a parenting mistake when I downloaded a Radio 4 drama for a long car trip - it turned out to be thoroughly scary. I blame the top quality acting.

K was quite ruffled and while we love a bit of Hallowe'en silliness, I wanted to find a more positive angle to stop him dwelling on ghosts, poltergeists and things that go bump in the night.

We did Diwali last year so Day of the Dead was the perfect topic for this season. My talented friend wrote a book about a skeleton so we timed reading it to coincide with the festival and then looked at the science of bones.

Kicking off with some geography we located Mexico and watched the beautiful Literacy Shed videos on the topic; a perfect link to death without ghoulishness. Fantastic follow up discussion too :
http://www.literacyshed.com/day-of-the-dead.html

Using a My Body book we investigated skeletons and considered what we'd look like without bones. We talked bones, bone marrow and what happens if you break a bone.

Finally we made some split-pin moving skeletons (Twinkl template), just for fun!

Everything Zen ..

... I don't think so.

The 11+ (sorry Transfer Test) created a pretty stressful couple of months (understatement). As an antidote I had the idea of making mini zen gardens. I was giddy with optimism and self-congratulation at this easy, quick, genius idea. Clever me.

A quick search on google images only served to reinforce the fact that this was the best idea I'd had all week.

Problem 1 was locating suitable frames. I spent an unhappy 20 minutes crawling around in a spidery loft, banging my head (in frustration and also on the rafters) until I found a pair of matching frames. Unfortunately they had our wedding pictures in but I was too fed up to keep hunting so now I'm looking at my younger self, in a big white dress, stuck on the fridge. If I could go back and give advice to 20-something-newly-wed-fridge-girl it would be : don't even think about making a mini zen garden when you're 36. Oh - and spend less time on, or in, the fridge.

Problem 2 was finding sand. And gravel. And shiny beads. I didn't know Buddhists could be this demanding. Sheds were searched, craft drawers emptied and in the end, in despair, I tipped a load of sand out from the candle arrangement on the coffee table. Phew.

Problem 3 - tools. The loft, sheds and craft drawers are full to bursting with everything, literally everything, except for mini zen garden tools. Luckily, we foraged some sticks from the garden and set to making mini rakes with a glue gun and some swearing.

We're 2 hours in and I'm still waiting for a serene feeling of deep inner peace to descend.

Finally, with frames, sand, gravel, beads, candles, stones and custom-made mini stick tools all in play we were ready for some serious relaxation.

Re-designing was fun, it was like an etch-a-sketch.

Not enough fun to eclipse problem 4 though.... there is sand EVERYWHERE.

I spent the next hour hoovering. I think zen is overrated. I'll stick with gin.