Assumption Day Tea and Craft

I'm hoping to adopt a weekly tea and craft activity, I've "borrowed" the idea from Dawn over at:
 
Sun and Candlelight

The Assumption of Our Blessed Mother as cited in the Catechism of The Catholic Church is as follows:

"Finally the Immaculate Virgin, preserved from all stain of original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory... and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, so that she might be more fully conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords and conqueror over sin and death.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a singular participation in her Son's Resurrection and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians."

There appears to also be a blessing of first fruits associated with the feast, so we celebrated with Strawberry Clafoutis and the thick Guernsey cream represented the cloud on which she was assumed into heaven!  We did actually manage to set the table with tablecloth and napkins, flowers, candle and a statue of Our Lady, but I forgot to take a picture.  Pip was quite sweet as she wanted Our Lady looking in her direction!

The craft activity was courtesy of Paper Dali, this lady is amazingly talented and her web site is a gold mine of information and downloads.

 Buttered dish lined with juicy red strawberries.

 Benedict mixing a thin batter to pour over the strawberries.

Bake in a moderate oven for about forty minutes... a really quick and easy dessert, it also works well with plums and cherries.

Whilst tea was finishing in the oven Sara marshalled the troops into action and they all set to with rakes on the newly cut lawn:

"The Dance of The Rakes!"

 Paper Dali Assumption craft all finished, the middle piece is moveable so that information regarding the feast can be displayed as Our Lady is drawn up into Heaven, ingenious!

Today was also our first day back in "home school" mode and once again the white box on wheels came in very useful as our portable school room!  Benedict worked on:

visual place value using the Montessori beads and cubes,

  skip counted in tens,

wrote out spellings for the week,

looked at speech marks and there place in the written spoken word

mental maths incorporating pyramid addition,

read from our Famous Five reader.

Not to be outdone Pip has been busy with her own programme of works, she had great fun playing with the gears set:

Concentrating hard.

She also recently discovered a new game which has become a firm favourite, "Crash, Bang, Wallop" soundtrack game by Orchard Toys.  It is just lovely to watch her concentrating hard on the sound and then identifying the corresponding object from the picture pile:

Sibling fun.

We also experienced a jaw dropping moment one night at tea when she proceeded to count the squares of chocolate on the table, ten pieces in all!!  I think she has inherited her Dad's maths brain... Benedict is very much like me, give us a good book any day!