Festival of Stones

Last year, a few days before Advent started, so many of the blogs I read posted about their Advent preparations.  I hadn't really given it much thought up until then, other than we could something......I had mixed feelings about it as I was not really sure what Advent meant to us as a family and it is already a busy time of year.  There are many festivals thoughout the year most of which are largely ignored.  Christmas and Advent are Christian festivals it seems somewhat hypocritical in a our increasingly secular society to be placing such a disproportionate weight on it, it seems to have lost its meaning and become all about buying and receiving.  This doesn't sit well with me either.

So, determined to make a better job of it this year, I started to think, a few weeks ago, about what we might do.  This might seem like I am placing alot of weight on it too, but I wanted it to be about celebrating and learning and I always give myself time to prepare for each project we do.  We are using the same framework this year as last, the Festival of Stones, which gives us a different focus each Advent week.  All of our projects fit around our usual weekly rhythm, we will however return to this one each year, so I can continue to refine it each year.

I love to read other blogs.  I find them inspiring and insightful on so many levels.  Occasionally I read about something that I would love to do too and I park it in my memory, and hope that it stays there, to wait for the right time.  I read a while ago now about a lovely ritual, drinking tea with proper cups and saucers and sharing poetry.  I thought this would fit rather well into our Advent project and the poems would be added to with stories and crafting.  The children love it.

So tea cups in hand and our advent candle lit, we read about what Advent means and the story from the lovely book, The Festival of Stones by Reg Down which I discovered last year.  It has stories for each week of Advent, in the first week the story centres around a festival where everyone brings a gifting stone, we arranged out own gifting stones on our seasonal table which we rearranged, removing some of the Autumny bits to make a bit of room.  The book basket is full of Wintery and Christmasy books.  Other reading we have done throughout the week is a book on all the traditions of Christmas that were introduced by the Victorians, a charming version of the Nativity story, a story about how it feels to be amongst people who celebrate Christmas when you don't, a Scottish folk tale about giving at Christmas time, a tale about loneliness at Christmas and a charming Astrid Lindgren story about a search for a Christmas tree.  We also read several poems about crystals, Christmas traditions, the Nativity, and Christmas trees.  We also relearnt the Advent song that we learnt last year.

Cameron has never been a huge fan of crafting that involves getting your hands dirty or sticky so it it not something we have ever done a huge amount of, I wanted to include some crafts and chose carefully so he could feel included.  He has loved them and has asked each evening what are we doing tomorrow.  We have made window rosettes, a pretty and simple cuff for our advent candle which does a good job of hiding the scruffy candleholder underneath, and some stars and snowflakes it took us a while to working out the folding bit from the instructions, that has never been my strong point.

We live in an area rich in geology, it is one of the most geologically diverse and mineral rich areas of the country.  For our Wednesday walk we went looking for an igneous intrusions that we had found on our geology map of the area.  Despite the continuous rain we have had here for the past month it kindly let up for the three hours we were out.  We found what we were looking for and the all the recent rain meant that the river that flows over it was a fairly full waterfall.  It was quite an adventure and we probably stopped to do a bit too much looking, we were fast running out of daylight on the final descent!

I managed to finish the play capes and the felt star decorations I shared earlier in the week and an extra unexpected afternoon at him meant that we have made a dent in the Christmas card making.

Next week is the Festival of Plants when will be doing more reading and crafting with a focus on the plant kingdom.  See you then! Have a lovely week.

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Apologies for the large number of big photos in this post, I had hoped to be able to put some collages together using my usual website but an update to our Apple software means that it is no longer possible until Apple fix a bug.  Don't you just love computers?

The photos are a bit on the dark side too it has been like twilight here all week. The seasonal table photo was taken at around 11am and the table is next to a really big window!

Projects

We have had a busy enjoyable day out today, which had been a great end to a very very long week.  My eldest has rekindled his interest in World War II over the last few weeks.  This was his project of learning in the spring and early summer and we had many visits out during those months.  Most of the books he is borrowing from the library are now about this, his own books about this are being reread, all his daily drawings depict scenes he has been reading about, his made up Lego models are of vehicles from this time.  So I am back to looking for interesting places for us to visit to support his interest and learning.

So today we made a long journey to this place.  I had to be organised and make a picnic the night before, as we needed to set off early, at a time when we are usually just waking up!  It was a very cold morning at home so I packed for every type of weather, the boot was full of clothes.  I am glad I did as when we arrived it was a beautiful hot sunny day, so the first thing we did on arriving was to find the toilets and get changed.

The museum itself is on the site of a prisoner of war camp.  Each of the old huts has a theme, the Blitz, U Boats, Women's role during the war, etc.  Each hut is like a small museum.  There is a lot of written word in most of the huts, little of which got read by any of us today.  The snippets that I did manage to read I did share.  If you read all the information in every hut I think you would be overloaded.

Like all information from this period some of it makes for difficult reading and viewing.  It always leaves me feeling, why?  How can humans do this to each other?  In particular anything to do with the concentration camps.  I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau some years ago, even with all the reading I had done and pictures I had seen nothing can prepare you for seeing it for real.  At the end of the hut which contained pictures, very sensitively put into a small side room, of the concentration camps there was a chapel.  As I walked through I felt compelled to sit down and pause.  I needed to sit quietly and gather my thoughts, to make sense of what I had been reading in all of the huts.

In an ideal world we would have no wars, but I am realistic this world is not for idealists.  What I can do is help my children to understand why war is not the way to resolve conflict and that peaceful solutions can and should be sort.  I hope I can do this, one small step at a time.