About

I'm Rachel, and this blog documents our family's life and adventures in the UK, where we moved in 2018. We moved from a big city in the USA to a little rural village in the Cotswolds. We homeschool our two kids, so in addition to adventures, I also write about crafts, cooking, and little bits of daily life as we live and learn together. Welcome!

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Poetry Teatime: January

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Poetry teatime is sort of a "thing" in home ed circles, originally inspired by the Brave Writer curriculum. Traditionally it happens on Tuesdays, and the idea is to introduce kids to poetry while savoring tea treats and making memories. I have always loved the idea, but a weekly tea hasn't worked in our schedule for a variety of reasons, and consequently we never did teatimes at all. Then, as I was planning our 2020 home education year, it occurred to me that we could do a poetry teatime monthly instead. This works perfectly for us for a number of reasons: one, I already try to have a theme for our learning each month, so I can just fit tea time in with that theme; two, I can handle prepping a fancy tea once a month even with a new baby; three, it fits better into our schedule by giving us space in the other weeks to explore other interests. This is especially important for Justin who, in his own words, likes poetry "okay" but doesn't "
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Becoming Bilingual (and Figuring out Flour)

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Eric has been speaking only Spanish to the kids since they were born, so they both understand pretty much everything (even if they reply in English). We're used to being a (passively) bilingual family. But I didn't think we'd need to learn a new language when we moved to England! While we understand most of what people say to us, there have been some moments of misunderstanding. Today at rock climbing class, for example, the teacher told Rebecca and the other kids to "queue up" behind him. Rebecca looked at me like he was crazy--"Q up?" I could hear her thinking. I translated and she fell in line. A few weeks ago, before the flu took us all down, we went to Village Coffee Hour at the church. The nice woman who runs it offered the kids a biscuit. They looked highly skeptical at first until they realized that biscuits were chocolate chip cookies, rather than something that goes with gravy and mashed potatoes. Snack foods are especially tricky...Frenc
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Nauntonbury

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As I mentioned earlier, village fetes are a big thing in the Cotswolds. Usually our village hasn't had one, since it's pretty small. But this year a family in the village decided to host one in their horse field to raise money for the village hall and a local hospice. Glastonbury (the music festival) wasn't held this year to let the fields re-field themselves, so they dubbed our village fete Nauntonbury and had music along with food and games. It seemed like a big success, as hundreds of people came.  I manned the face painting booth, and painted the faces of quite a few of the village kids (and maybe a dozen or so adults, too!) I forgot to take pictures until the very end of my face painting stint, so I only got a few from my seat. It was another beautiful day and it lasted well into the night. I only face painted for the first few hours, and then we all went home. (Oh, we also made a few trays of apple cider donuts for the bake table--bringing a little New England t
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