As usual Thursday and today have been chill out days after the home ed meeting, so I thought I would just fill in a few little things that have been going on in the background.

For instance, this morning we were looking out the window of the bathroom as usual while brushing Ram's hair and spotted a woodpecker! I had heard from a neighbour that there was one in the village, but this is the first time it has been seen in our garden.

We always keep some binoculars in the bathroom, along with a bird book, so we spend around 15 minutes watching it look for insects and trying to decide which species it was. We are still not sure because it seemed to have more red on the head than a great woodpecker but the middle woodpecker isn't found in the UK. It definitely wasn't a lesser woodpecker as it didn't have the red on the rump.

This week we have also seen a lot of rabbits in the garden. They are coming over from the paddock behind us. They are so bad again this year that they have eaten a lot of things in our vegetable patch, and they are now all over the farm yard too!

We also found a dead pigeon in the garden this week. I thought it was alive at first and couldn't understand why it didn't fly off, until I realised it had died while perching! When I knocked it off the perch, I found that its feet and legs were very swollen. We asked the gardeners who know a lot about birds from their experience helping with game keepers and there said that it wasn't mites but some kind of tumours probably.

We also had a good look at one of the snakes. The smaller one was in the compost bin this afternoon and the gardener picked it up for us to have a better look at it.

Over the past week Ram has just been playing Dawn of War on the computer and I have been reading to him. I was thinking that not much education has been going on, but actually, there is more to the book we are reading than I realised.

We are reading Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett, and the motif is Imperial China and Maoism.

In fact, the Wikipedia page on the Discworld series is very useful as it lists the motifs from each of the books. Besides China apparently Lemmings, the computer game also appears in this book, but we haven't spotted htat yet.

We have spotted many things about China though, some from the Adam Hart-Davis series What the Ancients Did For Us, which is a lovely way of consolidating what Ram has already learned from watching the TV programme .

How much more fun it is to read amusing books, and watch birds out of a window, to show how much you have learned, than taking a test in school!