Home Education Resources - Inkscape

I thought I'd share this brilliant piece of software. My Dad and my husband are both Adobe fans and love Adobe Illustrator. However, Adobe Illustrator is around £600 per year. So what can you do if you want to create your own resources for HE?

Enter....Inkscape

Inkscape is completely free and open source. It can do pretty much anything that Illustrator can do, so you can design anything you want to.

I wanted to produce a handwriting guide for Jasmine that was just the right size for her handwriting. After a few minutes of fiddling around, I had this:

Bespoke handwriting paper. It's only a small first attempt, but I think it would be great for topics or arty stuff.

Square Watermelons

I was watching 'How do they do that' on YouTube with Jasmine a few weeks ago. Down the right hand of the screen was a list of videos and one caught my eye: Square watermelons grown in Japan. Apparently, Japanese watermelon growers were thinking about profit margins and efficiencies and decided that square watermelons would be much more economical to stock - they'd stack nicely on a shelf.
 

When I was watching the video I was so impressed, until they got to the end of the video. It turns out that these square watermelons are no good at all for eating - the growing process renders them inedible, mainly because they have to harvest them before they are ripe, or they explode!

Our Fruit and Veg Patch

We are so lucky to have a garden big enough for a fruit and vegetable patch. This weekend we got to work. We had to decide what to use for our planters - we have a dog and children so we were a bit worried about the plants getting trampled.

Ben, my husband, suggested old sleepers, but when we looked into it they were expensive and the treatments mean that you have to wear gloves if you touch them. My Dad suggested using old tyres. Loads of people are doing it!

So I went to a local tyre fitter and asked how much he'd charge for his old tyres. He was more than willing to give them away, so I collected them and the work began.

Everyone joined in!

We have Blueberries, rhubarb, strawberries and two varieties of raspberry. We are also growing carrots, runner beans, sugar snap peas, beetroot, leeks, celery, radish, salad leaves, lettuce, tomatoes and broad beans.

The girls learned so much this weekend. They learned about preparing soil, planting seedlings, watering them in, etc. They also had loads of fun!!