18 May - 31 May
During these two weeks, I did a lot of different activities. I am still making the most of the amazing weather, so we've been outside and on the water a lot. In the mornings, I'm still helping the boys with their schoolwork. I'm still really enjoying this. I get to spend a lot of time with the family and the boys really seem to like having me around. I would say that helping them with their schoolwork even taught me some new things I didn't know about the English language or Maths.
We spend most of the afternoons outside playing with water or doing other projects. This week's theme was all about science, so we did lots of fun experiments. We did an experiment with different kinds of sweets in water to see if they would change in any way. This was a good exercise to talk about predictions because we needed to predict what would happen to the sweets overnight. We did loads of other experiments like seeing what type of water (sugary, salty, vinegary or lemony) would be best at preventing an apple from turning brown, putting paper towels in different coloured water to see if the colours would mix and create new colours in plain water, putting skittles on a plate of water to see what would happen to them and the water, trying to put an egg in a glass bottle using a match to create a vacuum inside the bottle to suck the egg in and we recreated the solar system using different sized balls. The boys were really enthusiastic about the experiments and I believe we learnt a lot about predicting what might happen in different situations and we learnt some things about physics.
After the school day was over, we went paddleboarding on the river Thames most days as a way to relax and enjoy the sun some more.
During half-term the boys didn't have to do any schoolwork, so I took that time to explore some nature parks and go for some nice and long walks. I love being outdoors and going for walks is a good way to keep moving while being in quarantine.
Because of the incredibly high pollen count currently, my asthma got really bad and I ended up paying a visit to Chichester Hospital. They ran a series of tests on be and took a chest x-ray. Unfortunately, they weren't able to help me with my breathing and after a few hours, I was sent home again. My asthma being this bad meant that I wasn't able to complete my splits challenge, so I'm still not able to do the full splits. But I'm sure I'll be able to do it eventually.
It suddenly hit me that I've only got 7 full weeks left here in the UK before returning to the Netherlands. Never in my wildest dreams, would I have thought that my stay abroad would look like this. In the middle of a pandemic, quarantined in a different country with people I've only just met. But like I've said in previous blog posts, I'm loving my time here, whether I'm at a school or just with the family. I'm excited to see what the next few weeks will look like.
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