Monico Family Travels

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  • Monthly Archives: November 2018

    • Child-led learning as inspired by Argentina

      Posted at 7:04 pm by Charlotte, on November 30, 2018

      This post celebrates more of the amazing projects Bella and Emily have created each week during their Autumn school term.  These projects epitomise ‘child led learning’.  The girls come up with each concept, inspired by what they see around them, then Rob guides and inspires them to incorporate creativity, maths, research, art, writing skills, life skills and much much more to deliver output, presented on Fridays (over over-the-top G&Ts) always as a prelude to our weekly movie nights.  They usually reduce me to tears (a bit like the school assemblies).

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      Project time G&T Woppas!

      School, MonicoFamilyTravels – style 

      This project was the planning, scheduling filming and editing  of a short video describing the cadence, routines and teaching styles of school MonicoFamilyTravels-style.  I think it speaks for itself:

      Artistic works inspired by Los Potreros

      Los Potreros is the wonderful estancia we stayed in north of Cordoba for a week. Animals abounded, and cosy nights in front of log fires, and new friends with wonderful hearts and fabulous senses of humour.  All this inspired a series of artistic works including the below:

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      Los Potreros Acrostic Poem by Emily and Bella

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      ‘Mist’ by Bella

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      ‘Masai’ by Emily

      How the Humming Bird got her name, by Emily
      How the Humming Bird got her name, by Emily
      Hermione the Humming Bird
      Hermione the Humming Bird
      How Trumpet got his name, by Bella
      How Trumpet got his name, by Bella
      Trumpet's accoutrements
      Trumpet’s accoutrements

      Core health

      James and I had roles as patients in this weeks ‘core health’ project.  The girls gave us full medicals including eyes, ears, and teeth. Bedside manner was occasionally a little boisterous / unusual, and I think I’d be rather concerned if either of them head down the route of becoming a dentist, but overall they now know the difference between pulse and blood pressure, I have got a new vision prescription, and we escaped almost unscathed with a more-or-less clean bill of health…..

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      except for a few broken bones….

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      Bridges

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      This project was inspired by the Zarate bridge, and incorporated sketching, technical drawing, history, maths and an intro to engineering and architecture skills.  

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      The culmination was an impressive to-scale model of the bridge, manufactured from cardboard, fruit boxes and balloon string. Impressive stuff!

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      The big reveal!

      End of term festive finale

      We were treated to a concert of Spanish, popular and Christmas songs, by ‘Arthur Band’. Lyrics were adjusted to celebrate the crazy world of MonicoFamilyTravels as a fitting and nostalgic end to the first term of school.  Thank you to Bella, Emily and Rob for a wonderful evening of entertainment, and for bringing the Christmas spirit to Las Palmas.

      Last but not least, PEN LICENSES!

      In recognition of an age-old St Christophers tradition, both Emily and Bella earned their pen licenses (and new fountain pens) this term to honour their very neat joined up writing.

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      Posted in Argentina, Countries | 6 Comments
    • A day on the river

      Posted at 3:27 pm by Bella, on November 17, 2018

       

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      A very nice family invited us to have boat ride and try out water skiing on the Panal River.  The river was calm but sometimes in the middle it was wavy.  It was very wide and sometimes you get massive cargo ships passing by (its the third biggest river in South America).  Before lunch, Emily and I had a go at water skiing but first Ernesto taught us how to do it by practicing standing up on his lap.

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      When we had got the skiis on in the water we got hold of the rope and let it slide through our hands until we could grab hold of the handle.  Then we had to position skiis parallel facing the boat with our legs as bent as possible.  It was sometimes hard when the current picked up to swing your legs around to face the boat.

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      On my second try I managed to stand up on the skiis.  You had to keep your skiis in the exact same place otherwise you would have a wipe out (I had quite a few!).

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      Got it!!!

      Nobody ever told me that once you got up you could stand up fully so I got loads of water in my face, but it was so exciting to fly across the water.

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      Mummy also got up on her second try, and stayed up for AGES, because she didn’t know how to stop when her arm’s started hurting!

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      Daddy weaved side to side across the wake of the boat.

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      WIPEOUT!!!

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      Emily got to drive the boat and took us safely back to the dock.

      Posted in Argentina, Countries | 7 Comments
    • A cumpleanos muy feliz!

      Posted at 8:34 pm by Charlotte, on November 16, 2018

      For my ‘pre- birthday’ James took me for a romantic weekend to Buenos Aires.  We took flight from the country (in our muddy ute) off to town on Friday morning, and enjoyed a day of hygienic waxing and cell phone service shops, interspersed with glasses of Mendoza’s best sparkling.  We stayed in a gorgeous hotel and had an amazing and iconic view of BA from our room:

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      We eeked out the evening by watching a movie, then going out for dinner at 10:30pm (for once there were other guests in the restaurant with us!), and then hitting a local bar in BA’s equivalent of Belgravia.  It was posh, noisy, served mega strong cocktails, and reminded us why we don’t really go ‘out out’ any more….

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      On Saturday James had arranged us a private street art tour around La Boca.  We saw tonnes of new artists vs Palermo, and enjoyed the stories behind the pictures which are much more politically driven.

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      The actual day of my birthday was wonderful and full of surprises:

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      Tea and a card in bed from Emily

      which led into a special breakfast, also courtesy of Emily:

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      And a gorgeous card and scented candle from Bella:

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      We have a ‘no school on birthdays’ rule for the trip, so in the morning ‘uted’ down to the clubhouse, played some tennis and had a swim in the gorgeous 25M pool.

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      And then more surprises, in the form of a dead frog

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      and a live one rescued again by Beanie Bot……

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      Lunch was a perfect chicken salad and crisp white wine, on the terrace, on a beautifully sunny day, all laid out by the girls – it doesn’t get more idyllic than that!

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      Our afternoon treat was our first family polo lesson…….well we did a quick circuit to prove we could all ride, learned the ‘forehand’ in about 20 mins, then played a match for about 40 minutes which got surprisingly heated (or may be not that surprising….).

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      And resulted in some blisters:

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      So one of my birthday treats each year is that the girls let me ‘do’ their hair, however I like, so I indulged myself with some French Plaiting.  The cherry on the cake however this year was the removal of James’s mullet.  I exacted some wifely revenge by leaving a rats-tail which amused us all for a few days!

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      Dinner was a 3-course treat for which I lifted not a finger, but rather my glass many times with crisp G&T followed by champagne, then delicious Malbec with the tender lomo that James lovingly cooked on the Asado.  Huge thanks to James for cooking / orchestrating, masterminding, to the girls for baking and decorating the cake, and to Rob for a beautiful table, and some sooty sous-cheffing!

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      The final hurrah was my gift from James who was Topsy the Arab (named due to her affinity with spinning, but actually called Safira) who he rented for a week for me.  She was very very pretty, un poco nerviosa, but charmed us all, especially when she learned to drink from the hosepipe when I washed her down after sweaty rides.  What a brill prezzie from the BEST husband.

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      Posted in Argentina, Countries | 9 Comments
    • So they cancelled the Day of Tradition…

      Posted at 9:06 pm by Charlotte, on November 12, 2018

      ……in San Antonio de Arecco…..but we went anyway……. for no logical reason: the hostel we had booked was significantly less comfortable than our lovely home in Las Palmas, there was 100% certainty of rain (the torrential kind with keep-you-awake thunder), and all the outside events had been postponed till next weekend.

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      After an extreme expectation setting effort by Jimbob, I was genuinely impressed by the cleanliness and friendliness of our hostel, (and he was initially relieved when they kindly put an extra mattress in our ‘girls’ room so he didn’t have to bunk up in the mixed dorm……but less so next morning when 6 nubile Aussie lasses trooped down from said dorm to breakfast in their pjs).  We met some other interesting travellers there, including an older lady who was traveling with her sister (the dusty ‘in a box’ type) which led to some interesting explanations and speculations!

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      The rain held off for the afternoon so we took a walk around town and enjoyed an exhibition of top quality Gaucho artisan work.  Highly skilful craftspeople had produced some brutal bits and spurs, some beautiful knives, bridles, and belts and as for the boots – I want me a  pair (made-to-measure of course)!

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      Our evening plan had been to join the gaucho bonfire and dancing, but having walked over a mile to the outskirts of town to find that there wasn’t even a sniff of it starting by 10pm, we surrendered to our English bodyclocks, and bailed to bed (the spritely older lady let us know at breakfast the next day that it really started ‘kicking’ at around 1:30am).

      Tenacious to the end, the following morning we we wentIMG_20181110_115907.jpg to Parque de Criollo where the Gaucho displays and games should have been staged.  There were a few hopefuls like us lingering around, and a few gauchos hanging around on their horses.  Turns out gauchos are pretty accomplished at hanging around, and they out-hung most of the hopefuls, but we hoisted the girls into a tree (from whence we could no longer hear their moaning), and stuck it out until the gauchos decided to put on a very fine display of traditional skills (begrudgingly credited with ‘worth the wait’!).

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      Before heading home we enjoyed some local brew and empanadas.  We went to a general store which was purported to have been converted into a cafe, but which more closely resembled something out of a cupboard at Hogwarts.  

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      On the way home it rained A LOT.  And its been raining ever since, A LOT.  We have become highly adept at both bucket placement and speed-mopping which are certainly good life skills to bring home from our adventure!

      Posted in Argentina, Countries | 2 Comments
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