Achievements of the day

We’ll start with the darker ones so that we can end on a high note.

Major achievement – getting through the day without throttling either child or bursting into tears. Not quite sure what’s the matter with me atm, must be partly stress related to the fact that I *still* haven’t heard about the results from Saturday (I’m assuming it’s a no, and spent £40 today on a course to brush up my Java skills, but it’s still rather irritating). Plus there’s the whole financial thing, but hey, who isn’t skint?

Minor achievement, I finished another crochet square. I think that makes 4 down, only 46 to go…. takes me about an hour at a time to do these things, so looking at it that way, plus what it’s going to cost to mail all these things to the States, it’s a real expensive blanket I’m going to end up with! Hohum.

Oh, and I put another couple of articles on the business site rewrite (don’t look at how long the rewrite has been underway!)

Otherwise, another day focussing on TV ed. I am trying to be involved in the watching of the tv programmes though, so that I can back up anything that’s overly confusing. And given that Big is watching maths shows aimed at Year 5, there’s a fair bit that’s confusing. Did I mention yesterday about making a set of fraction cards? Probably not, but that spun out of one of the Maths channel programmes. We did another reading lesson as well, and that has to be the major breakthrough of the day – Big read most of a book!

Drum roll please, this has been a long time coming! It was one of the little make it yourself books out of the Jolly Phonics workbooks – I’ve come to the conclusion that Toe by Toe is a bit too intensive to do on a daily basis, so I’m trying to back it up with a variety of other approaches, but preferably nothing that clashes. Big has now very definitely got the idea of sounding things out, but I’m finding it intensely frustrating that this includes trying to sound out the word “the” twice on one page….and so on, and so forth. I also want to scream because she can’t sit still, she’s got to wriggle and writhe, stare at the ceiling, kick her leg around, ask daft questions about unrelated topics….aargh!

She wants to read. She really wants to read. If I threaten to stop the lesson we get tears and pleading. So why do we get the performance throughout?

Anyway, there you go. We also went out to ballet this afternoon, for the first time in ages. Bit perturbed that most of the rest of her class appears to have shrunk in the wash since the last time we were there, which was going on for a month ago what with one thing and another, but still disconcerting. Wondering if she’s been held back because of our uneven attendance, but she hasn’t said anything about it, so I’m not going to raise it either.

Less positive happenings include her trying to pick up Small and dropping him on his face (poor boy was bleeding from his mouth somewhere, but wouldn’t let me look. Ate his tea though, so can’t have been too bad). Hang on, didn’t I say I was going to finish on a positive note? Hm, did I mention she read a book? 😉