Bitty week.

Children were too tired on Monday for the outing I’d optimistically arranged the evening before, so I had to miss the outing to the hyperbolic crochet workshop 🙁 Tried very hard not to let my disappointment get to me or adversely affect the day, but it was always going to be a tough one (day that is) anyway.

I do sometimes envy the full program some of the children of some of my friends get. I know that my friends are arranging it for their children rather than for themselves 😉 , but very often I’d like to be doing the whatever and suspect it can be a bit wasted on under 10s! My children, however, rarely want to do anything much. It worries me rather that they are not getting a full and varied home education experience, but I try to console myself with the fact that I am responding to their needs instead of mine. Hm.

Monday evening we had battle royal with Small trying to get him out to Beavers. The whole leaving the house thing is next to impossible atm, and I’m rather at a loss as to what to do about it.

Tuesday it was back to work and Small started his new maths book. He’s now on the same Singapore maths book as Big and the way he’s gone at it this week he’s going to catch her up in no time. Understandably she was kind of upset by this, but we had a few talks about it and I think she’s more or less OK with it now. Small seems to be in a workbook frame of mind atm – we found his KS1 Success Workbook: English and he worked through about six pages of it in one marathon sitting. Gave rise to some interesting conversations – one of the sections was introducing verbs and as a word that isn’t a verb, had “water”. We discussed whether it could be a verb – to water the plants for example, and decided that the book isn’t really all that good. Still, it gives us a springboard for that kind of discussions, lets me know what we have and haven’t talked about and has the benefit of ticking all the boxes should we ever want to compare with key stages, or more likely, meet an inspector who does 🙁

Despite our low opinion of the content of this book, we are considering getting a couple more in the series, for both springboard and box ticking purposes. I do find that looking at the National Curriculum and SATs reassures me rather – there are times when I feel we aren’t achieving very much because of the incredibly short time we spend doing anything academic. When I look at the national standards I discover that my children are at least at the standard required for their age, and very often far above it, even in areas which seem to me to be weak. Need to remember that concentrated one-to-one attention is worth many hours of school time.

As well as academics, we’ve fitted in a few other bits. Both have been inspired by our new RSPB membership (clubcard deal family Christmas present 🙂 ) and have started nature diaries. Found some nice glittery scrapbooks in thing-me-bobs (odd little shop on main road in town) and they are using those. Small drew a tree and collected leaves to stick to it, and we looked up one of them. Wondering if it could be time to start a 100 species challenge. Wouldn’t really care if it was plants, animals, birds, local wild or planted up, would just be pleased if I managed to get them to be observant enough to identify 100 living things!

The plant that they found seed pods from this time was Honesty in case you are wondering.

Wednesday I dragged Small (almost literally) out to music. Quite pleased with myself that we weren’t the last there (small pleasures and all that). As I’d assumed Small loved it – they learned about pianissimo through to fortissimo by dimuendo-ing and crescendo-ing up and down the room. Also singing, rhythm and composer (Ralph Vaughn Williams) – an excellent session. And of course they went swimming Tuesday night – Tim walked them down while I walked out with soa in wrap to get bits of shopping.

Which reminds me of our other family challenge. We’re all trying to improve our diets by having fruit at lunch and dinner. Small and Tim find this particularly challenging as neither of them are partial to fruit or vegetables. I’m finding it’s slightly cutting down my chocolate and sweet things cravings which is good, as I’m very down about the state of my body atm. Breastfeeding means no dieting for weight loss, not that I usually diet to lose weight anyway, I usually just cut out chocolate and try to up my exercise levels. Right atm I can’t easily up my exercise levels either, and in fact today I feel completely wiped out without even considering exercising. Wondering if I’m slightly under the weather or whether boosting my vitamin/ mineral intake might be advisable.

Right, this is already a ludicrously long blogpost, mainly because I’ve been interrupted writing it more times than I can count, so I’m going to hit publish and see what I’ve missed out later.