Day recovered.

Shortly after my last post, Big was very rude to me. I calmly asked her to leave the room, and she uncalmly didn’t. The length of time she was to be in her room rose with each scream and stamp until Tim escorted her from the living room and told her she could stay the rest of the day in her bedroom.

After a while the wailing died away, and she occupied herself with a leappad. There was a discussion I think between her and Tim and she did come back downstairs. Then we indulged in a spot of ICT when we introduced her to her new blog – don’t have her permission to link at this time I’m afraid. We showed her the elements of touch typing, and I was amazed at how quickly she started to pick it up, and doubly amazed at how it speeded up her typing, given she’s hunting for letters that she isn’t entirely sure of.

Next was a game of chess with Tim – he says that she is improving immensely, although she did lose again. I found a link to some chess puzzles [adam bozon site sadly disappeared now Sept 2015] and she did one of those, with assistance on how to work through the possibilities logically (and a quick aside as to what ‘logically’ and ‘deduce’ mean).

Bit more chat about blogs and computers and they’ve run off into the dining room to play on the computer in there. I found her an online typing tutor which she played with for a while, but then said it was hurting her arms. We’re going to have to think about ergonomics of computer use for them both – obviously in this household computers feature quite high on the list of priorities so they will no doubt use them more and more.

She is thrilled to have her own blog – we’ve set one up for Small too, but not introduced him to it yet. Our goal is that they should both post on a weekly basis – to begin with I’m hoping for something like a picture and a sentence about it, so today we took a picture of the seesaw that Small and I built out of meccano together 🙂 Big wants to blog about things she makes and places she goes and ppl she sees, so I don’t think inspiration for a weekly post is going to be difficult for her 🙂

So a day which had a very flakey bit in the middle seems to have come together pretty well. This is probably how our education works best tbh, driven by family interests and skills that Tim and I think could come in useful. Forgot to mention that yesterday there was a quick maths lesson in wilcos, with her working out how much she had to spend, what she could afford and what coins she would need to pay for it. (Also rather pleased that what she chose to buy was chocolate treats for each of them, given that Small wasn’t there at all). Education on the fly, with frequent how and why discussions between me and Tim and I daresay increasingly involving Big and Small. We’ll get there in the end.