While soa is happy in her bouncy chair. She’s increasingly awake and alert during the day, and also increasingly happy to be separated from me for more than a minute at a time. It’s not many minutes though, so I’m typing rapidly!
Can’t remember when I last blogged properly about the older children (odd thing to say about Small!) so this is going to be a braindump of things I can remember that I may or may not have blogged before.
Small is continuing to enjoy Beavers, and now has three badges down his arm, and a Promise badge on his chest. They seem very organised at his pack – they’ve baked twice, he went to a swimming gala (Tim was very impressed, said Small did actually swim the whole way across with his float), they visited a church and wrote a prayer and last night he went to the district carol service. Even more impressive, I put soa in a wrap and took him there 🙂
He’s also still enjoying his swimming lessons, and seems to be making progress faster than I would have expected for just a half hour session once a week. Really wish I could be getting them swimming in between times as I think he’s very near to cracking it, but think by Centerparcs he’s going to be either actually swimming or will be by the end of the week.
Work wise he’s spending most of his educational time wandering through the bbc bitesize site, particularly the KS3 area which has a subsite called Questionaut. This week he’s learnt to use a calculator, and I inflicted a KS1 Sats paper on them both – he scraped a level 2A (the top of the expected level for the end of the school year he’s in) with several careless mistakes mainly down to the fact that he doesn’t write any working out down. I’m not sure he understands what working out is supposed to be about tbh, on the one question that asked him to write down how he worked out the answer he put “I think of a question and then work it out” or something of the kind 😆
Big’s big success of the last month has got to be her swimming. Not so very long ago she moved up from the yellow hats to the green hats – it was at the start of the current batch of ten lessons anyway. Then the week before last her green hat group was doing lengths rather than widths and it rapidly became painfully obvious that she is way more powerful than the rest of her group as she consistently caught up with the child ahead and had to manoeuvre round them. As a result she was sent over for a test with the next group up, and passed, and last week was her first session in with the blue hats.
The blue hats appear to be concentrating on the finer points of their strokes – turning the head to the side to snatch a breath rather than lifting it from the water in crawl for example. As Tim said, she’s already at least as proficient as either of us and there’s not a lot we can teach her although she does obviously need to develop her stamina, and continue with the fine tuning of her strokes. We are seriously considering the swimming club now as we think she would really enjoy it.
Work wise she has been exploring bitesize as well, though as she gets very stressed about things she doesn’t understand I am currently on strike where Questionaut is concerned with her 🙁 This follows a major breakdown in communication where she just flat out wouldn’t believe me that a particular part of a question/ answer was irrelevant (it was a question about coordinates on a grid, if you are at (-2, 5) how many units are you from the y axis? She was determined that she had to know how big a unit was, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get across that that part really didn’t matter).
Positive news though is that she too achieved a 2A on her KS1 Sat ;), getting only one thing wrong. They will be attempting the level 3 paper next week.
Finally made it out to the library yesterday for the first time in a month I’d guess. Big bought herself a replacement library card as she has yet again lost hers, and then got out lots of books about Anne Frank including A Friend Called Anne
And now soa is no longer happy in her bouncy chair, so blogging more about my birthday present and adding piccies is going to have to wait til our next break.
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