Making It Up

as we go along

week by week

Saturday snippets 9 September 2017

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{Practising} habits. Water, exercise, creativity. If I manage to cement these in for another week I’ll add something else – maybe that I clear the kitchen before internet? (This might mean I mainly clear it before bed, but that works too.)

{Reading} actually I’ve stalled. I’ve been reading Lynda LaPlante Good Friday (amazon affiliate link – kindle price excellent just now!) which is about Tennison as a WDC in the 70s. I loved Prime Suspect and Helen Mirren, and she’s in my head while I’m reading this, but I’m really struggling with the writing style. I think maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of YA and MG which tends to be very immediate if that makes any sense, whereas this is quite wordy and descriptive rather than action driven. I really want to know what happens though, so I’m keeping on bit by bit. (And that has to be a positive recommendation – I have given up on books when I just don’t care about the characters. )

{Creating} a lot of little pictures. And thinking lots about my art in a I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but I know I want to go somewhere. Similar with photography – I’ve had so many people compliment me on my pictures and how calming/beautiful/different they are, but I tried putting them on redbubble and got nowhere. This may be because I don’t market things well, it may be that they aren’t marketable, I really don’t know. (If you’ve time to offer thoughts on my redbubble offering, it’s here and I’d be incredibly grateful. )

{Circling} on business and content much as above. I have watched a *lot* of webinars though, and I’m pretty sure about a lot of ways I *don’t* want to run a business.

It feels like time for a picture. Look, autumn!

Snapshots.

Big made decisions about A levels and started back to sixth form this week. She also did a huge amount of excavating and discovered lots of socks. So that was nice 🙂

Small didn’t start back to anything except fencing this week, although we have started exploring his college online thing. Not entirely sure what he’s supposed to be doing, so he’s just cracking on with it anyway.

Smallest lost another tooth today, and has started rereading the Harper books in preparation for the next instalment.

Tigerboy and I are enjoying a Pablo and Jane book that I’d thought was essentially a graphic novel but turns out to be part story and part hunt the picture in a picture. He’s actually really good at that sort of thing and it’s been fun sitting together on an evening staring at pictures and talking about them.

Plans for the week ahead? Small starts college (eek), and in excavating the living room I’ve found a stash of craft kits I’d forgotten so I foresee some crafting in the near future. You?

watching Mary Poppins

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Yesterday I worked from home. The break from driving was much appreciated!

Kirsty came by and dropped A off while she took M to the dentist, and despite the fact it was ages since my two had seen A they all disappeared off upstairs, and were neither seen nor heard until about 5.45, when they came down and asked to watch Mary Poppins.

Well, I didn’t have any problem with that, put it on and sat down to watch it. Really listening to the lyrics to the first time made me blink slightly though – particularly the song Sister Suffragettes, which the wonderful “though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid”. Hm. I foresee much interesting discussion of these concepts in the future.

Kirsty and M got back from the dentist, and Tim popped out and fetched fish and chips for us all. Very pleasant evening, though quite a late one – it’s a long film. Good to catch up with Kirsty, I think for one reason or another that’s the first time they’ve been round since they moved back down. Small wants to know when he can go to their house, and I think he’s in for rather a surprise when he discovers how near it is now 🙂

Then after they’d gone, I started to feel incredibly tired. A bit of an ache started up again, and by 9.30 I was sagging, so I gave up and went to bed. Slept the clock round – Tim brought me breakfast in bed about 10 and I then loafed around for several more hours, although I also had several in depth conversations with Big about various things.

She was in and out all morning. It appears that there are one or two things that she isn’t too happy about at school right at the moment, and we’re going to work together to sort them out. Part of the problem appears to be that it takes her a very long time to do any work that involves writing, so she doesn’t get time to do any of the other things that she wants to do. I’m going to take two ways forward with this. First of all, I’m about to print out a load of sentences for her to do similar sort of copy work with at home, to practise her writing in a less distracting environment. Secondly, Tim and I will make time to go up to school to talk about a plan for her education overall. As she’s only at school 3 days a week, I’d particularly like her to be enjoying the type of thing that we just can’t provide for her, like all the montessori materials that we don’t have about. They also do lots of baking and craft that I don’t have the kit for, so that’s good too.

The second thing she was upset about is that she took in a reading book from home and no one will read it with her. I did point out at the time that she took it I wasn’t sure they would want to read it, as it’s Fairy Treasure, probably not the most educational book on the planet. We talked about this again today, and I tried out an analogy of food types. Basically, some books are like sweets, not very filling, but very tempting, while others are more like fruit, good for you and nice to eat. She came up with Farmer Fred (Little Workmates) and we decided that that was like baby food 🙂

Haven’t got as far as sprouts, I suspect that’s Dickens. 😀

I know it’s a rather tenuous analogy, and right at the moment, the thing I want to encourage is reading. Requiring 30 minutes a day though is really working – Tim said that today she’d almost given up reading out loud, and was basically subvocalising – which would explain why she’s nearly read Amber the Orange Fairy (Rainbow Magic) in just two sittings. She also asked if it was alright if she kept on reading after the 30 minutes. I said that yes, I thought that was fine. 🙄

Later on, she started preparing a party for her baby. She made invitations, then burst into tears when I pointed out she needed to put on when and where 🙁 We solved that one, and she did a lovely job of preparation, and even coped when we had to push back the starting time because Tim was having a lie down. She’d got a pile of prizes for various party games, had wrapped up a parcel for pass the parcel, and Tim took pictures so that she can blog about it properly herself tomorrow. 🙂

And now they are having tea – although Small is ignoring it in favour of finishing his picture. Hoping to get them into bed at a more reasonable time tonight, as I assume tiredness is contributing to ongoing tearfulness. Big just managed somehow to trap the inside of her knee in her barbie lunch box and cut herself! Still, she’s got an Ouch plaster on now (even if that means she can’t straighten her leg, oops) and that appears to have solved the problem.

So, all in all, a pleasant couple of days. And I’ve even managed to sign the new petition for Home ed rights along with 131 other ppl. It’s not doing too badly on there – do spread the news if you hadn’t already heard about it 🙂

First week.

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Given the pattern of our lives just now is radically different to how I expected this whole home education thing to pan out, I’m applying a bit more forethought to the approach atm. This fits in nicely with Merry starting up a new reading year sort-of-curriculum blog, so I’m going to see what we can do alongside what they are doing. This (brand new) blog category will be used to document our targets and our achievements 🙂

Week one – I’ve printed out The Sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo (unlikely as it seems, we don’t appear to have a copy of Just So Stories around, I was sure we had two!) and Chapter 1 of Our Island Story and I’m going to read one of them to the kids over tea tonight.

Big has requested and done maths already today, as she wants to improve her chess (??) and there was also much scratching of heads over a puzzle at group today with Barbara’s B and Jenny’s C. Both of them did lots of drawing – Small then repeated the letters as I wrote out his name. His other astounding achievement of the day was to inform me that he was going to draw an ‘a’ and then proceed to do so.

Rest of the week, I’ll dig out a poetry book and we’ll read some poetry together (I’ve got lots of poetry books about, so we’ll just see what comes to hand first.) Tomorrow and Weds is school, so I’ll assume that both education and socialisation gets taken care of there (big assumption I know, but I’ve been to this school, and I rather think it’s an accurate one 🙂 ) which only leaves Thurs and then I’m working from home Friday. I might set Big up with a box of bits to pick and choose from over the two days.

Reading – the last couple of nights Big has decided to read one of the bedtime stories, she read Rattletrap Car and Hand, hand, fingers, thumb with Small chiming in at appropriate moments.

Other bits – we’ve had a long discussion about laws, religions, morality and commandments today, and I’m going to see if we can kick off some project work around that.

Only other thing I want to get into is finances, I want Big to understand about money from as early an age as possible, (yes, and Small as well, but he’s not quite past the ‘wow, it’s a coin’ stage yet). So I’ll be pondering what to do with that.

Don’t know whether ballet restarts on Thurs yet, need to fit in some more music and some science I think, then I’ll feel that we’re building a fairly balanced base to all of this. Going to fit in an extra language at some stage, but need to ponder how to achieve that. Occurs to me that our car journeys together could be a possible slot 😉

eta – first poem is Rainy nights, by Irene Thompson, first poem I ever learnt for speech and drama. 🙂 Have printed it out in big type with half a page to spare so that she can illustrate it if and as she sees fit.