As promised to the children, my alarm went off at 8 am this morning. Given that I didn’t get to sleep until well after midnight, despite being in bed before it, then woke again at 5 and did that horrid drifting dozing thing for a couple of hours, it took me several minutes to force myself out of bed. Several minutes too long – I heard Big hit Small as I was putting my dressing gown on 🙁
Not impressed with her, and wouldn’t listen to her excuse in which it was all his own fault, probably for existing. Instead, I separated them as soon as they’d finished breakfast, had them dress one at a time, and then set them to getting on with some of the stuff that they got yesterday.
And that was the pattern for the morning. Big moaned, wailed, rolled on the floor and generally performed, but was eventually persuaded to write up a few sentences about Victorian toymaker advertising in her learning journal. Small, during this time, worked his way through some of the CD-ROM that came with the usborne french book. He was very happy with that, and didn’t require any prompting or assistance.
I was quite cross with Big. I do not see myself as her teacher, but it would appear that for things she wants to learn, which are separate from things she just does, she does see me as her teacher, and as such, it’s my responsibility to make these things happen. School really wasn’t a good idea after all, if that’s the impression it left her with. Never mind, I have a long term plan for weaning her off the concept, and it started today with me refusing point blank to tell her what she needed to write, and insisting that she wasn’t allowed to copy either.
Once she’d done that, I read through it and wrote out the miss-spelt words on a separate sheet for her to copy several times. I doubt that it’s the best strategy for learning spelling, but it will do for now. And after that she copied two of them out again to get rid of the capital letters in the middle of words. Hohum.
Then she moved on to maths. This was a better attempt than normal, although still protracted and painful. At least she removed herself to the bedroom so that she could work at a desk for the duration! Small moved on to the Journey To The Moon (Maths Adventures)
, which turned out to be quite fun for him (at least, I assume that’s why he worked on it for an hour and a half 8) ) but in desperate need of some proofreading. I thought he was struggling to multiply by 10 at one point, but when I reread the question carefully I saw the problem “if you run 3 kilometres in a morning, how many miles will you run if you run 10 times as far?”. Given that this is a very basic book, I don’t think they actually meant you to do the conversion!
After that, Big read the funny poem of the day to herself from Read Me and Laugh
and eventually moved on to making a list of things that would be handy for an exploratory beach walk from the Usborne Nature Trail Seashore
book. Once she’d got the list, she hunted for some of the things that we already had, and made a list of shops where we could get the others. So lots of writing today. We were hoping to get to the beach, but a Suffolk downpour (bit of a shower for you northerners) put paid to that for the day.
When Small had eventually had enough maths (thought he was going to go through the whole book in one sitting!) he did some reading, and then we had lunch 🙂
Oh, and excitement of the morning was a small bird cannoning into the french windows, and shooting off again, leaving a trail of little white feathers behind.
The afternoon started with a musical interlude, with Small choosing Bat Out of Hell
(which obviously I had to sing along to, love that album!) while Big preferred The Immaculate Collection
.
After that I read them both the poem of the day out loud, and then Big started to play computer games, with Small as her cheerleading section. As they seemed to be fairly well settled, I took the opportunity to go to bed!
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