declared Small this evening.
He’d been asking for Brown Beaver’s phone number, and I wanted to know why he wanted it. He said that not everything had a why, and I said I thought it did. His response was that there was no why that the earth started, and I have to admit, I had no comeback on that one. So he wins the argument there.
Aren’t 6 year olds still supposed to be trying to work out the why for everything? Rather than disproving that there is such a thing. I think I love how his mind works though, it’s so sideways to everyone else!
In other news this evening Big and I made apple crumble between us – I did the easy bit of peeling and chopping apples and left her to do the crumble topping while I took Small to Beavers. Got a phonecall from Tim while I was there to confirm that I had finished the filling and immediately cottoned on that this was because Big had read the recipe and was concerned I’d left out the flour. I’ve never put flour in my fruit filling before and wasn’t about to start now, but this had left Tim in charge of a daughter who can read recipes and likes to be precise, and if she can’t be precise she’ll be dramatic. But I was a mile away so I couldn’t hear the histrionics for once 😆
As I seem to be relating the day backwards I’ll continue. Afternoon was somewhat annoying as they started it by fighting at which point I gave them both more work to do. Fed up of the bickering which so often results in one or other of them in tears, so if I have to schedule the whole day I will 👿 Which was a shame as we’d had a pretty good morning – the work spun out over 3 1/2 hours, but that was mainly because they were really enjoying the history aspect of it, yet another Great Lesson, courtesy of Miss Barbara, this time on the coming of humans. Small is particularly taken with it all, and the maps which I printed out to go with it, and we discussed it all for ages. Then he went off and drew a timeline of a possible evolution of spiders, after confirming what evolution meant.
Big loves history, so any time to discuss any historical aspect goes down well with her, and recovered the morning after a struggle with her English. The struggle this time was with the question, which I’d read ahead and thought was straightforward. What I hadn’t anticipated is that she doesn’t do idiomatic language, and so she didn’t have a clue what most of it meant. The question was asking her to work out the meanings of various idioms (eg getting into hot water, showing a clean pair of heels) and then use them in a sentence, and I suppose I could just as well have asked her to translate them into another language for all the sense it made to her.
How has she got to nearly 10 years old without me noticing this in her? She reads voraciously, but I’m now wondering how much of it actually makes sense to her. Anyway, instead of her using them in sentences, I got her into Credo reference online courtesy of Suffolk Libraries and we started looking up the idioms and finding examples of usage. I’m hoping that was a better idea than the plan in the book.
Small finished his book (The Thing from Knucker Hole
) this morning and they both did their maths without too much fuss, so despite the whole thing stretching out, it felt relatively painless. Oh, and I nearly forgot them working together to make a clock face for Small to continue practising with – they even roped Tim in with that as he passed by.
So that was Monday.
Sunday was quiet – I made it out for a walk on my own in the afternoon, and Tim excavated one of the two garden sheds. The one he sorted is insulated out, for no apparent reason, so may be a bearable bolt hole even in winter 🙂 Small did demonstrate that he’s cracked telling the time by reading the clock accurately to a time that we hadn’t started work on yet 😀 He’s still a little hazy around the minutes to stage, but he’s pretty much got the principle of it down now.
Saturday was even quieter, mainly as I’d had a dreadful night’s sleep Fri-Sat and after fighting with my blog for most of the morning (and losing it has to be said 🙁 ) I retired to bed for at least part of the afternoon.
And that is where I need to go now.
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