Big week for Big. She’s moved up to elementary – I went to see her new desk this morning. She’s got her own maths set, and a big pile of exercise books, for new work that she’s going to be doing. Today they did nouns I’m told. She’s absolutely thrilled with all this – showed me her new reading book which we agreed wasn’t nearly up to what she’s been reading at home 🙂
In other news, Small’s friend has stopped attending and will be being ‘home-schooled’. I shall of course be passing on contact details for all sorts of groups and mailing lists to his mother, who is still working in the children’s house. 😉 Small doesn’t appear to have quite grasped this yet it has to be said.
Today at work I got the first warning call from school – they’ve been there a year, so it’s pretty good going. Wonderful comedy of errors that wasn’t remotely amusing until afterwards as I missed the first call on my mobile, couldn’t ring the number back as it was busy, and then had front desk chase me round three buildings trying to work out which extension I’m on (we moved desks earlier this week). Anyway, he was just rather sad for himself and hot and bothered, so I headed to pick them up earlier than usual, much to Big’s disgust. So we were home a bit earlier than usual and they are both finally in bed asleep now. I hope.
So to this reading thing.
I don’t really remember books around my house as I was growing up. My father read, but my mother and stepfather didn’t particularly – the house I lived in had a few readers digest condensed books, but by the time I moved out I think a good 90% of the books were mine.
So I didn’t do a lot of reading at home. I did read some of the RDs – I particularly remember Emma and I by Sheila Hocken, and One Child by Torey Hayden. Plus rather a lot of Dick Francis and James Bond stories. At school we had a very small library – it took up a corridor space in between two areas, and really didn’t contain many books. There was one I’d love to track down, something about a child who was evacuated during the war and how she got on with her family when she moved back home. (Not very well, basically.) I think that the child was called Kirsty, and I’d be very grateful if anyone can help me identify it!
Other than that, there were some Mr? Brainstawm books, and quite a few mysteries – was it the three find outers? Think one of them was called Jupiter. And that was the sum total of my reading until a teacher arrived in my last year at primary, found me rereading the library yet again, and started bringing in his own sf for me. I do remember getting A wizard of earthsea – my dad collected sweet wrappers and sent them off to get it for me.
And the point of this tale of woe? 😉 Basically, that reading all kinds of twaddle doesn’t appear to have radically affected me now. Access to books, or lack thereof, affected me more than anything else. And as such, I’m fairly determined that whatever my kids want to read, they get to read. Within reason. But not much of it.
I’m very tired, and probably not overly coherent. I apologise in advance for anything I may have said that I didn’t mean to.
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