so obviously the kids were completely self entertaining yesterday. Sigh.
Well, I was mainly more available, apart from the hour or so I spent shopping for clothes that would go over the bump without sweltering me – got a great denim dress for £5 in one charity shop and a lovely bright ethnicy one from the hippy shop for considerably more 😉
Bit of a crisis all round in the afternoon when the media centre turned itself off and refused to turn itself back on, meaning that I had to watch Federer streaming on the netbook. It doesn’t stream well, and the screen is a bit pathetic for it, so all in all not overly successful.
Then Big and I had a bit of a fallout over the learning journal/ book review. To recap, she told me that she wanted to learn more about Victorians and improve her spelling. In an effort to polish off two birds with one stone and keep slightly Montessori with it at the same time, I suggested a learning journal for her to document what sort of things she’s been learning about which would allow us to work on her spelling when I checked through it. So she read Mill Girl (My Story): A Victorian Girl’s Diary, 1842-1843
which seemed an ideal thing to write about, and I wasn’t sure why she was dragging her heels over it.
Turned out that she didn’t know what a book review was. And was not in a cooperative frame of mind about it – even threatening never to read another book if she had to write about it. I recap again, these were the things *she* asked to learn about – and she doesn’t consider it learning if she doesn’t write things down with me working with her. Even bigger sigh. So we talked through what a book review might be and she wailed and stropped and wrote three or so sentences, mainly with dire spelling.
I bought her a spelling dictionary
and a workbook because she said she wanted to improve her spelling, but now she doesn’t want to do even that, she is so terribly afraid of getting things wrong (don’t know *where* they get this perfectionist streak from, honestly!) that it makes her kind of difficult to even talk with about this stuff.
Obviously more thought required. But for now, no more book reviews. On the plus side she is covering pages in her diary that she bought for herself, so I do know that she is writing, just not anything that she’s showing to me.
We recovered the evening by going to a Brownie fun event in the playing fields of a local high school. Children thoroughly enjoyed spending 20p on a variety of stalls and not winning much of anything, then buying a book each on the 50p stall while I funded their food and drink courtesy of the BBQ stall. After an hour of standing in a very cold wind my back was aching unpleasantly so we called it a day and came home. And that was another day.
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