Given that neither Tim or I are working outside the home atm, the pattern to life here is somewhat fluid. Weekends are slightly more marked in that they are our chances to see the ppl who do work, relatives and friends both, and we made our most of our chances with a ppl filled time this weekend.
Saturday we saw James and Lily, they came over from Manchester via train (managing to find the one direct one an hour that I didn’t find out about until I was at the wrong Manchester station on the way home the other day!) and we had a lovely salady lunch, and then inflicted Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets [2002]
on them. Lily was quite happy to watch as she’s quite a Harry Potter fan herself (turns out she’s a River Phoenix fan too, showing wonderful taste :grin:) and James suffered in silence. The children had had yet another Potter fest, as they’d watched film 1 that morning as well. Bit of a hiatus in film watching now, as we aren’t watching the third instalment until we’ve listened to it. It’s waiting for us at the library but I didn’t fancy going out round there today 🙂
Yesterday we went to see my parents for the exchanging of birthday gifts as it’s been Big’s and mother’s in the last month. Mother was very happy with a WHSmiths eastern style jewellry wrap, although she’s already thinking of repurposing it into an evening bag, while Big got more clothes. She might finally have enough long sleeved tops to make it through a week now – and she got more trousers too.
The children enjoyed playing with the lego boat in the freezing conservatory and we adults talked, drank wine and watched the snow flurries with some trepidation. Eventually we headed off back northwards and had a very unpleasant run past M’hell where the snow was thick and the drivers thicker, until it cleared up around jn 37 and the rest of the run was easy. There did appear to be some accident on the other side that had blocked the way for some time but I couldn’t find anything about it from the news.
Today has been a quiet day. The children have been outside in the snow twice. They’ve both done some reading (bet you can’t guess what :rolls:), Big has done some logic puzzle and both have computed for a while. We’re going to watch Ballet Shoes (BBC) [2007]
as we’ve been discussing Emma Watson, work, money, darwinian purposes and so on in one of those wandering conversations that makes you wonder precisely what they do take in.
Oh, and Small has spent quite a lot of time this weekend figuring out months of the year and days of the week. He’s got a new clock in his room, which has a digital display of day and date as well as the analogue time, and he got down last year’s calendar and discovered a page at the back with a calendar for this year. It would be very nice if he’d work out days of the week – we have tried on several occasions to get this through to him, but as has been proved many times now he learns when he is ready to learn in his own way.
I have noticed today, and you don’t want to know how, that he really does not learn from example. Which means that Montessori in terms of presentations was never really going to work for him. The materials though, with their self correcting aspect meant that he could work things out, and I think I need to continue putting things in front of him that work in that sort of way. I’m increasingly tempted by Stile Maths, I think he’d like it.
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