just another morning here

Started off thinking Steve was going to be home for a day off from 10am onwards but he rang and cancelled, either the day looked like it was going to get busy, or being at work was preferable to having a day off! Probably cheaper all round for him to be at work … so, we got to work as well …

Joe read one of his Start Right books, and we played with his wooden letters – I’m trying to help him with sounding out words, just simple 3 letter ones. He will look at three letters (eg J-A-M), say the sounds correctly, and then when he puts them together he just changes them for no apparent reason, (eg he’d say JIM or something equally random!). Start Right use both phonics and ‘look & say’ with the children, but I think Josiah has picked up on the ‘look & say’ stuff and needs to build up his awareness of phonics so that he can sound out unfamiliar words. Anyway, he’s only little yet, doing really well with it all, but he does like to be doing ‘work’ alongside the girls. I am thinking of using 100 Easy Lessons with him, but not until the summer holidays when there is a decent break from Start Right, as I don’t want to confuse/overload the poor child – but I think he is more than ready *and* able.

Anna did some more stuff on verbs and tenses, while Abbie did a short reading comprehension thing. Oh, and Anna’s finished ‘The Miserable Mill’ (Book the Fourth in the Lemony Snicket series), too.

Abbie did some lines of symmetry activities, all fine, and Anna had moved on to tenths and decimals, which again, she’s actually understanding, until she has to try and write it down – strange. The Eduss software has been great in supporting it all though, we’ve been watching the little ‘teach me’ clips together and she’s found it helpful. I had to phone them today to try and unlock my re-installed version, and they are sending me an upgrade – just thought that might interest anyone else who has it (Joyce, Merry?) because it will make it transportable between pcs.

After a bit of chilling we came back together again and ripped up newspaper for papier mache – always satisfying, that part! We were going to make Greek vases, to tie in with our somewhat overhanging Ancient Greek project, which is sort of half finished, because Christmas got in the way. Anyway, I decided that the vases were going to be somewhat too complicated for everyone, what with bases, necks, and handles, so I’ve made one which they can decorate together, and they have made a pot each as well. I need to go and put another layer on in a minute.

Erm … then Mollie came over in her brand new school uniform (she did look very sweet), it was her first day at school today – so they all played schools for a while, we’ve bongoed (is that a word?), and made dinner much later than usual because the garage is now staying open until 7pm Monday – Saturday. Steve is now educating the children with regard to special effects in film, apparently. Just don’t ask

Grrr! I get really cross when what is otherwise a relatively decent workbook (if there is such a thing ) treats something all topsy turvy. Anna’s page today was all to do with fractions, touching on proper/improper fractions, and part of it was asking her to write a proper fraction as an improper fraction, which to my mind is the wrong way round. And there was no ‘vice versa’ activity … so she found it really confusing. Anyway, I reached for Eduss to help me out and found that Steve had deleted it from the computer in a fit of tidying up one day, so double grr, I had to re-install it … anyway, once I’d gone through the rigmarole of sorting it out we did a few fractions exercises with it, watched the ‘teach me’ section on fractions, and she was fine with it, although some more practise probably wouldn’t go amiss, at some point in the future. Sometimes I also find that it’s the things that *I* find easy that are the hardest to explain, especially to Anna because she simply doesn’t think like me … Abbie was leaning over her shoulder the whole time telling her how to work it out … I despair!

Anyway, we’ve also done some verb/tense pages plus the last Lemony Snicket activity with Anna, handwriting with Abbie, and looked at the results of the pepsin experiment, which, thankfully, had got less ambiguous overnight This afternoon is dance and drama at school for Anna while I have odd jobs to do, then tonight I have a meeting, so I must go and bongo now while I have the chance . Steve says he might have sold my new Sharan from under my feet, so I may yet get the Zafira back … !!

Abbie’s not really very well today so we’ve been at home doing not very much. I feel a bit bad, really, because anyone watching us this week could definitely throw the socialisation argument at us, the kids haven’t seen anyone other than Mollie from up the road and Rosy from cello lessons – oh, and a few grown up friends I suppose. Ah well, they don’t seem to be suffering too much.

The past couple of days have been really nice, actually – Steve’s been at home with us Yesterday we all mucked in cleaning kitchens and bathrooms, music practice, some more DWN, then we went out to Crealy for the afternoon, which was nice too. We were practically the only people there, and the children were able to feed the guinea pigs and rabbits with one of the Crealy Rangers. We got to see some day-old guinea pig babies too, which was fab, they were sooo cute! The kids played, and Steve & I chatted. Mainly about whether it’s better to renew our membership there next year or go for something else – they have finally realised that Josiah should really have his own card as well now, so we have got to decide whether to get him a ticket and renew ours too or go for a family season ticket somewhere else. At the moment we’re veering towards another year at Crealy simply because it is so convenient to us – and it does have a lot to offer, especially in the winter. I think there are probably more educational places we could have season tickets for, but we’d probably visit them less because they’re further away…. the boon for us with Crealy has been that it’s been a really decent place for the kids to let off steam while we catch some valuable time together. There *is* educational stuff there too, and lovely walks down by the lake, and the animals … and the coffee

Later on we (Steve & I) went out to our church small group together, and then for a drink together after that, so more chatting was done, which feels pretty good.

Today Steve took Josiah to Start Right and has been working most of the day, with a break for half an hour to come home for a Channel 5 photo shoot. I dragged Abbie out to pick Joe up, but really she’s been a bit wasted today, she’s got a cough, and is running a bit of a temperature. She went to bed after lunch, but managed to get up and be in the photo with the rest of us, so that was good. We looked very industrious I’m sure, although it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary at the moment, they took photos of us all round the table with the Draw Write Now stuff out. Anna, the vain thing, had requested that I curl her hair with the tongs this morning, so I spent half an hour doing that while watching the section on Home Education on Channel 5′s ‘The Wright Stuff’. Anyone would think I was doing some free advertising for Five TV today, think I’ll stop there

Did some maths with both girls this morning – Abbie was working on patterns in one of her books, while Anna did some rounding up and down to the nearest ten, then hundreds too. Followed Anna’s stuff up with the practice exercises on Eduss, which she enjoyed, for once, and did well at. Also did some reading with Joe and Anna while Abbie was in bed – Josiah read his Start Right books to us, and Anna and I have finally got round to starting Little House in the Big Woods, which we both enjoyed, but Joe did get a bit fidgety after two chapters.

We’ve given up a bit again now and the kids have opted to watch Oliver on video. D’you think I can claim a bit of literature/Victorian history there? Aunty Jacky is coming later for another Ancient Greeks session – Anna’s worked on her Greek Gods family tree and her own family tree as homework since last week, and the girls are both enjoying the project I think.

We’ve got business stuff bubbling away too – Steve is always looking for the next step in expanding things, and it’s a challenge to find the right place and people that we need to help us make it work. It’s a bit slow at the moment, but going well generally, and I think we just have to keep exploring new avenues otherwise it will get stale and boring … and one of these days I might even get round to doing something more with Two Red Boots … other than the New Year Bookbag Venture, of course, which I will keep mentioning just so that everyone remembers to take part

Successfully put off doing the shopping till later/tomorrow by getting Steve to buy us chips for lunch when we went to run some errands for him today, so that was good. I usually manage shopping with at least one less child than normal, and that’s impossible during half term especially as Steve’s dad is off so Steve is working at the garage all week, not to mention the fact that the supermarket is full of other people’s children too. An evening or early morning run to the supermarket will be infinitely preferable this week I think.

And I’ve procrastinated on the cleaning front, too – Monday is usually bathroom day but Steve is planning to re-seal around our shower cubicle this evening because it has a slight leak, so clearly I couldn’t clean any of the bathrooms, no point, as I’d have to clean the upstairs one tomorrow so I might as well leave them all until tomorrow … the queen of putting things off, me!

Other than our errands for Steve, we’ve been lazing around the house in true ‘half-term’ fashion, despite the fact that it makes no difference to us really. Except it does – all our regular activities stop, yet we don’t want to go to places that we’d normally go to when there aren’t any activities on because the rest of the world descends on those places at half term, so we stay at home! And I somehow feel ok about being relaxed on the educational front and very virtuous if we do actually do anything that might constitute education! I’m probably repeating myself, I’m sure I’ve written this about half-term before!

Josiah has been slightly hot and floppy for the majority of the day (hence my excessive PS2 playing, easy to do with a floppy child on your lap ), he has a nasty cough and is generally feeling a bit yucky, I think. Poor chap. I am half planning to redecorate his bedroom sometime soon as due to a mixup in credit card payments (yet another!) we have a goodwill gift voucher from Courts (they charged our card twice for our dining room furniture) which will go some of the way towards a new bed for Joe if they have any. I’m going to have to go down and see, because they don’t have any kids’ beds listed on the website yet I know they do have them in the shop. Anyway, so if I use this voucher as part payment for a bed it would be worth decorating his room before it arrived … I’m sure it can’t be that difficult, it’s only a little room! Famous last words, eh?

Anna has played Reader Rabbit Yr 2 and Zoombinis, Abbie and Joe did a reading comprehension activity together from a box of story cards that we borrowed from the resource centre the other day, they’ve played outside and with Mollie, we planted our avocado seedling into a pot (finally), and I’ve played PS2.

Oh, and Anna did some adding money activity or other on Eduss, but soon got bored because they were asking her to add money in columns using carrying, and she didn’t want to add and carry, she wanted to add it up in her head, as you would normally do with money! For once I completely understood where she was coming from, it was a daft activity, in my humble opinion – if you’re going to add and carry you might as well use normal numbers … even adding and carrying with decimal points would be fine, but for some reason you just don’t add and carry with money, do you? You start with the biggest denomination and count up, don’t you? Well, at least, with the numbers they were giving Anna she could manage it by counting up, so she didn’t see the point of adding and carrying in the longhand sort of a way, iyswim.

Anyway, I’m not going to blog again till I have some pictures to post, this page is incredibly boring without any photos! Hopefully that will make me do something somewhat more organised (or at least worth photographing) tomorrow …