just another morning here

I left the boys at home this morning while I went into the office, and this is what they got up to. Apparently if you lay out all our geomags in a line and measure them, we have 5m 12cm of them Which is the same as approximately 4 Josiahs! He’s counted them this evening as well, he made it 246, and I’m not going to be bothered to check Think they did a bit of reading as well, and violin had been done along with the girls’ music practices first thing in the morning. Oh, and they went to Sainsbury’s, too.

I had tried to extricate Joe from his school trousers but he insisted on wearing them all day! Think I will have to move them from his drawer …

Meanwhile Russ gave me palpitations by asking me to move cars around the forecourt before the mist/dew had lifted, while the exhausts were still billowing white around the back of the cars as you reversed them – I absolutely *hate* manouevring cars around that tiny site! (how do you spell manouevring?). We got the website photos sorted too and then ground to a ‘no customers here’ sort of a halt with nothing much left to do.

So I came home at lunchtime, and the afternoon was then spent re-discovering the electronics kit, and a few jigsaws, as well as a bit of bedroom tidying. In fact a LOT of bedroom tidying, in Abbie’s case! Found a few pairs of shoes to donate to the Blue Peter Shoebiz thing so that made them happy, Blue Peter being one of the girls’ current favourites. Anyway, they obviously like having a tidy bedroom as they’ve disappeared up there together straight after tea … I should help tidy it more often

Have been relatively productive this morning; all children have done some maths, I’ve made a few phonecalls, the girls’ room is finally almost tidy (well, tidy enough to be hoovered) and I’ve hoovered the entire house.

The maths was quite an amusing interlude actually. Abbie’s was all about shapes etc., which was quite easy but she enjoyed making some of the shapes with geomags to complete the exercises anyway.

Joe was doing ‘ten more’ and ‘ten less’ on his workbook page, which really he could do standing on his head juggling with fireballs, but hey ho, we went through the motions anyway. He went on to the ‘check you understood the last 4 pages’ section, took one look at it and said ‘I’ve done that before, so it’s boring’, and refused to carry on. I saw his point completely so we left it at that – he only *has* a workbook to make him feel included, after all!

Then went on to look at Anna’s with her, she was multiplying by 5 and 20 using strategies of multiplication by ten followed by division/multiplication by two. Had a hilarious moment after sitting with her for five minutes while she swore blind to me that 800 x 2 was 1060, then finally Josiah turned round from the gamecube and said ‘duh, Anna, it’s 1600′, (in a condescending ‘don’t you know *anything*’ sort of a voice) he obviously couldn’t take it any longer either – I’d almost run out of patience with her, too! She saw the funny side and finished up her page easily after that.

Made a menu and shopping list planning to go to Sainsbury’s this afternoon before Joe’s music lesson but Abbie has developed what seemed to be a killer headache and had to go to bed So Sainsbury’s is out of the question … ah well.

The sun is shining and showing up dirty windows and fingerprints everywhere, which I guess I really ought to do something about …

Found this beautiful geomag creation on the coffee table when we got home this evening – I reckon Steve’s Mum must have been a bit bored once the children went to bed!!

Top marks for Geomag creativity though

We got up *really* late this morning and didn’t finish breakfast until 11am! Steve has successfully procrastinated about going to the tip, and put it off until sometime next week, so we’ve bummed around not doing very much.

Anna’s done music practise, and the other two have done some of their new maths books.

Josiah’s been driving me bonkers with his today, wanting to do it every spare minute. Today he’s already done five pages, in the process informing me that he was doing one activity ‘in alphabetical order’ and then another one ‘in aserical order’ (he meant numerical!). He’s done number line stuff, o’clocks and half pasts (fine on the o’clocks, bit dodgy on the hour hand on the half pasts still), measuring in centimetres, adding up coins and working out what coins would add up to different amounts, and is now working on a bar graph to show numbers of shapes or something! I keep telling him to stop, but he’s not listening to me. Of course really I’m hugely proud of him, he’s using a book meant for Yr 1 – not that I set any store at all by the National Curriculum, but it still makes you feel good. His writing is getting much better so he can actually write the numbers legibly now, which makes things much easier. I reckon the only thing in that book that he *won’t* easily be able to do is writing numbers as words, but I definitely don’t really see the point of that in any case! Since when is *that* maths?!!

We took the opportunity of having Steve around to get a science kit out, it was about light today, and I’d been saving it – my physics is decidedly ropey and Steve is much better at explaining stuff like that than I am. Always good for a few decent rosy way HE snaps, too, those kits!!

First we tested materials to see which were transparent, translucent, or opaque:

We looked and shone light through a prism and saw white light being split into the colour spectrum (and spent ages trying to take photos through the prism )

Then made a colour wheel to spin and try to see the white light – this turned into an elaborate construction of spinning device with geomags, which didn’t actually work any better than spinning it on a pencil, but they had fun trying! This then digressed into Dalek building, as you do

I think Abbie has got a black/white heat/light absorption experiment going in the conservatory too, and there’s been lots of discussion about light waves and reflection and how we see different colours. So all good stuff; Steve’s now teaching the kids to play poker (not sure if that is good or bad!), we’ve got a cello lesson and Sainsbury’s shop to do later, then I think I’m being let out for a drink with Ruth this evening.