Keep kneading!

Its a shame it wasn’t M today, i could have found loads for that! As it is, a spurious link to the salt dough will have to do! We did bake and make again today and for a first effort the girls ones have turned out quite well. They need painting over the weekend and i daresay we’ll do some more, but it was fun.

However, that was far from the main events of the day really and in fact today was a rather fabulous illustration of just how well children do if left to themselves.

It all started with our cylinder blocks – now for one reason or another i haven’t really got round to using these yet but they are on the shelf and get played with periodically. Today they had one set out and were alternately fiddling with them. Then one or other of them got out our knobless boxed cylinders and they started to build towers. Half way through doing this, i wandered past and pointed out that if they got all four sets of each out, they would find certain ones matched other ones. Now in fact our knobless ones are proper Montessori ones but the blocks aren’t and only have 7/8 cylinders and are not in the same colours. But they spent a really happy length of times going through various processes to work out which set did the same thing (bigger and wider, smaller but not thinner etc) as another. Very enjoyable to watch and i was completely hands off, doing houseworky stuff, so useful from all points of view. Even better, they tidied up when they were done!

After that, almost immediately, Fran found a little tape measure that came on a magazine the other week. She and Moo settled straight into a period of measuring EVERYTHING, body parts, tables, toys etc etc and she and i had a short conversation about centimetres, which was all very interesting. Its one of the things on my list, weighing, measuring and volume but i’ve not really got into it much although when they are up at my mums in a few weeks, she apparently has plans to do some project or other with them on all that stuff. Very her thing so i shall leave them too it!!! However, the game then progressed into a shop where you paid by length (an interesting economic idea in all sorts of ways!) and so they spent a very happy morning measuring, counting out money, putting things in bags, role playing, turn taking and all sorts of other terribly National Curriculum type ideas. Still, given that none of it remotely concerned me, i was rather chuffed for them!!! I was really pleased to hear Fran doing her 2x table to work out how to get near 7p from 2p pieces; that is not something i have suggested to her so although its not neurosurgery by any means, i had a huge grin on my face to hear her applying something we have “done together” in a really practical way.

While all that was going on, i thoroughly decluttered the dining room, put away washing, scrubbed the bathroom and bunged out a load of videos! That was EXTREMELY enjoyable!!! Its all now looking very clean and tidy but i have decided i need a little dustbuster thing for going round edges. Upright Dysons are severly crap when i comes to edges and so i never do them. (Yes, yes, i KNOW life is too short but i’m nesting, okay???!!!)

Towards the end of the day the girls chilled out with a video of Mulan while i did bits and bobs. Then while i did parcels, Fran came and asked to earn some 20ps – i happened to have on hand some sheets i made where you add up pictures of coins, 3 or 4 at a time so i offered those and she did loads of them. And she got them all right, and she independently worked out it made sense to start with the biggest coin and that crossing out a coin as she added it made sense too. She also sat and thought out how to write 120 and 110 today – she knows them when she sees them but seems to find it hard to get them from her head to the paper but today i could hear “one in the hundred column…” as she did it. Good on that girl i say!!! It felt like a nice mixture of the practical and theoretical :~) and its such a relief for me because of all the things that panicked me when we decided to HE, maths was it. Her reading is just blossoming too, she is sounding out new words all the time now.

Finished off with another “Tale” (about Spiders!) and a couple of Aesops Fables.. so, an upbeat day i have to say!

I’ve got a couple of things i want to do and if i list them here i will:
*Make crib card for Monte materials we have.
*Laminate and prepare some Miquon sheets.
*Put together a few “craft packs” so i can just get them out and get going at a suitable time.