Scrabbling back on to the track.

It has been amazingly foggy here for much of the day, felt despicably wintery. Could have completely done without going out, but when i asked Ams if she wanted to go to nursery, catching her mid excellent narnia game with sisters, i got a resounding “YES!!!!” – hm. So we took her and she fell into the arms of her two cronies, who came shrieking out of the classroom with shouts of “she’s here! she’s here!” They’ve been upgraded to ‘sisters’ this evening, so i guess she likes them. lol.

When we got home we had agreements to get back into some normals and do some SOTW (must give it its own category.) Fran is very motivated by her reading tree, so sat down to do a book for that; there is a tacit agreement that short books are fine but they must be challenging and she’s really abiding by that. Amazing what a counts for reward really, there is no ultimate prize, just filling the tree is the goal. Anyway, today was The Tale of Tom Kitten. She still reads aloud but i don’t hang over her, i want the pleasure to be hers, rather than feel like a chore. She seems to like it.

Maddy and i did some maths, working on teen numbers. Must spend some time building them with her tomorrow. Fran did word sums but we kept it brief since it was the first day back to it after 2 weeks.

Then Maddy “read” an ORT book to me. She wanted to do something like Fran’s tree and settled on her idea of word flowers. Maddy contributed her two words “I” and “look” (“see, i told you i could read….”) and after some brainstorming we discovered she knew quite a few others too, so we added those. I got briefly distracted and when i came back she was stood in front of it making up sentences from the various words. Next time i went past, she had spontaneously broken into written sentences! Fran still doesn’t do that!

I had to giggle though: i looked at what she’d written and couldn’t quite figure it out. Between each word she had put a cross. I asked why and she said,
“That is to mark the spaces, so you know where each word ends.”
“Ummmmm…. why don’t you just leave spaces?”
“Oh yeah, i never thought of that….”
*bewildered giggle* The most amazing thing was that having had this pointed out, she didn’t get cross or lose heart, she did it again. All on her own. I love that girl.

Once we’d been reduced to giggles by Josie, who was doing a comedy act from her lunch chair in the form of a deeply funny “thinking” pose, so clearly copied from her sisters that it was just hysterical, we went off to read about the Fall of the Roman Empire. First impression of SOTW is good, Fran loved it and although Maddy was distracted by Josie, she did listen in too. Fran drew several pictures based on what she’d heard, asked lots of sensible questions and was able to link things up with stuff we did on the Romans a year ago.

Fran’s picture of the view from our magic carpet as we fly over a Roman bridge in a town.

It all went mildly pear shaped when i lost my temper with Fran because despite wanting to do the mapwork activity, she managed to lose concentration 3 times and make a completely idiotic mistake, like colouring land blue and water yellow. Eventually i lost my temper, screwed up the third attempt and hurled it across the room. Who IS the grown up????? Bad mummy. Luckily it was time for gym, so we went to that, they had fun, we came back and had a nice tea and then she had another go.

She did it beautifully actually, she’d really taken in the things that had gone wrong before and it was neat and accurate and she knew what it was representing. Unfortunately Josie then managed to scribble on it but i can rescue it, i think. She was very proud.

Plan is to whisk through the first few chapters as it’s stuff we’ve covered recently, finishing off the Ancient Life project as we do. Then we’ll slow down and spend more time on the fresh stuff. I’ve got the book on Muslim Heroes of the Crusades that Hannah kindly got for me and from the look of it quite a lot of the Sonlight Core 2 books i have will fit in alongside it too, so i think we can have a nice year with it. I think i’ll restart OIS too, picking out the stories that fit and then carrying on with it as and when it works to do so.

Finish off with Maddy’s picture frame.