No Bravery.

Title only applicable to me really. This song by James Blunt brought me up short today, in a moment i had no right to be even having. I’m putting it here to remind myself of myself.

Have just finished reading a chapter of The Horse and His Boy that i really love, one where Shasta finds himself walking, in a dark moment, with an unknown stranger by his side. Turns out to be Aslan, who has been waiting for him to call so that he can give him help and comfort. You can say plenty about imagery in Narnia stories, but that particular image is, to me, religion and culture wide. All religions seem to have an element of “turn to me and find me there” in their god. It’s something i deeply envy. Had a very powerful effect on us as we read it actually; we’ve not discussed the religious symbolism in Narnia at all (i’d rather do it more meaningfully when i use the curriculum) but Fran had clearly stumbled upon it during that passage. “How can someone who loves also do something that hurts?” she asked. Wish i had the answer.

Josie has turned into an upright person overnight; she showed off thoroughly yesterday and i can’t think of asingle time today i have seen her crawl. She is almightily pleased with herself and remarkably adept for someone who has walked for less than a week. she can carry quite heavy things and climb and get back down on to her feet, stretch and reach and so on. Her most favourite thing is now sitting in a little plastic chair the same as her sisters. She is almost palpably smug when she does 🙂

Today has been a very successful day really. Fran was captured by the area bits in the rods book and spent a long time working on those (dolls house floor tiles was one description we used in order to visualise what we were doing.) She grasped the idea of square units and square cm very easily and had good fun playing with them. Makes such a difference now she can read the book and work without much help – i know she is really doing it, not just following my lead. The book also covers perimeter and volume, so will be interesting to see what she makes of that.

Used my list to plan the rest of the day; i do like orgo-planning. Did occur to me that we only have half a day left free this week so i think it might have to roll over to next week!

First of all we read SOTW Chp 2 – Angles and Saxons and Beowulf. There is a great poem in the book that summarises the Beowulf story – captured both big girls; Maddy had been resisting all efforts to educate but sidled up to listen and loved it. Both girls then did the mapwork (must try to think of more stuff like that, they both like it) and plotted the arrival of the Angles and Saxons. Fran had a decent memory of the OIS stuff we read earlier in the year.

After that we got out the Timeline book, printed off some little Roman soldiers and stuck them in at appropriate points to mark Roman Empire moments of importance. There is a good BBC timeline linked from here. Alll this prompted a conversation on BC, AD and CE as ways of explaining time. I find using AD a bit uncomfortable now, i think because i am so aware it is presumptious to expect everyone to mark time from the birth of Jesus. Then we also talked about the fact that he wasn’t born in Year 0 anyway, how historians get things wrong and how before they knew that Jesus was going to born they weren’t counting downward to 0 either.

Buried among all this Fran read me a couple of books and we discussed why schools started anyway and how children used to work in mills, mines and up chimneys. And then we read a story about Boudicca from this book, a slightly more accessible OIS style book, which Kirsty suggested to me a while back. Boudicca is very much a heroine around here.

Have gone on to a bit of a Maddy alert; she’s got very stressed over the last few days, started washing a lot, her eczema has really broken out for the first time in a couple of years and she has had a couple of whopping temper tantrums, even going for me and hurting me. Last time she had violent tantrums she was 3 and much more manageable – i couldn’t actually stop her from hurting me the other day. I really feel for her; i don’t really understand Maddy in many ways, but she certainly gets her temper from me. It takes a long time to make me angry but i have an awful temper; it’s one of my worst failings i think. Once i get really angry i just want to hurt people, or myself, though i don’t 😉 . It doesn’t happen often now and when it does, i feel the effects of it for ages. I find it really hard to let go. I see this in Maddy – she is capable of really lashing out now and she really remembers and dwells on hurts and slights.

So, knowing that Xmas is coming up and she hates that anyway, i need to be pretty careful of her over the next few weeks i think. On the other hand, she is very excited about our next round of blog-bumping. 🙂

I’ve got the dentist again tomorrow. Never did get round to working on being calm 🙄

23132 words. Not quite half way at the half way point, but not too far off. Irrationally impressed with self