Polymer on the patio

It’s so nice to feel motivated again and lovely to feel that the children are keen for the same. There is just something so nice about a fresh house, it makes all the moving hassle worthwhile. Well, almost worthwhile. It is good to have some routine back.

Started the day with some word cards i made ages and ages ago and found in the move. I think i adapted them from the Underhill site ages ago, but i can’t find them on their site now. Anyway, lots of baisc words, laminated – Maddy and i spent ages at the table cutting ones out, getting her to identify a word she wanted from a sheet and then creating sentences from them, which she wrote up and illustrated. She loved that and i marvelled at her intelligent guesses and her writing. Clearly the “Fran experience” proves that children who make a lengthy foray into “unintelligent guesses” will also learn to read but it is nice to work with a child who doesn’t feel the need for that particular brand of parent torture 😆 Moreover, Maddy appears to be learning to read via writing, while Fran still moans about that. Maddy and i rarely open a reader type book together, yet her word awareness is coming on nicely.

While she was busy with that, Fran was working on 6 EC year 3 exercises i set her, charged with getting 100% in each before she was done. Took her a while but the effort itself wasn’t too much for her, more the ability to sit there long enough not to forget what hse was doing. She did a bit more of the French too, then swapped with Maddy who worked through a load more maths and english on it, while Fran and i did some writing stuff. After the “I am from…” thing the other week, i thought it might pull her string to get her to try and write about herself a bit. We set out a list of words she was going to need together and i wrote them out for her (since forcing her to actually think to that extent might just have taken the fun out of it!) and then i left her to it. She did several sentences in decent writing and all quite nicely constructed and punctuated, which pleased me as we don’t spend much time on that sort of thing really. She is going to carry on tomorrow and i’m hoping we might string it out over the week in some form or other; i really want her to realise that she can in fact do this. She has obviously picked up construction and punctuation just from reading (as an aside to that she read to my mum from “The Borrowers” at the weekend and mum remarked on how nicely she reads outloud and how nice her expression is. I put that down to listing to lots of well read story cds 🙂 mainly as my reading outloud was sparce until a year ago). Was good to know that mum and my nana, who is a bit HE dubious, got a taste of how well the “learn to read late-ish” approach can work. Fran is reading something by Gwyneth Rees now i think. She’s definitely a lightweight when it comes to subject matter!

This afternoon i got out a Fimo type kit i got from Sonlight a while back and let them loose. I didn’t look, because i knew i’d get controlling, but the book itself was excellent and gave them exactly what they needed, which was ideas for picnic food for their SF’s. Fran and Maddy spent pocket money at the SF site today and have been happily playing with them at various times. Anyway, i’m off to bake the results and will photograph them later. I can do that now, as i’ve found the camera lead. (Actually, that is a rather shortened version of the truth, which i am too embarrassed to blog!)

Girls are at dancing now, with proper buns, me having been finally shamed into being a “hair mummy.” Got to organise a party now as Fran 8 next week 😯