Sand in the Ganges.

Today marked the start of our involvement in the history group work that 2 friends have been doing together for some time; i hope they felt it was relatively successful, it seemed to go all right from my point of view. Granted, 10 children on a very hot day and 3 adults who would also like to be cooler is never going to be perfect, but overall it seemed all right.

We started with a very short SOTW V2 chapter on India, no more than a taster really and i suspect more as a way of breaking up two major sections on Christianity and Islam – however, it was perfectly do able and we’ll no doubt do some more India over the next couple of weeks until we meet again to finish it. The plan is then to “do” Islam, which will be interesting in itself, given the majority of the gathering will be Muslim. I’m hoping to learn a lot anyway, not sure about the kids.

Anyway, afeter a bit of playing and lunch, we took the big girls upstairs and 2 of us read from SOTW while they crafted and coloured in an elephant )lol SOTW activities range from the sublime to the erm.. uninventive… at times!) That kept them quiet, but it was kind of noticeable that the most of it had been taken in my Linzi’s 4 year old 🙄 Might go back over it with my two! I quite liked the fact that the babes were occupied elsewhere, that the kids seemed to respond to being in a group and that all the kids semeed very happy to be jollied along and co-operate by other mums. Overall it seemed positive and refreshing – i’d like to get into doing more of that type of thing as well really.

Beyond that we did a slightly random sand art craft from the book, supposedly a Diwali thing but it involved glue and mess which naturally went down perfectly well! I have half a ton of coloured sand (what is it with buying in bulk when you first start HE? 🙄 ) so it was an excellent opportunity to get rid of some of that. It was all a bit too busy to do photos of though!

Beyond that we’ve done more on the voyage of the Beagle tonight and LOADS of Hama again, Amelie copied a fab pattern and Maddy was on a roll as was Fran. Even Josie Maxi’d.

We’ve swum and i remembered to catch maddy’s teacher to explain how hard she finds verbal instructions; cue very relieved instructor who had been wondering what on earth the issue was! 😳 She does so well now that i tend to forget and it was only when i saw her utterly floundering in the lesson last week, unable to fathom what to do without the visual clues she is so used to from people who know her well, that i suddenly remembered the teacher needed to know. All credit to the teacher, who responded magnificently and with considerable insight and Maddy came out of the lesson massively more cheerful than last week. In fact, i wonder now how much of her general wobbliness over the last week has stemmed from that?

Ah well… going to have to work now. Site has picked up after a dreadful last few days; i reckon i need to take a comfortable £500 clear profit a week for the next 5 weeks though, which could be mildly alarming! (And that is before i get paid anything!)

I will flickr later too though, got loads to put up.