Don't know no education.

Couple of good days here again. The girls have been heavily into the borrowed copy they have of High School Musical and along with them dancing and singing and strutting their stuff, i’m horrified to find i’ve started singing the tunes too 😆 Is it me, or does the lad in it look like he ought to be in the original line up of Bucks Fizz?

The reason for this is that F&M (a collective abbreviation, lol) are doing  the show at their Easter Musical Theatre workshop and they wanted to know it beforehand. They’ll be the younger ones there thoguh again, so i doubt even Maddy will be out of the chorus, but no doubt they’ll survive not being the 2 main leads 😆 However, they’ve been watching it on the singalong version and it did have an interesting side effect; Maddy came to me with “no” and “know” written on a piece of paper, demanding to know exactly what the meaning of this anomoly was. I was happy to oblige – and even happier knowing she must be reading along well enough to have managed to spot something that didn’t make sense to her. Result 😉

Josie impressed Claire by bringing 3 biscuits into a room, one for her and one for each of us. Apparently this means she’s a mathematical genius (though how Claire would know, i can’t imagine 😉 😉 😉 )

Amelie can read P&J 1a and b, perfectly effortlessly from whati  can see. Slightly alarming to see her having absolutely no difficulty with it really, though it just can’t be ‘raspberry’ reading because she doesn’t know enough letters. But the concept, the shapes of words, the pattern of sentences all seem to be there and certainly her recall for the words is rather good. Maybe this is how most kids can learn to read and my eldest 2 have just been unusually uphill and late (i totally know how ridiculous that last sentence is, just humour me!)

Fran finished Charlottes Web the other night and hurtled down the stairs in floods of tears 😆 So my girl 🙂 Apparently it wasn’t the end of Charlotte, so much as the babies flying away that made her cry. She woke up crying about it twice in the night but seems to have overcome it now! She’s now reading The Worst Witch, having not found anything similarly weighty without too small a print size otherwise available on the shelves 🙄 Afterall, we only have about 8 million books here….

Yesterday she and i did some maths together after she hit a hitch on EC – it involved working out a percentage discount on a price. Going through it, which she got but i’ll find more practise for her, i was amazed (again) by how many mathematical concepts fly around in your head in one simple transaction; fractions, halving, doubling, percentages, decimals and even the weighty issue of reading it all well enough to understand that the answer is the piece you’ve taken away(the discount) and not the more obvious figure of what had been paid. We drew a LOT of diagrams during that 😆

She’s been carrying on with French, i’m trying to take a more active role in Maddy’s guitar lessons (basically fine, slight stress this morning when i pointed out that stopping, lying it flat on your lap and spending 2 minutes finding the 2 notes didn’t in fact constitute having learned a tune well enough to move on!) Mum knows a Suzuki cello teacher who lives fairly nearby and i’m debating that. Will have to discuss it with Sarah!

Emma has done some project work with the girls this last 2 days, putting together some basic Islam stuff. I hate this, get really finicky and want to do it for them, but they find it helpful  and i know it is an approach that works well for them in terms of absorbing and visualising info. BUT i’m going to have to admit defeat and knuckle down to getting some half decent presentation and effort out of them. Fran doesn’t stop to think and it’s basically my fautl for not being prepared to grit my teeth and sit by her to help. ARGH. back to that next week. Still listening in, Emma did a great job covering stuff with them, so all good really.

She also did maps with them yesterday, including looking at a book i borrowed from Helen and covered keys and scales with Maddy. Came in very helpful later over a map of Islamic populations. And then they all finished off with a game of Cadoo while i sorted some stuff out.

Had to get everyone out by 2pm and was unusually ready on the dot; then realised i hadn’t seen my keys for a week. Hunted frantically, to no avail, eventually rang Joe who is up here visiting their Gran ( 🙁 ) and he went and got Max’s key for me. This meant that i was 2 hours late leaving, except that i never had to wait for Max’s key because immediately Joe retrieved Max’s, i looked across the room, saw a basket of toys and thought “they are gonig to be in there, aren’t they?” And they were 🙄 :wall: Why? I have absolutely NO way of KNOWING !