Time for a new approach.

Again.

Lately i’ve been seriously missing all the high ideals i had for HE when i first started out on this journey and i’d like to get some of them back. The good thing is that in the intervening period i’ve learned just how good children are at soaking things up on their own, but i feel i’m really missing out on the process a bit too much and i want some of the fun and “doing things togetherness” back. Some of the things i miss the most are very easily put-back-able and most of them just mean getting enough cohesion together that we have things to blog at the end of the day. It’s harder to blog about children who occupy themselves, but actually they were happier when we were doing more organised stuff. Now i’ve got more time back, i want us all to get some more positive memories of “doing things” together.

Besides, Fran is 9 now and even by my beloved Charlotte Mason standards, she could probably do with being a bit busier and more stretched. (Not stretched as in tall enough for Legoland rides, though that would be good too!) She’s very into animals at the moment, so we’ve printed out the application course for a zoology distance learning module that Violet and, i think, Hannah started at about her age. I suspect she’s less ready for it than they were, but we can take our time and work on it together. Perhaps we’ll surprise ourselves.

In a couple of weeks we’re going to borrow Sonlight 1 and see if that might work for Fran and Maddy. I’m hoping they’ll do it mostly together and just have some input from me, but again, we’ll see. I’d like to do it with them, but i’m also sort of aware that i don’t want to encroach too far, plus i want to do some more things with Amelie that are more on her level. She has been really playing up lately, though she does seem to have calmed back down since we changed off the Cetirizine ‘itchy eye’ medicine; she really seems to go a bit hyper on that 🙁 Bad mummy for not noticing. I’m not convinced that Amelie actually does respond positively to more attention but i’ll give it a good go. We have to get passed this phase eventually 😕

The Singapore 3rd editions have arrived now, which has been an instant hit with Fran, Maddy and me. So much easier just to sit down and get on with and both the big girls have happily done some of that first thing the last 2 days. Fran has gone back to level 3 for a while, as a sort of revision. So far it all seems well within her reach, but i never felt very convinced things had sunk in properly, so some sort of back track is in order. She’s always happier if something is well within her grasp instead of outside it and that doesn’t bother me, level 3 is age appropriate anyway. Maddy is delighted by Level 2, she just adores pages of sums!

Everyone is back into EC now too; Fran particularly likes the science games at the moment, Maddy likes the English and Amelie likes the Spanish. She’s very into the idea of languages and that particular one still really grabs her. Josie likes to sit and watch it too.

There has been a variety of crafty stuff going on from various kits i’ve dished out, painting of dinosaurs, plaster mould painting, Maddy has made an amazing Hama Bead TARDIS (meaning i spent 40 minutes reading about the history of it on Wikipedia yesterday, i’m such a sucker for a serial!) Yesterday Amelie spent ages colouring in donosaurs (gutted to discover the Ladybird site has removed its lovely dino pages 🙁 ) and learning their names. Max is gonig to do a dino day with her at the weekend. Fran is preparing for animal project stuff by working her way throghu all the schoolexpress units; i luckily managed to find my back up disk (though Vista won’t open it) as my membership expired and the immediately sent out a mail to say no further memberships would be sold. ARGH. Must start harvesting their freebies again then. So far she has done one on Pandas, one on farming (tied in nicely with the EoE show stuff) and has Killer Whales to do today.

Right. Back to doing stuff. MummyFlower and Little Flower are here, so we’re hiding packs of babywipes as pulling them all out is LF’s current fave game 🙄