Feels like a full week (this is now last weeks blog though!)

S has been here all week on a block placement which means we’ve made a huge effort to get on and DO things, since having 3 adults some of the time is too good an opportunity to be missed. In general the normals thing has just been “happening” with lots of supervised EC, lots of writing, dictating and maths (Fran put maths as her favourite subject on a Newsround form the other day!) All the girls are getting through their maths books alarmingly and bank breakingly fast. We’ve got a tables chart and all the older three are working on getting those off pat now and we’ve done quite a bit of work with cards and other materials i’ve had for ages. EC is hugely popular too and it’s also a major pleasure to see Maddy reading for pleasure much more often.

I can’t really remember anything else now, i’m sure there was stuff. On Saturday i wnet to the Toy Fair with Alison as my sidekick. I had a lot of fun and found that (mostly) i get taken reasonably seriously these days, particularly (ahem) when you mention turnover figures! Some people are unbelievably snooty though, like they frankly wish they didn’t have to put up with mere RETAILERS! Humphf. Found some great new stuff though, looking forward to it. Was also lovely to have a day out with a good friend without having to deal with the toilet trips of anyone but our own! 😆 Loved the trip though the docklands, as usual, and due to a forced detour, had to go back via Canary Wharf, which had me walking along with my mouth open like a child in Wonderland. What a fantastic place.

Other news for last week is that Josie moved out of her little bed and into a big one, the pairs of girls swapped rooms so the big 2 are now back in the big room with the bunks and are about to get it decorated. Oh, and Josie is now properly in knickers, remembers to go to the toilet and has pretty much stopped having accidents totally. SO, all good.

We’ve concentrated a lot on Charlotte’s Web and i’ve been approaching it from the standpoint of encouraging them to try and pick out the salient points of a chapter, block of chapters and (hopefully) eventually whole books, so that we can start  to do book reviews. This week we’ve done Hama Beads of all the main characters and bits of scenery and S and the girls made a stage out of half a box, all painted out. To do that we got them to visualize the opening scenes of the book and try to imagine they were directing a film of it. We wrote everything down that they imagined, how they would portray those first impressions and then used that list to paint it all out. They went considerably further than i intended and made quite a bit of 3D scenery for it, fences, a pig sty and so on. It was great and has inspired me to do some set building with them (I LOVED THAT STUFF!) All that led us on in the book and to build on the notion of 2D and 3D i asked them to do a 2D pic of Wilbur’s escape. Everyone but Fran did; she decided to do 3D (spirited!) but it was probably the best ever model she had made. Must do photos. We also used the resource book and did some sheets of stuff, thinking about words that described people and sequencing.

Friday, by way of a change, we made a start on our winter/water project; we raided the shelves and pulled out