Are you pulling my string?

Gloss over normals… all went well, signed Fran up to paid version of Meleto; like it like it, like it. Considering doing one of the adult courses myself!!! taught Maddy B,C,D, 2 lots of E and G to go with the A and D on the recorder she already knew. 15 minutes later she has made herself a music book, drawn herself fingering guides, decorated it with notes, drawn staves and then created a completely Maddy-esque system of writing a tune by drawing letter on to the bars with different letter sizes meaning how long the note was. Completely adore that girl. Think possibly reinventing the musical wheel unnecessary though so planning to give her some basic music theory lessons. She got some great note tones, remembered all the fingering perfectly and clearly loved doing it. Felt like a huge result. Was worth driving to Scotland after all. Helen, fancy a music day? Particularly loved the fact that she decorated it with notes, then abandoned that as an idea for her own system. Just so very Maddy.

S helped Amelie with a load of maths and EC.

THEN… we made a start on the Charlotte’s web puppets. Yesterday Max and the girls did a rather good picture of an undersea scene; they used pics from the web and the DK Animal book and, starting with a person, they added creatures from Clownfish up to Killer Whale, all made to the right size. So today we measured the children and got them to think about the proportions of their own body to help them get appropriately scaled puppets.

Breakthrough moment came when Fran suddenly realised that Amelie’s body length was the same as her arm and body span. No prompting there at all, it wasn’t even in my mind, she just saw the connection.

Obviously we measured everyone then, including S and all were delighted to discover we fitted the pattern, meaning we have no aliens or people likely to die of awful illnesses. S suitably impressed and went home to measure her family too!!!!

This added a new dimension to our planning which had looked like this up until that point.

We collectively realised that we would do a better job if we worked roughly within a square.

And so we did.

And then we made a start on modelling the puppets out of rough Fimo, with flesh for the visible bits of skin. (The will eventually be dressed.) (As an aside, Maddy is very taken with this blue, highly 80’s cut of top and teamed it with leggings and legwarmers today! 🙄 )

Fran did Fern (we are back to Charlotte’s web), Maddy did Avery, Amelie did Wilbur and S and Josie did Mrs Avery.

The links are little hooks i got from Homebase (the bloke who helped me find them, all 22 years worth of him, thought my husband would be able to link them up for me 🙄 ) and we prised them apart with thin pliers, looped them into each other and then shut them again. I owe this bit of genius entirely to my mum, who once facilitated me making wooden dowelling puppets in exactly this way. I never got further than the skeletons of them but i played with the very simply wooden dolls i made for years and years. Very Waldorf 🙂

They’ve worked pretty well and seem to be holding together okay. In retrospect we should have made the bodies in fimo covered tinfoil as they are heavy. The pins seem to need you to bake it twice, once with them stuck in, then again with more fimo built around it to strengthen it, but it works. Next week we’ll dress them. We remembered (only just in time!) to put hoops in the tops of their heads!