Creatively fantastical.

Yesterdays film, The Spiderwick Chronicles, has really inspired the girls. They spent a good bit of yesterday pm designing covers for a book and today carried on the theme. In fact, the day didn’t actually start there; Max was poorly so he was home, i dashed into work and when i got back the girls were all very busily doing stuff. Maddy had made a lovely pumpkin jar (for collecting Halloween sweeties) out of card (it was fab) and i came home to find her carefully guiding Josie through a map of the world with added animals jigsaw. She sounded very much like she was home educating her 😉 Josie was lapping it up. It was lovely to hear. Fran was ummmm… not sure actually but she and AMelie very quickly got into making mythical creature sheets from various books and other sources; Fran then spent much of the day creating a world of fairies and other things in her room – loved listening to her as she variously narrated to herslef about her pictures or turned mini story lines into musicals!

Maddy then created a vampire costume for herself, threw a strop when we said she couldn’t punch holes in a mask from a board game (it is 20 years old!) so we suggested she copy it in card – and she did. Must photograph it, it really is great. She is so patient; it was a great copy, with 3 layers of card for different colours and added detail in pencils. After that she also headed into Fantastical Field Journal Land – but she went for the darker side of it and drew and made up story lines for several very evil creatures. The main one also had a poem and an extraordinary name – something like Kin Fu Kella. I printed some nature journal pages out for her and she added them into that, with details written round the side. Amelie and Josie did similar on their own level and Josie spent ages on a picture of pyramids, using the inside of a set square to draw triangles. Thought that was rather good for a not quite 4 girl.

The big three and i spent some time on Animal Crossing and they all went off together to play on that; Amelie is teetering on the edge of independent reading now and i thought this would be a good way to get her going; i know the others will help her and it will be nice for them to collaborate again. Fran and i ended the day by popping out to do errands and had a lovely chat together, mainly me telling tales on the awfulness of my sister when she was little 😉 I said that she roughly combined the pickledom of Rowan, Ella and Amelie with a pinch of Josie’s stubborn, wind up merchantness as a child.

Gosh….” said Fran.