More home education

as in staying at home rather than education particularly :).

Both children were quite specific in their requests to not go out and to not see anyone today. So that’s what we did.

We watched some tv, I forget quite what now although I know I got engrossed in some ‘extreme engineering’ show about building a huge hotel in Vegas next to the Venetian. I kept drawing their attention to interesting bits of it and adding my own Vegas trivia too. They had the lego out and Davies built a park complete with snack stand, hedges and roads. Then he built a succession of creatively made vehicles which he brought over and explained the design features to me in great length. We do have a book of lego structures from one or another kit purchased over the years so I suggested following that to make something but he looked at me like I was mental and said the whole point of it is to use your imagination and try and build what you dream up yourself. Funnily enough he’s the same with k’nex, geomags, gears, gears, gears! and any other construction type toy. I sort of see his point given my own philosophy on such things but personally I love following step by step instructions for things like that -I am the flat pack furniture assembly manager in our house – and given Davies’ creative but not entirely orthodox approach perhaps it’ll stay that way unless we want a hostess trolley with integral TV stand and pot plant holder created out of the pieces designed to create a wardrobe :lol:.

Scarlett came and did some stuff on the laptop with me – we looked at my old del.icio.us page from link hoarding days and found a Dr Seuss site with some cool games on it so she did a load of those. Davies came over and joined us for the Horton storymaker and the Green Eggs and Ham memory game and then we all got quite involved in the fox in socks game :lol:.

We had lunch and I finished reading the book for reading group tonight – The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. I read it last year when it came out in paperback and quite enjoyed it then but didn’t remember it sufficiently well to talk about it without re-reading which I’ve been doing on and off since last months meeting, taking it on the train with me this weekend and finally finishing the last 100 or so pages today with lots of cups of tea.

We went out and collected ants for Davies’ Nasa ant farm thingy which he’s had for ages but we’ve only just started seeing ants about after the winter. We caught about six, chatted to various neighbours passing by and then brought them in to put in the ant home. It did say in the instructions to ensure they were all the same type or they would fight – and fight they did. We seperated so many ant brawls (and removed at least one corpse) that in the end we gave up and rereleased any survivors with a plan to be more accurate in capturing ants from the same place in the garden again tomorrow.

Finally I photographed a load of the clothes cleared out from Scarlett’s bedroom last week and started very slowly listing them on ebay – I got about a third listed and will try and do some more tomorrow afternoon. I borrowed Yellow Submarine from the library last week thinking as Davies and Scarlett have liked some of the Beatles music they’ve heard they might like it. It held them in places, or should I say distracted them from the game they were playing in places and I noticed they were already referring to the ‘Evil Glove’ tonight and Scarlett has been singing ‘yellow submarine’ ever since. She really has a knack for picking up songs very quick and can often recall most of the tune and a fair whack of the lyrics of songs after just one or two listenings (no idea where she gets that from 😉 ).Tonight I was talking to her about it and asking if she wanted to think about a musical instrument to learn but she insists she just wants to make songs by singing them. I was in the choir throughout school and got loads out of the act of singing with others (and infact still do) despite no real talent at all. I don’t really know where to look for her on that one but will have a look about and see whether anything suitable exists for her to go and do singing with others.

Then it was off to swimming lessons. They both had a good lesson with Scarlett really getting the idea of moving her arms correctly. We talked about road traffic accidents and why cats have very little road sense, how you should cross the road, stopping distances of cars and how blind people know where crossings are because of the bumpy bits on the pavement. Then we counted how many crossings there were on the strip of coast road between our house and the swimming pool.

Shortly after we got home my parents arrived to sit with the children while I popped off to bookgroup. Ady is away for 2 nights and I didn’t want to miss it at short notice. Reading group was good, a full house turn out with plenty of banter and good conversations. I was back in about 1.5 hours to water the plants and get the children to bed before having a bath and my own dinner. Davies has been up and down stairs though and I suspect he has ended up curled up asleep in my bed as he often does when Ady is away.