Table influences us further ;)

I meant to go to bed at a decent hour last night having been up til gone 3am on Saturday night. Predictably I didn’t get there, partially as I was chatting online with Lucy and arranging for her and The Rs to come over for an hour or so this morning. Due to our four children struggling to get on with each other for any prolonged period of time we have not seen much of them for quite a while. The consequence of this is that Lucy and I don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like but we decided to have a try today.

I’d said to come over any time after 930am which meant waking up at 915am had me dashing round in a flat spin to ensure we were all dressed and breakfasted. In the end it was more like 1030am before they arrived and the children had long since tsked at me for hurrying them and gone off to DS together. When Lucy and The Rs arrived her two joined them at the table for further DSing before heading off to play.

Davies did really well and led lots of games, compromised and was great with the others. He really can be the one who makes or breaks the day and while I don’t want to put that responsibility on him all the time as ultimately he is just a kid too it was great that he pulled it off today and it was all harmonious :).

When they left we popped to Tescos for various things – I specifically wanted some storage for things like flour and sugar to try and organise the kitchen cupboards a bit better. I’ve only done half the job there but when I next feel motivated to tidy that will be the place to aim in the direction of and finish it off. While we walked round Davies told us a story about how French bread got invented to do with two bakers who each had half the required ingredients to make bread so decided to share and make dough but then argued about who should get the loaf and each pulled at it until it was long and thin (and baguette shaped). He couldn’t remember if he’d heard it somewhere or made it up himself, but he certainly told it very entertainingly. 🙂

At the checkout they went and sat on the windowsill next to an old woman. Scarlett noticed someone at another till had dropped something from her trolley so went to pick it up for them which earnt her a smile. I mouthed to Davies to be ‘nice’ and ‘sensible’ twice and as we walked out he asked me how he had known what I was saying if he couldn’t hear the words so we talked about lip reading – and also how often I must say those things that he is probably expecting them and hears my voice in his head anyway! 😆 Lipreading came up again later when he was writing something as he said if he says the word out loud and pictures the shape his mouth makes it helps him work out what letters he needs.

We had a late lunch when we got home and then did some more of the Wildlife Action Awards stuff. Before I move onto that I wanted to document an interesting conversation I forgot to blog over the weekend. One was yesterday over lunch when we were talking about languages. Davies had been interested in the translating French that Ali and I had been talking about at her house – I’d had a go at doing a bit and not failed miserably and it is something both Davies and Scarlett have been interested in before. When we were in France / Belgium they were asking me the French words for certain words and are proud of the little bits of French they know. It’s something we could do more of actually if I could find the right way of doing it. Anyway at lunch yesterday it came up again and we talked about various languages, how old they were and their origins, words that we had taken from French (cafe, ballet, au fait and phrases such as deja vu and joie de vivre), words that are used in both but have different meanings (I came up with formidable) and some stock phrases ‘I am English’, ‘I do not understand’ ‘ Excuse me’ and so on. I told them numbers 1-10 and we talked about how there is not necessarily direct translations for every word and how different sentence construction can be. I told them about Esperanto and we talked about different alphabets or letters in different languages. Also languages that are written not from right to left, top to bottom on a page too. We talked about bilingual people and how children learn languages easier than adults and why this might be. We pondered on the smaller your vocabularly the easier it would be to learn it again in another language. I mentioned a girl I’d known as a child who was Italian but had an English mother and spoke perfect English but couldn’t always translate from one to the other, and a German woman at reading group who says she thinks in English when she is in England and thinks in German when she is in Germany!

Back to the Wildlife Action Awards then. We’d seen and identified collared doves out of the window on Saturday so they both drew them and Davies labelled his. He also relabelled his crow and I’ve copy and pasted them into a word doc with some writing (just a few lines around the pictures explaining where we watched from, how we identified them etc. I don’t want to do it all for them by any means but I don’t want to bore Davies and Scarlett with tedious stuff like that, this is supposed to be fun for them and the point is in the spotting, sketching and identifying rather than being able to construct reports!) for Ady to print off so we can send that as evidence for the Birdspotting Activity.

Scarlett got the book, looked at it and said ‘does this bit say collared dove then?’ pointing at the top and then copied out the letters, saying each one aloud as she did so. She was really surprised at the end and said she didn’t know she knew all of those!

Davies did all of the spelling, just looking up to check each letter with me before he wrote it. He is really getting the hang of all the different letter sounds and asking ‘is it EE, EA or E with magic E at the end for the EEEE sound in beak? and ‘does it end with K or C then?’.

While he was redoing his crow label Scarlett started on the next activity which is Composting. As this is something we already do I got her to draw all the things she could think of that go in our kitchen waste compost bin and then helped her with the letters to label them:
. She did a great job and it was really interesting to see her interpretation of quite tricky things to draw like banana skin and potato peelings :).

Davies and I chatted a bit about his as I thought he could do something a bit more challenging and we came up with the idea of a story board of the cycle of compost from kitchen waste from a fruit, going to the waste bin, then the compost heap, then breaking down to compost and being used when seeds were sown for fruit before finally the fruit being ready to eat. He really liked that idea and came up with all of the individual pictures himself. Predictably with a Davies twist – you will notice that in the first picture he is wearing a top with ‘8’ on it, by the bottom he is wearing a ‘9’ as a year has gone by while the compost breaks down. He is eating with his hands while sitting on a pristine chair at the beginning whereas by the end he has learnt table manners and is using cutlery and crockery but sitting on a worn chair. Finally there are things like the flies at the compost heap looking bigger in the second picture :).

By then it was dinner time so I went and sorted out their tea which was leftovers from roast beef yesterday and while they ate I started working on a report for ‘creating a wildlife pond’ which is another of the activities. We have already done most of that but need to get some plants in it next along with a bucket ful of water from an established pond to transfer some microscopic pond life to it. We’ll go and filch some water and plants from my Dad’s pond later this week and take some pictures of us doing so to finish that report.

Ady arrived home and they were so enthused at showing him what they’d done that we got the pens back out and they carried on. Davies sat and with really minimal help labelled his storyboard:

While I helped with that Scarlett drew a picture for the next task of ‘Reduce, re-use, recycle’. The idea is to list all the rubbish your household creates, research all the different ways you could dispose of it and then ensure only the minimum goes into landfill. This is something we have done for a long time so would be a bit of a fictional work and involve lots of writing again so I got her to draw a recycling blue box (what our’s gets collected from kerbside in), a compost heap and a black sack for landfill. She then drew what goes into each – bottles, tins and newspaper for the blue box, banana skins and apple peel for the compost heap and above landfill with Ady’s help she wrote what we do rather than landfill – freecycle, charity shop, mend and make do (things like ragrugging etc.).

Davies then decided that he’d like to do the typing up of the reduce, re-use and recycle rather than drawing something so we’ll add in Scarlett’s picture and he can elaborate on it including things like our keeping chickens to feed kitchen scraps to, making new things from old clothes and so on. We made a start but got distracted by the tool bar on word so went across that and looked at what everything did which got us talking about headings and body of text, fonts, size, what bold, italic and underline mean, how to format things using align left, right, centre and justify, what columns are for, borders, tables, highlighting and font colour. He learnt loads from that little exercise and is very keen to learn more and do the report too. When we’ve done that, got the pond finished and written up and completed the last task of this lot which is ‘get creative’ for which they’ve both decided to make a fimo model of something wildlife-y we are ready to send off for the bronze award :).

Davies says he’s really enjoying it and feels like he’s learning loads about reading and writing. He said he knew most of the eco-friendly stuff already, which in fairness he did but agreed that covering it again makes him superconfident about it all and think more about how important it all is. He also said he wants to ‘delete all the stuff I don’t need in my head and use the space to learn more about reading and writing and stuff like that!’. He’s in a really creative and inventive phase again at the moment which is just so lovely to see and so very Davies :).

We had a pile of bedtime stories and then they went to bed. Scarlett went to sleep fairly quickly but Davies came back down to show me a PG Tips rocket he’d made by fixing the pg tips soft toy monkey that came free with teabags ages ago to a foam rocket using a roll of sellotape. He’d written PG on the sellotape and told me he’d decided that meant ‘positively great’ and explained how it was a sort of rocket powered teasmade. If nothing else he has a future coming up with the W&G contraptions of the future! ;).Which reminds me I really MUST get us booked on some of the science museum workshops and get up there to see the W&G contraptions display.

We had leftover roast beef too – cut thinly and served in pannini bread with mustard and red onions.

And now, would you look at that – it’s tomorrow again already!