Burning bridges never made me cry

Today has pretty much lived up to its promise of being a good day. There has been no shouting, no unruly behaviour (from me or the children!) and plenty of TV watching, which has in turn led to lots of creative play so that’s fine too 🙂

We went to the library first thing where I wanted to look out some possible books for Sarah’s TRB, have a read for myself of Dogger (which as I suspected I did read when I was a child!) and (truly a miracle!) take back some books before they actually ran out or needed to be renewed (this was because one was James and the Giant Peach, which we have now bought a copy of and a stack of parenting manuals which served only to piss me off with their patronising tone, make me feel inadequate and a virtual child abuser or just bore me so much I didn’t get past the second chapter!). We were library pests really, Davies kept doing stuff like climbing into the big board books boxes and shouting ‘look at me Mummy, I’m on a pirate ship’, Scarlett kept acting like the one in a wheelchair in Little Britain, randomly pulling books off shelves and saying ‘I want that one’, I got a phonecall from Ady to say he had heard that talking Dora was down to a tenner in Argos should he get one (well yes!!!) and a return text from Sarah to tell me who wrote Dogger!
We then enlisted the help of the very helpful librarian from helpful land. He was the one who ‘helped’ us when we joined and he tried to help us find Dogger, then got all the forms out to order it before just checking in the pile of returned books from that day and finding it there! He did all this while blushing slightly and answering all of Davies’ many, many questions about why he was doing everything he was doing. (poor bloke must have looked to check we left before going to the toilet incase Davies popped up there too ‘why are you doing that?’) Davies did actually learn quite a bit though about libraries so we may talk to him again! Came out armed with Dogger and a pile of prehaps suitable books a couple of which I have already read to the kids. A quick look round the charity shops yielded nothing of interest so back we came for lunch.

This afternoon they have played pretty well by themselves really, Davies watched Kipper then came and asked for his megabloks out and has built a house for rabbits (cue him now calling it a burrow and a warren after a quick bit of HE) with little mouseholes all around as that was on Kipper. We made a rabbit out of some paper and an empty toilet roll so he is happy with that. This morning I sat with Scarlett and we drew Dora, Boots and co for her to colour in with crayons we named all the colours of so that’s her sorted too!

I have had a long phone chat this morning with J again about the new HE group and we have had emails back with good wishes blessings (and a degree of pissedoffedness I’m sure) from some of the old group who do have different ideas and needs from the group. We are probably going to go for it, we just have to hope that it is not just the two of us who have the same idea and that we actually get some interest from others! I have written up my job list, will swap it with the one J is doing and we will set to work trying to market it to the HE contacts we have. I’m also going to ring Julie tonight and she whether she is really interested in being part of the set up too. SO that is all looking quite exciting too.

And now for the reason I have ticked planning! I persuaded Davies to do a bit of copying (ears, eyes, nose, mouth etc) to go in the scrapbook I have put together on our senses work. He did it but was reluctant and I think for a while at least we are going to start doing a bit of work each day out of his workbooks. Jan told me a bit about how she does it and I really think its a good idea for him to have the discipline to be able to sit down, with an amount of ‘work’ to do and get it done. I know once he has finished it he will enjoy the sense of achievement, I will feel a bit more like we are achieving something in the way of schooly skills and it will justify having the bookshelves groaning with workbooks I have bought over the last year or so! The areas I want to work on (and may do a bit on each day, a rotation on a daily basis, a week of each or a lucky dip!) are: Reading, writing and numbers:
Reading – he is very good at recognising pretty much all the letters and can in most cases tell me a word they are ‘for’. But that is a memory game rather than him knowing or understanding that each letter has a sound as well as a name and that when you put those sounds together that is how words are made.
Writing – he quite enjoys copying shapes and so on, which is how most of the workbooks are designed – copy straight lines and curves as the beginning of letter forming. He does not look at all comfortable holding a pencil and although I tried the ELC grippers they didn’t make much difference, but I think it is only through practise he will discover that it is easier to hold the pen in a certain way.
Numbers – I would love to pretend that reading blogs about same age children being mathematical geniuses does not bother me, but it does 🙂 His counting is wobbly past the teens although he has the idea about 20-1, 20-2, 20-3 and so on so I guess getting upto 100 is the next step, he also doesn’t yet grasp about the concept of numbers being added, subtracted and so on. I also want to work on 1 being a whole number but it being possible to have smaller amounts too. This is the one area I can think of loads of games and examples to show him, aswell as being stuff we can do easily with Scarlett around too (like baking) so I am not too worried about getting things off the ground once we make a start.

I also have ideas for several mini projects all related to us and the world around us which I probably need to plan a wee bit first and then roll out as and when. They include weather; space; human body; our world (globe and atlas type stuff with a bit on different countries) and life cycles. My vision would be lots of scrap books with the starting points of all of these areas which we add to as they get older and we learn more and cover more complicated stuff.