If you want dumplings done on time….

do them yourself ;).

Another rainy morning and proof yet again, as though we really needed it, that we are not a Home Ed family who should spend too much time at home! I did some reading of blogs, always a bit disheartening when the latest thing is timetables and lovely tangiable proof of learning and academic progress. At times like this my confidence can wobble and I fret that my children most certainly could not do a page of sums, draw parallels between classic literature examples and indeed at least one thing I read on a blog this morning that someone’s child struggled to do was something I would struggle with myself. It got me to thinking about our approach, why it feels right for us, whether I am doing Davies and Scarlett a disservice by not teaching or introducing workbooks or challenging them in some way, or deciding on some minimum standard of literacy and numeracy. But as ever I tried to sit tight and watch and see if I got a sign from them one way or another. I think I have more thinking to process on this but I’ll save that for when it’s not midnight and I have to be up for work in the morning!

So, while I was doing this naval gazing and compiling a blog post over on my self-suffish blog Scarlett got out her plaster moulds again and mixed up some plaster, poured it and turned the heating on to set it. She spent some time decorating the excess blobs of plaster that had formed from spilled bits yesterday and she’d decided to keep and paint. One became a bush with some berries on, one became a rock with a tiny lizard one and the other was part of a dead animal to be meat for the lion to eat. When the new ones were dry she decided she didn’t want to paint them as giraffe, lion, elephant and zebra this time so started to plan what else she could paint them as instead. In the end she hadn’t mixed enough plaster in so they were very brittle and all but the elephant one broke as she took them out the mould. She plans to use the broken bits to make other things but she decorated the elephant as a mammoth. All through this she did a typical Scarlett monologue about what she was doing and all her her trademark irrpressible Scarlett-ness.

Davies got out the hama beads and made various things including a hawk moth caterpillar, a Star Wars droid, a pendant which he’s going to string for a necklace when it’s ironed. He also DSd for a while, spent some time looking at a Star Wars magazine and then went round the house hunting for cardboard, finally finding an empty kitchen roll inside which he cut down to make a flat shape and then coloured in, cut out and sellotaped to make a Darth Vadar mask including finding some thread to string it on. It had a 3d nose and was all shaped.

While all this went on we had a documentary about Vesuvius and Pompeii on in the background which would catch our attention every so often and one of us would comment on it or ask a question. I can’t recall any of the words but at one point there was a sentence said which had at least 3 words they wanted definitions or explanations of.

I’m typing all this more for myself than to prove any point or start debate. I fretted, managed to leave them to it anyway and they proved to me once again that left totally to their own devices they learnt, explored, experimented, were creative and imagainative and engaged and inventive. They didn’t need direction or interferance, my role from behind the laptop available for comment, praise, suggestion or answering a question was all that was required. I don’t think there can be any doubt that I’m lazy and disinclined to engage in rows and arguments but I feel better for having had my Occassional Wobble and coming out the other side still happy with what we do for us.

And then, as they say, we had lunch ;).

I had said I’d read something to them this afternoon as we’ve missed bedtime stories for a few nights due to late nights / watching something on TV at bedtime instead but they remained engaged in what they were doing, I spent some more time learning different knots on friendship bracelets and Davies came and showed me some knots he knows too and then it was time to make dumplings to go with the beef stew I’d got on in the slow cooker earlier. I’d decided after last week if I made them myself and left them ready to go in then it would be easier for Ady given then Sea Scouts back and forwarding he needs to be doing. So I popped some in for the kids, left the rest on the side ready for us for later and we headed off to swimming.

I’ve not been paying to get in but I’m not really cut out for petty crime and I’d been feeling both paranoid I’d been busted and was going to come out of the changing rooms with wet hair to find a police officer ready to arrest me and bad about it too so decided to pay today. One of my reasons for not paying is the extortionate price of just under a fiver but as I’m now in the water for an hour rather than 30 minutes I felt that wasn’t so bad. When I went to pay however the girl asked if the kids were there for lessons and when I said yes she only charged me £3.40 for the group rate. On that basis I think £3.40 for an hours swimming for me is far more reasonable so I’ll pay from now on and sleep easier at night ;).

Scarlett went off to her lesson and Davies went off to practise his jumping in. When I looked over he had palled up with two other lads doing the same and the three of them were busy competing and trying to impress each other with fancy jumps in off the lower board. Davies perfected a spiral spinning thing which looked quite impressive and I managed 25 lengths in the first half an hour. He was more reliable about watching the clock today and only popped over to say ‘I’m going to my lesson’ on his way past rather than me frantically trying to attract his attention to tell him to go. As I got to the shallow end side Scarlett appeared, proclaimed ‘Guess what Mumma, I can do backstroke now, watch!’, leapt in over my head and set off on her back doing a full 33m length of the big pool at quite a pace of near perfect backstoke! 🙂 🙂 Well done that girl :).

She then went off to the diving boards and spent a while on the top board perfecting her own daring stunts which including jumping off backwards and doing perfect arms up straight, legs held tight jumps in. Once she’d tired of that she spent some time on the smaller board before teaming up with another couple of girls and then playing on the side and having jumping in competitions with them. I love the way that both kids seem to find friends to play with at the swimming pool. I was also on a roll with my swimming today and went way past my goal of 42 lengths (I want to improve on myself week on week) and managed 48. I was very tempted to do the last 2 and claim my 50 but my hour was up and I want to try and improve my speed along with my amount of lengths. I’m not swimming next week as we’re in London and won’t be back in time so that gives me a good goal for two weeks time. It also means my aim of 50 lengths in the hour by Christmas is too easy. I’m loathe to set myself a too-hard goal of 60 but I now have that in mind :).

So wobbly legged one and all but all proud of our achievements we got dried and dressed (Davies won the competition again but only fractionally. He claimed not being able to find his pants (they were in the bag) was a handicap equal to my bra but I don’t think he has enough experience of bra wearing to gauge that ;). On the way home we discussed wombs as Davies was making up a song and used the word womb because it rhymed with something he’d said but when Scarlett said to him ‘you don’t even have a womb!’ they wanted further explanation of what one was, so we covered ovulation and menstruation again and touched on puberty and menopause at either end. I do need to be careful with my matter of fact attitude to these things I suspect as it’s only a matter of time before they decide to ask someone of appropriate age about one or the other and I suspect teenage girls won’t want to be asked by young children and women of middle age won’t feel it’s appropriate either! On the way to swimming we were talking about scars and I was telling them Granny (my Mum) has the most impressive scar in our family on her thigh from falling out of a tree in her youth. I suspect they’ll be asking her about that next time she’s here.

We got home and found Ady was already here. The kids settled down to their beef stew, I got ready to go back out and Ady and I managed a quick catch up chat before I headed back out again to my course. Tonight we were covering recycling and it was all a bit statistic and slide-show heavy with a lot of information given to take in but was interesting and I’m starting to get a feel of the sort of things I might want to volunteer for in the future after the course has ended. Sitting in a room after an hours swimming is quite tricky to concentrate from 630-930pm though so I need to think harder about snacks either before or to take with me to help me with that inevitable post excercise slump which is even harder to be dealing with in a classroom enviroment at night.

Meanwhile Ady and Scarlett took Davies to Sea Scouts and then went to my parents for an hour. They enjoyed a chat and watched a wildlife programme on my parents HD telly which Ady tells me was amazing. Davies enjoyed Sea Scouts and tells me they built a boat and then took it apart again. He was tired so I didn’t get full details but it sounded like a sort of life size jigsaw of pieces of wood which they worked together to fit to a boat shape.

I got home just before 10pm, had a quick bath and we sat down to our dinner.