One word? When seven would do…

A very efficient morning today with me waking early enough to justify reading in bed for half an hour and finishing a book before getting up and finally putting away a couple of baskets of washing that has been cluttering the bedroom for ages. The children came and helped and it was all done very speedily. A couple of times in the last week or so Davies has proclaimed something ‘boring’ which has surprised me as it’s not something he’s ever complained of before. Admittedly it is usually something I’d have to concede is fairly mundane – the most recent was the food shopping on Saturday – but it prompted a conversation about stuff we simply have to do, or can choose not to and live with the consequences, such as food shopping, cooking, tidying. I don’t think I have a particularly negative attitude towards anything really and I know he’s not alone in being a bit less than enthusiastic at being a child in a supermarket, but I explained that a big part of Home Ed for us is that the children get to participate in everyday life and get an idea of what it means to be a self sufficient adult (that’s in terms of looking after oneself rather than killing chickens and growing stuff in a polytunnel you understand!). I did offer the choice of him attending school and me getting all the food shopping done while he’s there instead but he declined that one ;). So it was quite nice to see him totally up for helping put his own clean, dry, folded clothes away. Tarly sat and matched up all Ady’s socks :).

We came downstairs for breakfast, followed by bananas while they watched a bit of TV, not sure what and then we headed out to the bank. I put a Queen album on so they could hear what We Are The Champions sounded like before Crazy Frog got his flippers on it 😉 which went down very well, we dashed to the bank, followed by the petrol station, followed by Lucy’s house to pick them up, followed by Magical Mondays.

I’d gathered up stuff to make cheese scones and some glass jars with marbles and extra thick cream to make some butter. I don’t think extra thick cream works so well as double cream though as one lot worked but was very soft butter and the other seemed to go over past butter and back into rather sour tasting cream, but we all got lots of exercise shaking the jars anyway! 😆 I had a couple of helpers for cheese scone making and as one of the other parent’s said ‘it’s not like Henny Penny is it?’ so we had lots of help eating them spread with the butter. 🙂 Davies spent a while with Allie working on a Doctor Who story using the story generator blogged about here . It was really interesting observing them from afar across the room, as I couldn’t hear what was being said but was reading Davies’ body language and seeing him creep ever closer to Allie and start to turn his whole body towards her and lose self consciousness about being in a one to one and start to enjoy what they were doing. He showed me his story and then went off to illustrate it, and made a dalek with a flip up window to show inside too. He also played a lot with Leo, which is a fairly recent thing as they seemed to be largely unaware of each other for ages but suddenly appear to have clicked and Davies talks about him a fair bit during the week ever since his birthday party. 🙂 Scarlett also did some fine sticking of feathers and pompoms including writing her name on her artwork. She managed to fall over and hurt herself twice within the first five minutes or so of arriving today but then recovered and had a great time. It was a good session there today, we all feel like we belong to the group now and the addition of new faces in the last couple of open sessions has been largely a positive thing too :). It’s nice to have a local community to feel part of with potential for the children to grow up alongside HE peers.

We came home and Lucy and The Rs came back. Davies was initially not happy about that idea but had some time on his own in his room and then seemed to decide it would be more fun playing with the others so lured them upstairs with promises of dvds to watch and they had a nice couple of hours together, letting Lucy and I chat some more. They left and the children had a rather hurried dinner (Davies had roast beef and yorkshire pudding and Scarlett had pasta, so still fairly varied but a good start) before we walked Davies round to Beavers. They’d been asked to bring in a story book this week and I’d accidentally ordred in a giant classroom edition of The Gruffalo to work (I was looking for the dvd of the stage show and found a title with ‘educational edition’ next to it so assumed it would have ideas of activities based on The Gruffalo and satisfying relevant key stage criteria so ordered it in to have a look at. Once it arrived it was so huge I felt I had to bring it home :oops:) so he took that in. Once home Scarlett and I put the chickens away and then sat on the sofa while she brushed my hair, put loads of clips and bands in it and decorated me with necklaces and bracelets :lol:. Ady arrived home soon after so I popped round to collect Davies and he was buzzing with having used The Gruffalo to put on a ‘show’ of the story. It turned out the others had all read out their stories but when he said he couldn’t read they decided to turn his into a play instead, and he got to play the part of the fox, who, he tells me, is his favourite character. I asked him how he felt about being the only one who couldn’t read and he said it was fine ‘cos it’s cool to be different!’ :lol:. Later though he was looking at the word ‘title’ on the tv when Ady was doing something with the dvd player and talking about reading. I said I thought he could actually read already, he just needed to find something he actively wanted to read and challenging him to read ‘title’ and ‘text’, which he did, fairly effortlessly. I then told him I reckoned he could read that Gruffalo book if he really tried and as soon as he had got into his pjs and brushed his teeth he brought the book to me and asked to have a go. It was flaltering, and of course he does know the story very well so it was more looking at the picture and working out what the beginning and end sounds of each word might be before making an educated guess but he really wanted to do it and was enjoying it. He tells me that Thr Gruffalo is going to be the first book he learns to read all the way through so I packed him off to bed with our regular sized version to carry on looking at it in bed, as we’d only got halfway through. I’m not getting all excited about this as we’ve had false starts before where he’s been up for trying to read something and then lost interest but this is probably the first time something has come from a genuine desire to master a skill rather than bribery for something or to prove something to someone else, so I’m tentatively hopeful. We’ll see.