Davies and Scarlett were rediscovering the fun of having each other to play with all the time today. Last week they were rarely spotted in each others’ company and at the weekend they were still shaking down back into not having 12 additional children around them at all times, but today they were back to being bestest friends again.
I laid in bed snoozing while listening to them playing downstairs and agreeing to the occassional request from a visiting child to eat something else out of their party bags from Leo’s party yesterday. When I did come downstairs they were playing with wooden blocks and geomags and being totally lovely to each other. 🙂 I made them some ‘proper’ breakfast which they ate while watching Class TV. It’s funny how sometimes Class TV totally entrances them and other times they don’t seem to register it at all, they both seem very receptive to all sorts of learning-y type stuff at the moment with Scarlett getting really into writing and asking outlandish maths questions like reeling off a load of numbers and then asking what they all are added together. She has no concept of the amounts she is asking about but just delights in seeing me pulling faces trying to work them out and then supplying her with another, even bigger number as the answer. 🙂 Davies is equally experimental with numbers suddenly telling me what various little sums are he’s tasked himself with working out. It’s funny to watch them make a sudden leap in something and start to demand things to do to test themselves. They’d also brought down a load of early reader books from Davies’ bedroom that they’d been looking at too.
Due to the Class TV watching we were slightly later than planned getting round to Lucy’s (although I imagine we were still earlier than she was genuinely expecting us to be with our notoriously bad timekeeping :oops:). Lucy’s SIL and 2 nephews were also there celebrating Richard and Rebecca’s birthdays and the six children all very quickly found things to do, mostly either cooperating or working around each other. One of the new presents given to Richard was a domino truck thing very similar to the domino train that we had a couple of years ago for Christmas so Davies and Scarlett were quite happy to mess about with different pieces of that. And of course shiny new toys are shiny new toys regardless of the fact they were for a two year old so if I secretly wanted to get down on the floor and have a good old look at the new bits of plastic it was no wonder that Davies did too :). I sat and chatted to Lucy’s SIL, we had lunch, the children all disappeared into the garden to make the absolute most of the gorgeous weather and we ended up staying til gone 4pm in the end with Tarly protesting at leaving even then.
We got home and I made the children’s tea and brought in line fulls of clean dry washing. They ate their tea, having tidied up the blocks and geomags with no fuss at all :shock:, then Davies got changed for Beavers and we all walked round there. So lovely to see him call ‘bye then’ at the door and dash in to be part of it all without a backwards glance :). Tarly and I walked home looking at all sorts of plants and insects and then rather than waste the hour without Davies we snuggled up on the sofa and I put Education City back on for her and she worked her way through all the science ones for reception. Such a wide variety of things on there with plenty of answers she gave considered wrong but I would argue over – eg there was a transport one which asked questions like ‘which transport is used to move lots of people between cities’ – Scarlett chose ‘bus’ which is not altogether incorrect but they insisted the answer was ‘train’ when actually it could also have been plane. Another was asking which transport do people use to bring home their shopping with the answer being ‘car’ – again I would have said bicycle, bus, train and car were all correct actually. Then it made me laugh by asking ‘which transport is used to travel to a crime scene?’ – answer is police car but she needed both words in ‘crime scene’ explaining – as I would imagine would most four year olds actually? Then there were others which were just so easy she was getting bored and others still which I’d have not realised she’d know but she breezed through (noteably one about which animals are vegetarian or carnivore – it had animal noises as clues which she didn’t even register, merrily clicking on the right answers and saying ‘cows are vegetarian but cats aren’t’ 😆 It’s funny how her ‘education’ is so much a result of what Davies is doing / saying / learning rather than the ‘early years’ type stuff I seemed to cover as a matter of course with Davies without even thinking about it. The books I read him, the tv shows we watched all led Davies and I to do things in a fairly routine sort of way whereas Scarlett knows loads of things she has learnt alongside her older brother but has the odd gap here and there of things I sat and did with him when he was two but never did with her because we were doing four year old stuff with Davies by then. It’s all swings and roundabouts of course and I don’t think for one minute she’d have gotten to ten without knowing what a crime scene was but it’s offering me a very interesting glimpse into the sorts of things children might learn at school / nursery.
Ady went to collect Davies from Beavers which I think Davies was utterly delighted about. The children went to bed, Davies taking Ady’s laptop so he could do some Education City in bed (Science again, need to sign up for the trial to the next level for him, he’s practically worked his way through it and it seems rather easy for him although I’ve no idea whether he’d consider the literacy and numeracy bits, will ask him tomorrow). Then I popped out to Sainsburys for various bits and pieces including a load of fruit for the kids, who goody bag contents this morning aside are on a more healthy eating kick. They neither are into vegetables which I would be a hypocrite to say much about really but we talked yesterday about the different requirements for a healthy diet and they both love fruit anyway so we’re going to start aiming for their five a day in fruit if not veg.
Both children were still awake when I got home and actually Davies didn’t go to sleep until gone 10pm but the hour difference means that’s all but normal for him anyway – need to work even harder on filling him up with fresh air and wearing him out tomorrow 🙂 And finally in hatchwatch news we went through the eggs candling again tonight and identified 3 which we thought were bad – two were indeed empty but for yolks but one sported evidence of a baby chick in very early development. No idea whether if left alone it would have continued to develop or whether we were right in thinking it had the markings of a bad egg and was one that had already stopped forming but we’ve decided to continue candling daily but only remove eggs we are 100% convinced are not doing anything – so we have 14 eggs left and theoretically they should start hatching this weekend :).
Is it wrong to be pmsl at you using Education City? 😆 Am boggling slightly at the thought of reception kids being expected to know about crime scenes! Is CSI that ubiquitous these days???
Comment by Alison — 27 March 2007 @ 7:57 am
Not wrong at all 😉 Personally I loathe it, think it is merely gratuitous testing dressed up with really quite shit animations and patronising ‘good work!’ type comments. But I do think I sometimes impose my ideas of what is shit or patronising on the kids who actually being 4 and 6 probably wouldn’t feel patronised by them at all. I just recall being at school and feeling really pissed off by being given work that was soooo easy I did it in record time and sat around getting bored or being praised for doing well in something I’d found so easy it all felt really empty and pointless.
EC could potentially support all the issues I would have with testing too – it assumes prior knowledge and only teaches things because you ‘got them wrong’ by correcting you, many, many of the questions have far more than one right answer and I dislike the way it presents one simple sentence as an outright fact. Personally I wouldn’t want to leave the children on it by themselves getting ‘educated’ by it, I’d want to be around with them, discussing anything they weren’t sure of and debating the answers EC deemed as wrong but the children had a good reason for thinking was right – like the transport one where Scarlett could even give examples of people who don’t get their shopping home using a car.
Comment by Nic — 27 March 2007 @ 9:33 am
Very excited about your eggs hatching!
EC was so IRRITATING for reasons such as those you mention. We did a few free trials (free if you don’t count the printer ink used on all those certificates) and there was no way I’d part with money for it.
Mind you, I am very intolerant at the mo. We’re just watching class tv and there was a little song about how you should have your whole story planned before you start writing. Kids looked slightly anxious when I started bellowing, “that’s a LIE” at the TV.
Comment by Allie — 27 March 2007 @ 9:33 am
Allie, tell them I saw Philip Reeve (author of the Mortal Engines quartet, amongst others) last week, and he said that he never knew what was going to happen in his stories. (Probably the reason why he ended up writing a quartet, lol!)
Comment by Alison — 27 March 2007 @ 9:49 am
lol I wrote a very similar blog post about EC a while ago. E loves it though, so I have actually paid for it, for one child for a year! Shocking. But the things in the science part are rediculous. You can’t ask ambiguous questions and expect a right and wrong.
Comment by Em — 27 March 2007 @ 5:32 pm
I haven’t looked at education city, but Claudia loves brainpop, there are tests you can do but mostly it’s just little films about interesting things.
Comment by layla — 27 March 2007 @ 5:58 pm
well, SB loved education city for about 2 months, but is rarely doing it at the moment. I just felt that in the end, 20 for 2 years was a good deal really. She prob will come back to it quite a number of times in the timeframe.
Comment by HelenHaricot — 28 March 2007 @ 3:19 pm