I had a glimpse today of what it might be like to teach. It was a nice enough half hour given I relaxed a long way from what I had planned to do and went with the flow but of course teachers wouldn’t get luxuries like that, and they’d have way more than three children of mixed abilities and interests to deal with at once.
This morning Davies xboxed while Tarly played with Tap a shape. This has easily won ‘toy of the week’ here this week. Sometimes they do seem to fixate on one thing for a while before losing interest again. The tap a shape is a cork board with a little hammer and pins and a variety of wooden shapes with holes in the middle. You attach them to the cork board using the hammer and pins to make patterns and pictures. It was a cheap Christmas present about 2 years ago and goes through periods of being played with loads by one or both of the children. I bunged some pizza dough ingredients in the breadmaker. We turned the Xbox off at 10.30am and I put ClassTV on, every so often we watch it and it usually grabs their attention. It was Numbertime and as Davies is currently into playing with numbers and counting in a big way and Tarly loves anything to do with ‘pennies’ it caught them both for a good half hour. I hung several loads of washing out (which promptly got rained on for most of the day :roll:) and we headed off to Lucy’s.
We’d planned last night to do pizza with the children for lunch so we sat round the little table in their kitchen with a ball of dough each, shaped it (Davies’ was ‘Gromit shaped’ while Rebecca and Tarly went for the more conventional circular choices), spread it with ketchup, sprinkled it with grated cheese and the girls added some chopped up ham to theirs, cooked it and ate it. I tried to talk to them about the ingredients in the dough and what part of the baking each one played – the important one being yeast, but it didn’t quite work out that way 😆 and there lies why I am an autonomous educator really! Rebecca and Davies were really quick and efficient and their pizzas went in first, Tarly was a bit more into the idea of playing with the dough and making pretty shapes until I explained that it was sort of like the plate for our pizza but we could eat it, it was to hold all the ingredients on together and keep them in one place while we cooked it and ate it. That seemed to do the trick and she was happy to roll it out then. She is pretty handy at spreading things having done a lot of peanut butter, marmite and chocolate spread on toast type activities and hers and mine went in next. Davies ate over half of his which was rather surprising as he was insisting he didn’t like it, Tarly picked all the ham off hers and then all the cheese, Rebecca and Richard ate all theirs. 🙂
They played nicely, if noisily for the afternoon and did drawing, running around, we read some stories and ate some flapjack. It was nice :).
Our friend Jim, who lives in Ireland is over this weekend for a stay at Butlins with some mates so he came over last night to catch up with us before heading to Butlins today. We had a great night talking about old times, catching up on each others lifes now, lining up loads of empty bottles along the fireplace and laughing. We played our usual game of flicking between the music channels on Sky and guessing the song title, artist and year with additional bonus points for facts like album title etc and it was a really, really nice evening.