Got back to doing some “stuff” yesterday, but can’t actually remember what, mostly people lounging about reading improving stuff i think. Maddy is adoring her I Can Read books and now rates reading above drawing in the favourite stakes. I call that quite a result as she’s had a very hands off approach to learning, i doubt i’ve done even a quarter of the work with her that i did with Fran. Fran has made a start on a proper book study and Amelie and Josie were devouring Up,Up and Away books, though they did both reduce themselves to tears over a dead donkey. Cue considerable derision from their sisters who both picked up the book and pointed out her wasn’t dead at all. Josie tried to cheer Amelie up by saying “I’ve read it Am’ly, it doesn’t say donkey died, it says ‘conky kied…. actually, it says ‘tonky tied””

There was music, some spellings, so this and that and we popped out to work and did all the Jazz and Gym stuff in the evening. Worked okay.

Today was really good though.

Josie did ‘maffs’.

and Amelie procrastinated, read a bit, did some EC and generally did her best to duck under my radar. I forgave her, but won’t tomorrow Josie took herself off to play some little game that totally absorbed her for about 3 hours; she just sat on the 3rd step with a lap full of small toys and played and played.

Fran did a summary of the first 2 chapters of War Horse by Michael Morpurgo which is a kind of take on the Black Beauty idea and suits her current horse obsession as well as the history and reading one. I asked her to do each chapter in 5 sentences, written, then typed into her blog and properly punctuated. She did the first chapter very well, then lost it a bit so we did the second one together; i think doing that really helped her get the idea of a summary better and through up lots of ideas about how to use words and punctuation concisely. After that she read the first bit of a book called “Forgotten Voices of the First World War” and tried to unscramble how it all started then, inspired by what Maddy was doing, we found a 1914 map of Europe and she coloured in the Allies, Central Powers and Neutral countries.

Maddy had been reading a book called A Bear for Miguel and we’d been discussing guerilla warfare, government changes and the like as a result of it. I found her a map of Central America and she coloured sea, El Salvador and all the other countries, then i gave her one of the Americas to find El Salvador and then one of the World. She liked all that and now wants to do more geography which is good as i bought several of the more geographical ones of these this week.

Her particular bit of genius was to make a tiny paper boat (how very Maddy) and sail it from the UK to El Salvador on the globe. I do adore that girl.

Fran did decimals on Meleto, Maddy did multiplication sums using the 8x table as a base and then everyone did music and Maddy drew the front cover for the book she is going to write. AND the little girl from next door came round – and we popped into work – and they all played in the garden lots.

All in all, we did okay