Sunday with cakes and more reading!

Today was meant to be the lazy sunday I didn’t get last weekend!  It never seems to work out like that though!!

It started well, with being able to stay in bed and have a cuddle with B.  I only mention this because it happens so rarely!!  He’s either not there, leaves at 5.30am, or the kids force one or other of us out of bed! This morning, all the kids disappeared off downstairs together 🙂

Our cuddle was soon interrupted by E, asking if she could read some more of her book with me!  She re-read what she’d done yesterday with far less stumbles, and then she let me read a line at a time, then she read it on her own.  We managed 2 pages, and then it turned into me reading, and us talking about the story, and E finding particular words, like ‘faster’ on the page.  Amazing stuff!!!

Reading time over, I came downstairs and joined B, H and L for breakfast, then had to sort out a series of Freegle collections so we could start to clear a space in the room E has her beady on having all to herself.

H then commandeered the laptop so she could play computer games, while E disappeared with L, and both came back covered in make up, and with ‘interesting’ hair styles!

B then headed off to deliver his campaign leaflets, and we went to feed our friends’ cats while they are away.

We came back and H decided she wanted to crack some eggs, so we funnelled that energy (!) into making a banana cake, which L helped with too.

When that was in the oven, E decided to do some cooking too.  She decided she wanted to make a sponge cake with pretty icing. She did a fab job, and we used the opportunity to talk about double digit numbers again, and as she was adding ingredients she was reading the digital scales.  She got the amounts spot on, and we even got up to recognising 200 🙂

Meanwhile, H and L sat on the floor playing with Mr Potato Heads- ahhhhh!

E decided to decorate her cake with icing in concentric circles.  It sort of worked?!

And H did the Alpaca Wacka (I hate Nuzzle and Scratch!!).

B finally came home for lunch, and we had soup and banana cake 🙂

I seized the opportunity to escape to the docks for shopping break.  Had a lovely mooch round the Gloucester Arts and Crafts centre trying to find a belated (as always) present for a friend, then to The Works to price up canvasses and acrylic paint, as considering letting the kids produce some ‘experimental’ art!

Came home and we tucked into E’s beautiful cake.

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Many wondrous things!

Yesterday was busy, non-stop, exhausting.  After getting up stupidly early, we had to drop B off at the station, waving him off for the week 😦  We went home to get dressed and have breakfast!  E decided on the way home that we needed to have pancakes, so pancakes we had! Or more precisely, drop scones.  Yum!

We went off out to the library to return our overdue books, and stock up on new ones. I also picked up one I’d reserved: Stray Sock Sewing – fun, fun!

Home for lunch and the enacting of our new rules.  Worked a treat!

After lunch we went to our local market stall and stocked up on fruit and veg.  They also had loads of gourds and mini-squashes as well as indian corn.  E chose several to make an autumn display for our newly clean and tidy table, it looks fab – must take a pic!  Then a customary look at the fish – a wander round the aquarium shop next-door.  Then back to the library to drop off the Tudors box of books we borrowed from the Library Education Service, and on to Tesco for a few bits and pieces.

On the way we managed to add more to my little notebook, including a conversation about eating poisonous things which resulted in ‘what would happen if you ate a raw potato?’, and ‘would you be ill if you licked the outside of a conker, or would you actually have to eat it to get ill?’.  There was another conversation about drinking rainwater, which after a quick synopsis of the water cycle, and me advising that it might not be advisable to drink lots of it, but it can be cleaned.  E now wants to find out how water can be cleaned for drinking.  That should keep us busy for a bit.

E did some random cooking involving herbs from the garden, spices from our kitchen collection, breadcrumbs collected from the bread board and her favourite implement, the pestle and mortar.  She then roasted them in the oven and I had to do the taste test!

Recently E has been asking to do maths, so we’ve been doing some maths games from my new book, I bought her a year 2 workbook last week which she’s been doing, we’ve been doing some online games I found from the Toy Theater and we’ve talked about numbers non-stop, so she now knows her 2 times table, without realising it, understands number bonds, and has been using stickle bricks to demonstrate her understanding of these ideas and also some extra demonstrations of comparison lengths etc.

Last night she announced, as she climbed up to her bunk bed, that she is going to get a learn to read book from the library every time she goes so she doesn’t have to go to school. I haven’t said anything about going to school!!  She reeled off a load of reasons why HE is way more fun than school!  Finally.

 

Zip it!

I’m trying a new method of organising myself and making the most of E’s random questions.  Most of the time when we’re out and about, she’ll ask something out of the blue (today’s was ‘how do zips work?’), and usually I don’t know the answer, and am somewhere with no way of answering.  I also have a habit of completely forgetting about her questions by the time I get home, and so does she.

To try and combat this, I have purchased myself a notepad and pen to keep in my bag at all times.  This has mostly been used for noting down things the girls decide they want on their christmas/birthday lists (because I refuse to buy them!), but gradually its filling with useful questions.  The main flaw comes when they ask something when I’m driving…!

So far we have had:

• what does shark’s skin feel like? (as we watched a reef shark swim over our heads at the aquarium on Tuesday)
• what does dinosaur skin feel like? (and the pretend skin in our local city museum doesn’t count, says E)
• what are shark’s teeth like?
• how do zip’s work? (as E sat in the car zipping and unzipping a pocket on her trousers)
• what bones are in our wrists and what do they look like?

I’m slowly cultivating a shelf of useful books to refer to when we get home in order to answer these questions!  Internet searches are useful to me, but generally don’t have enough pictures to keep E happy!  The shark questions were easily answered by fishing out this funky little book on sharks we picked up for 5p at a car boot sale a couple of months ago.  Apparently shark skin has the texture of sandpaper, and was used as such in the past.  Many species of shark have several rows of teeth, and regularly shed teeth as they feed, apparently.

The zip question was laid to rest after a delve into my ancient edition of The Way Things Work which I begged my parents to get me when I was about 10 and we’d used it at school.  Its finally coming into its own 😉   E has now explained to B how zips work, and I apologise to anyone else who puts up with E’s zip demonstrations!

Still to work on wrist bones and dinosaur skin!

I’ve also been on a spending spree on Amazon, after getting a dose of inspiration – its catching this time of year, don’t you think?!!  Here are my new library additions:

• Games for Math
• Games for Reading
• How Children Learn Mathematics
• How Children Learn – my first John Holt book!

I am now in love with Amazon Marketplace!  Unfortunately I paid more in postage than I did for the books!  I’ve also downloaded the nectar.com toolbar, so I am collecting nectar points for every yahoo search I make online.  All going towards my Amazon habit…!

 

She knows you know

After my small breakdown yesterday…ahem…today has been much better.  Always the way!

I packed H off for her gym class with my friend, so I could go shopping to refill the very empty cupboards.  Poor kids had spent the last couple of days frantically searching for something to eat, and not happy with the random assortment of leftovers gracing the shelves!  Pay day is good – thanks B!!!  This gave E and I some nice time to ourselves, where she felt in charge of things as she knows the supermarket well, and could help find everything while I stopped L trying to wriggle and dive out of the trolley!

I’m all for bribery to get kids round supermarkets, so it was quite easy to say ‘yes’ to most requests from E this time.  Then half way down the fruit and veg aisle she started doing numbers on her fingers.  Look mummy, this is 6 (five fingers on one hand, and one on the other).  This is 7, this is 8, this is 9, and this is 10.  I asked her what she was adding each time to get the next number (just checking!!), and she said one more finger, so I confirmed she was adding 1 each time.  Then, just to test her I asked her if she had 5 fingers, how many more would she need to make 10.  She said, 5 more of course!  Oh my goodness, the girl actually gets it.  I nearly lay down in the aisle with shock!

Later on during tea she finishing her baked beans, and she said ‘look mum, I have 4 left, 2 there and 2 there.  2 and 2 make 4’.  Not a workbook in sight!  Oh yeah baby!!

Maths – tick.

This evening she was examining her new tube of toothpaste and asked if all the writing on the back was the ingredients.  I had a look and read it all out to her: directions for use, blurb about how to look after your teeth, active ingredients, ingredients, list of trademarks and logos.  The picture on the front of a blob of toothpaste with a face on was a Nurdle apparently.  Anyway, so looked at the picture, then ran her finger over the word underneath.  I told her it said ‘Lilly’, which looks similar to H’s name, and told her that often when words look alike, they sound alike, like fox and box etc. She then moved onto the words underneath ‘Little Teeth’.  I pointed out the ‘Li’ was the same sound as in ‘Lilly’, so with that, and the ‘tle’ she got the ‘little’ quite easily.  She couldn’t get ‘teeth’ at all.  The nearest she got was ‘teach’ or ‘teech’ I guess!  I told her what sound the ‘th’ makes, and once I’d said that she got it straight away, and was very chuffed with herself!  I asked her what she thought the word t-h-e would say, and she got that!  I went to find a book with ‘the’ in the title, and came back with The Snowman.  She read ‘The Sno…with?’, and I realised she knew what the title should be, but was stumbling over the word.  S-n-o is snow, but w-m-a-n makes not sense!  Her brain is working overtime!

We’ve been through these sounds before, but they’ve never made any sense to her, as she’s never been interested in looking at the words before.  I can see she’s suddenly making all these connections, its absolutely amazing to watch!

Literacy – tick.

We’ve also managed to cram in nice chunk of socialising, painting, drawing, playdough, mr potato head, duplo, playing on the internet, blowing bubbles and making balloons using a funky little kit.