A pleasant evening

I was reading K his bed-time story tonight and he spontaneously started to read one of the words himself! Once I realised what he was doing, I steered him towards the phonetic ones, and I helped him by covering up everything but the word we were reading, and sometimes showing just a letter at a time. So far he’s managed: Mum, Dad, but, I, can. Proud daddy moment. Katy does all the hard work going through the letter exercises with him, and I get the nice results. 🙂

As I tucked him into bed he asked “Why is it stripey?” and I thought he was referring to the wallpaper but he meant his bed as it’s made of unpainted wood. We had a little chat about how trees grow and tree rings, which was a lovely way to end the day.

Then down to sort out J and we had one of those meandering Home Ed. conversations that are really nice and hard to remember how they start. I think in this case I remarked to J that he was reading a book by himself that I used to read to him, and that soon he’d be reading War and Peace. “What’s that, Daddy?” I fell into the trap of saying it was by Dostoevsky, but Katy and Google to the rescue: War and Peace was by Tolstoy; Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment (among others). J said “Grommit read Crime and Punishment in A Close Shave” (amazing memory!) This then went on to me remembering my first secondary school’s houses, which were famous Europeans like Nobel, Tolstoy, Curie and some others so famous that I’ve forgotten them. (It was a long time ago!)

This then went to talking about the Curies. Another mistake from me – I said they got uranium from ore and it was instead radium. But I got the bit right about Pierre carrying a vial of it around in his jacket pocket because it was nice and warm, and he didn’t realise it was the cause of the large burn across his chest. He avoided dying of radiation sickness by being killed in a road accident first. (Got that bit right too.) I forgot to remember that Marie died of leukemia because of being a pioneer of X-ray photography during World War I – in those days the radiographers would check the strength of the beam by putting their arm in it and hoping it would make their skin peel. Ugh!

I mentioned the unit of measurement named after them, and then the Newton, and the difference between mass and weight with the aid of fictional space ships and weak tables made out of paper. The poor sausage was still going strong and tossed in questions about infinity (“What’s half of infinity?”) so his brain couldn’t have been completely scrambled.