Month: October 2009

Having been leapfrogged to early investiture specially, M was able to take part in the Cubs Challenge Day 🙂 Details are somewhat sketchy, but apparently the day was brilliant, both M and J liked canoeing best and they both also did woodwork (and brought home a stool to prove it), orienteering, pioneering (lashing bits of wood together, mostly, afaics), rock (wall) climbing, and quite possibly something else which I’ve forgotten… It was cool, anyway, or to quote M “Very good, very, very good!” 😀

Meanwhile K and L went to Music School and Bob and A read stories, and I had a bath, all by myself 🙂 Then we went to look at a car and put down a deposit on a 2004 Perodua Kelisa which I’ve yet to try but Bob reckons feels rather like our old Mini. We just need to juggle money, sort insurance and arrange collecting it and then Bob has the means to get to work next week 😉

Sunday was a restful day. M went to the Catholic church with friends, we made it to the Sunday Farmers Market we always seem to miss and we spent the afternoon pootling and baking. Just what we needed, I think.

Everybody woke up late today, and all seemed rather tired, so I had pretty much given up on the idea of MEACHE/Friday Club. J did violin first thing, so I knew it was done 😉 and then proceeded to be so grumpy and grudging about everything, while the rest were amiable enough but on a go-slow, that my plan B of staying at home and getting jobs done was obviously doomed to failure and we reverted in haste to plan A and Friday Club. Today was to be a nature walk, so we dashed about and found watercolours (paints and pencils), brushes, the children’s old nature sketch notebooks and some spare watercolour paper. Then we printed off some pages from Nature Detectives which J laminated while I got snack, lunch and water for painting. We knew we would be late, but thought that we could do our own short walk and collect things to paint then met up with the others when they had finished their walk and do the sketching and painting together 🙂
In fact, we got there to find that Z had somehow got left behind, so he came for a walk with us too, L ticking off the things we found on her list and everybody looking out for nice things to collect: J spotted a butterfly, sadly dead, with beautiful wings, K wanted a feather, L found a conker still in its case, A spied blackberries (and ate most of them) and M produced a half brick from somewhere 😆 but fortunately replaced it with some beautiful leaves. When the others got back we all had lunch together and adults chatted while children played. It was nice to catch up with old friends and also meet new ones, but the general age range is quite young. We were hoping to find a few more older children, but they seem to be few and far between 🙁
The painting went well, and everybody settled down and produced something – even A 🙂 then as the children finished they went to the other side of the hall and started to play games. It developed into a fairly raucous but fun session, including a birthday cake for one of our old Friday Club friends, then we closed in prayer and dragged the children reluctantly away.
On the way home J asked if we could have pancakes, so we popped into the Co-op for eggs (must get chickens sorted, now we have the Eglu for them!) and I cooked up a huge pile while L and M did violin and piano, J did piano and recorder and K did piano and cello – it has to be a musical carousel or they can’t all get everything done!

Another Wednesday minus a Latinetc meet 🙁 RI lectures are good, but just not quite reliably good enough to be worth the time and money for us, especially as we have to factor in not only how much it costs us to get there but also how many things already paid for we have to miss 🙁 I’m always deeply regretful at missing out though and haven’t dared tell the children that they are even a possibility 😉

We did another notLatinetc instead, which worked well. Gina’s Geography book again, this time with a piece of work about jobs, thinking about different jobs (useful vocab for M) and where you might do them (city or village) and then a piece of writing which also encompassed describing people (not sure how that is geography, but it’s useful all the same!) differentiated by provision of more or less guidance 🙂

French should have happened but didn’t 🙁 Recorders did though, thanks to a well-timed nap from S 🙂 Maths happened too, although not as much as we’d hoped. It looks as though we may be developing a new plan of attack, of doing lots of short bursts of things together, so that French, Music Theory and possibly also Latin start to happen more often in small groups (or at home) and then come together for bigger group sessions when we can. Some bits of Maths might fit in there too. I’m conscious that we don’t want to de-school M entirely (since he has to go back in a few months time!) and that J needs to get used to being more structured and possibly also more bitty in work ready for school in France – in the past we have tended to find ourselves blitzing one subject at a time, but it may be time to balance that a bit more, even if we only do tiny amounts in an ongoing way and still blitz those things which catch our interest… I think M is struggling at times just to work out what we are doing and that must be a bit disorientating for him. I don’t want to end up with a rigid timetable but it might help to have things planned out a bit more obviously.

Wednesday afternoon was cello and Baby Music, which L seems suddenly to be too old for – perhaps now that she is doing the Saturday Music School she has made the jump away from the littlies class. M did maths until he ran out of easy bits, a spelling worksheet and some Draw Write Now while J, having managed to lose the maths from the morning, did some work from a maths book he found in the car, fortunately at about the right level. Once home I went over the harder maths bits with M while J did piano and then they all pootled, did piano, violin etc and let me get tidied up ready for an evening lesson with a new pupil. No Cubs because there’s a challenge day on Saturday 🙂 so tea was less rushed than a usual Wednesday, but my pupil arrived early so I didn’t get to eat until after the children had gone to bed. The lesson was fun to do, so I’m hoping they’ll book again, but I’m waiting for mum to look at her diary and get back to me with suggestions for when, as Wed evening is not normally ideal for them, I think.

Today was our usual Thursday Tots and Nots, with Philosophy Club restarting. M decided he would like to give it a try, but in the first (younger) group – officially the right one for him by age in any case, but J and J chose to go to the older one, which worked for us as younger siblings were in the younger one 😉 L also tried it for the first time and all three seem to have enjoyed themselves. J was less enthusiastic, although I think it was better than he’d expected, given that he hadn’t particularly wanted to do it. I’m going to see if I can find time to talk to him about it in the next day or two, because there doesn’t seem much point in him doing something he doesn’t want to do, especially as discussing issues isn’t a problem for him. Somewhere around Philosophy and Tots we also managed to fit in piano lessons, French, recorders, poetry reading (just J and J this time, thinking about how to put expression into a poem when reading it out loud), maths for J, J and M (using a CiMT lesson plan), Draw Write Now, English (although L managed to escape 😕 ) and a fair bit of playing, plus craft for the littlies; A made a couple of lovely leaf pictures, very well-glued 😆 It was a long day though (we out-stayed our time at Castle Street somewhat!) and by the time we got back I needed a sit-down and a cup of tea, while the children ran round the field to let off a bit of steam. Bob got in soon after we did, so I sent him out as well to gain myself a little more time 😉

Priority for tomorrow is violin – we missed lessons this week thanks to Kentwell and seem to have missed a few days of practice too. It’s the first MEACHE meet though, so I’m not sure how much time we’ll have…