Life is a Highway - it’s the journey, not the destination

I must write up something before another day goes by with me being too busy. Since we got back from tenerife we’ve been really trying to get some “proper” educational stuff done simply because I feel it’s been lacking too much and we’re constantly getting bad feedback from James’ family about HE and I’d really like to prove it does work. For some reason Marcus has also turned into a 6 and a half year old and I can’t quite remember that happening, it does feel very ‘big’ and as such I feel he should be doing a bit more work. Although, this being me it isn’t normally that much!!

So last week we sat down and talked about stuff we wanted to learn and so I have a big list of possible things to do. Funnily enough learning to read didn’t come up for either of them, but they’re both getting there with it all. I wish they wanted to though. Actually my mum was really impressed with M on holiday as he quite often draws and writes stuff to go on the picture and instead of always asking how to write something he just thinks in his head. most of the time it’s wrong, but that’s to be expected with our language!!

It’s become apparent that M is really struggling with the concepts of numbers, adding and all that stuff. We don’t follow a set curriculum or anything, but we might look into something in the future. Anyway, yesterday morning I took our base ten block s and went way back to basics with him and we just counted out the right numbers of blocks for each number up to 12. Then we looked at swapping 10 cubes for a ten, etc etc and I think he stared to get some of it. It was kind of nice just to have a maths session without him just looking all confused!! He managed to work out that 100+100 isn’t something like 100100 or whatever he normally thinks. Nothing spectacular but a big break through for us. Alex did the same after too and didn’t flap and wail so that was good too!!

Also yesterday we finished the Spain project we started just after coming back from holiday. We’ve been looking at maps, themoney they used and writing down what language they learnt over there. We also read The story of Ferdinand and Marcus narrated back the story (with some poking and prodding).

We went down the library and managed to get some books on future learning ideas - dolphins and electricity. Wonder if you can work out who wanted which Actually M’s list was all physics-y kind of stuff which is crap for me as I never did it. But James did electronics at college so he knows what he’s talking about. On the way to the library was lots of nature spotting, M remembered about ‘lambs’ tails’ and we talked about spring starting with all the flowers coming through.

Back home and it was patch time - both of them have to have them for 3 hours a day - ugh! horrible, but actually yesterday wasn’t too bad. I think they’re getting used to them. They can play their computer games while they have them on and I think this helps Although I’m not sure the whole 3 hours is good for M to have on a playstation, we’ll see about maybe dropping it. Alex at least isn’t that obsessed with her ds!

Alex spent some of the evening pouring through a book on ocean life and looking at the sizes of the fish/whales/dolphons compared to humans and trying to read the sizes (so work on cm and metres - yay!)

Finished the night with few chapters from a book from Sonlight - Dolphin Adventure, that I happened to find on the shelf and fitted nicely with our ‘theme’

So a good day and I wanted to record it!

Oh and the hot socks refers to James’ bad neck so I made him a rice thingy that you warm up in the microwave with a sock. Of course the kids then wanted one each to take to bed so have been wandering about with socks all bloody day!!