06/01: If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.
Today was the first day back to school. But not for us!
For all sorts of reasons, not least that Jess's isn't legal school age here, we've decided to take her out of school for the remainder of her time here and teach her at home. This should give her more time to Be A Kid, and hopefully will also enable us to see a bit more of the country before we go back to the UK in the summer.
Today went very well - in that new exercise books / new school year kind of way. Jess woke up early (which would have been lovely if I hadn't been up until silly o'clock trying to convince our printer to stop printing everything with a slant and only two pages at a time) and came bounding in saying "Can we start yet? Can I start now? Can I do something before breakfast? What are we going to do today? Are we going to do some maths?" etc etc. I have a sneaky suspicion that the enthusiasm may wear off by the end of the week, but we'll see.
We got quite a bit done - more than I had (very loosely) planned for the day in fact. Jess has decided that she'd like to learn 'twirly words' which I eventually discovered meant cursive handwriting (or joined-up if you're British). We're going with a simple UK cursive, which seems to be the same one I learned at primary school, because (a) it's a hell of a lot easier than the standard US cursive script and (b) unlike the US version, I can actually read it. For a start,uppercase G looks like a G, rather than a deformed Y. To be honest, I thought Jess would take one look at it and decide it was too hard, but we started off with l, i and t, as they're nice and easy to form, and she declared that 'twirly words' are "much more fun, Mummy". We'll stick with it and see how we go. There may be mutiny when we get to s. Who knows, she might even earn her Berol Handwriting Pen before we school again in September. Anyone else remember those?
The hardest part of trying to teach Jess at home is keeping Emma occupied. She wants to do whatever her big sister is doing, including sitting in the same chair. We just about muddled through today, but I think I may need to rearrange things a little to if I'm going to have any chance of keeping my sanity. Thankfully she still takes a nap during the day, which gives us some time to work on any of the really tricky stuff uninterrupted. We worked through some number bonds (fancy word for sums), and while I was catching up with my ablutions Jess impressed me by digging out a reading comprehension book and working through the first three pages on her own. Jess played on her Leapster (some game that involves set theory) and then thrashed me hollow at Monopoly Junior, which she approaches in a rather mercenary fashion. We got a few board games for Christmas and she's been particularly enjoying Monopoly, Sorry (she never is, though) and Blokus.
By the time we'd done all of that there was just time to nip out and buy some food before ballet, then back home to help me cook chicken paprikash from her new cook book.
We'll gloss over the huge melt down at the dinner table then, shall we? Anyway, I think we're friends again now.
Tomorrow we want to make a start on the Ancient Egypt project - if I can find that Eyewtiness book that I know is around somewhere...
For all sorts of reasons, not least that Jess's isn't legal school age here, we've decided to take her out of school for the remainder of her time here and teach her at home. This should give her more time to Be A Kid, and hopefully will also enable us to see a bit more of the country before we go back to the UK in the summer.
Today went very well - in that new exercise books / new school year kind of way. Jess woke up early (which would have been lovely if I hadn't been up until silly o'clock trying to convince our printer to stop printing everything with a slant and only two pages at a time) and came bounding in saying "Can we start yet? Can I start now? Can I do something before breakfast? What are we going to do today? Are we going to do some maths?" etc etc. I have a sneaky suspicion that the enthusiasm may wear off by the end of the week, but we'll see.
We got quite a bit done - more than I had (very loosely) planned for the day in fact. Jess has decided that she'd like to learn 'twirly words' which I eventually discovered meant cursive handwriting (or joined-up if you're British). We're going with a simple UK cursive, which seems to be the same one I learned at primary school, because (a) it's a hell of a lot easier than the standard US cursive script and (b) unlike the US version, I can actually read it. For a start,uppercase G looks like a G, rather than a deformed Y. To be honest, I thought Jess would take one look at it and decide it was too hard, but we started off with l, i and t, as they're nice and easy to form, and she declared that 'twirly words' are "much more fun, Mummy". We'll stick with it and see how we go. There may be mutiny when we get to s. Who knows, she might even earn her Berol Handwriting Pen before we school again in September. Anyone else remember those?
The hardest part of trying to teach Jess at home is keeping Emma occupied. She wants to do whatever her big sister is doing, including sitting in the same chair. We just about muddled through today, but I think I may need to rearrange things a little to if I'm going to have any chance of keeping my sanity. Thankfully she still takes a nap during the day, which gives us some time to work on any of the really tricky stuff uninterrupted. We worked through some number bonds (fancy word for sums), and while I was catching up with my ablutions Jess impressed me by digging out a reading comprehension book and working through the first three pages on her own. Jess played on her Leapster (some game that involves set theory) and then thrashed me hollow at Monopoly Junior, which she approaches in a rather mercenary fashion. We got a few board games for Christmas and she's been particularly enjoying Monopoly, Sorry (she never is, though) and Blokus.
By the time we'd done all of that there was just time to nip out and buy some food before ballet, then back home to help me cook chicken paprikash from her new cook book.
We'll gloss over the huge melt down at the dinner table then, shall we? Anyway, I think we're friends again now.
Tomorrow we want to make a start on the Ancient Egypt project - if I can find that Eyewtiness book that I know is around somewhere...
Stu wrote:
Tell you what... we were playing Monopoly Junior last weekend... bloody good game! They should _definitely_ come up with a compromise between that and full Monopoly to make a fun quick grown-up version.