Just Quickly

Just Quickly...

I wanted to quickly blog that all is going well so far this term. I’m now schooling Joel & Abbie. I’ve made up a timetable that tries to get them working together as much as possible AND involves Phoebe when she is at home. Last week, despite a general lack of health in the house, everything went really well. And this week has kicked off well too (well it is only Monday!!). Joel likes to see his timetable because he likes to know what each day holds, but he is also aware that it has to stay reasonably flexible and can change if we want it to, because that way it doesn’t bind us, it just directs us and helps us remember what we would like to do each week.
     Abbie strangely has suddenly become less keen. It seems that as long as ‘doing school’ was her choice was almost overly eager, but now it is a requirement she’s not so, and is happy to sleek off with Phoebe under the guise of “I don’t have to do school today!”  I’m not putting pressure eon though because actually I’m not too worried how much she does just now and I want to keep it fun for her, but at the same time I have to fair on Joel because he is aware that Boo is supposed to be doing school now! I try to give Boo work that amuses her and makes it seem to Joel as if she is working hard!

As far as teaching Boo to read goes, I’m still not convinced she is really ready, but she so WANTS to learn - motivation coming from seeing her two closest friends now beginning to read. So we’ll plug at it for a bit - going as slow as I can without making it boring, or un-rewarding for her (she needs to see the fruits of her labour). That said, at the end of her first three days I got her to sound out, hear and read the words ‘cat’, ‘sat’ and ‘bat’ (she had learnt the letters s, a, & t and she already knew c and b) and then to show-off what she could do to her old playgroup teachers when we collected Phoebe! She liked that (& so did they)!! Today she learnt ‘i’, so I showed her she could now read ‘sit’ too. So in four days she has as many words under her hat (in addition to ‘at’ and ‘it’ as well of course!). I ’ll keep it slow and rewarding and see how far we get - that’s my plan!

Anyway it’s way too late - again! Caleb is about to wake for his early hours feed (ho-hum - when will he sleep through!?!) and I really must get some shut eye! We have had a house of bugs for a couple of weeks and I am way behind on stuff (having only just caught up after Christmas), hence the late nights...

I’ll blog as soon as I can again, but probably a couple more days.