THE FROG-ACADEMY

Just to let you know…

…there's no baby yet! I am now a week over (as per usual for me) and getting more uncomfortable by the minute - also normal I guess! Baby seems quite happy though and at least we have chosen names now J…but I'm not telling! The kids are all too keen for baby to arrive too and like me praying hard each night! E says "it's a boy, but I'm going to call him Becky!" - hmmm - that'll be interesting! I'm pretty convinced it's a boy too, but I'm definitely NOT going to call him Becky!

I've had some contractions - regular and irregular, but they come to nothing. I'm OD'ing on Raspberry Leaf capsules - to no avail atm. Curry…no thanks and it's never worked for me before. Sex…too uncomfortable (hips are past it!!). Black Cohosh…well you'd think that might do the trick, but no! Pineapple…(well juice anyway) - too acidic to eat it. Stairs… I sleep on a loft bed! Haven't tried scrubbing the kitchen floor yet though..! So - any more suggestions!?!

Kids are coping well with our make-shift school and being very accommodating of my tiredness - bless them. I've assigned them 'games' for a couple of days and today they've been asked to write a story today. They haven't done that for ages, so it'll be good & interesting to see what they come up with. I find it is sometimes a good way to gauge how well all the 'bits' of other English fit together for them and how well they can actually put a piece of writing together. Not a bad end-of-half-term thing for them to do. Wow! One more half-term of this school year to go - I can't believe it.

I guess that means I need to start looking into school resources for next year soon, not that I think we need a great deal - thankfully! My resources seem to gradually be becoming less 'consumable' and more 'reusable' (thanks to sites like homeschoolestore!), which is a good thing, but obviously maths and a few of my English resources have to be replaced. I also need to make sure I have the right materials in for P next year - so JP
workbooks and some next level S&S books too. She has been whizzing through the material I have, but the last couple of days we have been working on 'how many more?' & 'how many less/fewer?' - you know, where she has to match objects one-to-one and see how many don't pair-up to work out the excess? She has really struggled with it. I am not sure if it's the maths she doesn't understand or the language? Her comprehension of language is very similar to Jacob's (interestingly, because they were both late talkers too) in that unless something is blazingly obvious, she often can't make sense of it. The less than/more than concept is possibly a bit too abstract, so instead of telling me how many more/less bones Scamp has than 'Dog', she just tells me how many Scamp has in his bowl. She can see than 'dog' has more/less in his bowl, but doesn't understand that the excess of un-paired bones is the number that she needs for the answer to the question "how many more/less does Scamp have?" Lots more practice needed there. Strangely though, she can easily do a subtraction. So presented with four birds on a branch and two flying away she can tell me - 'there are four birds to start with and two fly away - that leaves two." Which is why I don't think it's the numbers that are the problem! So, when we've finish the S&S materials we are currently using I think we might start with Miquon Orange (which Boo is currently finishing off after a long break - and finding easy I might add J ) because I know that the first part of that works on one-to-one counting and object-number recognition. P can count beautifully (as far as 15) and does understand that '1' means there is one object, but it's getting beyond that and making the numbers malleable that we need to work on and making the concrete work with the abstract. That, I think, is the strength of Miquon - it encourages abstract thinking even in those to whom it does not come naturally - like ME! And alongside that I will get the Reception level maths books from S&S (instead of Singapore Earlybird) and work with the concrete too. By the end of all that I think P might be ready for MPH 1 but likely not before!

I will keep you posted about the baby, but I'm tired of saying .. "Not yet!" So I might not blog again until I can say "We have a …"