Blog to Blog…

Not blogged for a few day because life's not been that exciting really! Today was not that exciting either, but thought I'd blog anyway J

The day started well and having Mum here for a couple of weeks (her school is on half-term already) means I get an extra 45 minutes in my day when I don't have to collect C, as she does it in the car for me . Everyone seemed to work fairly well today and we got quite a lot done, although somehow I think Jake managed to get away with a couple of bits of incomplete work (hmmm). I spent some time working with E today because I somehow felt there was more time to do so. We began by learning the letter 'n'. Last week we covered 's', 'a' and 't' - which she seems to be remembering ok if she visualises the pictures that went with them - especially the 't'. She apparently knows the letter 'i' (which I didn't realise) and today she actually sounded out s-i-t and read it as 'sit' - her first real read word!! YEAH!! Tomorrow we cover 'i' (which, as I said, she seems to already know), so we might do 'p' as well and put six letters under her belt to practice on over half-term week. These are great letters to springboard reading from too as so many CVC words can be made with them - watch this space.

My other strong desire atm is to have E recognising the numbers 1-10. She has 1-5 down flat - no trouble there, but 6-10 she seems totally stumped on. I'm really not sure why, but she cannot move on with number work in any way really until she can at least verbally label and receptively recognise these numbers. She had done a workbook page on the No.9; writing, drawing objects, colouring, counting were all included in the page, but immediately after the book was shut she had no recollection of what number we had been working on! So I got out the flash cards. I'm not one for 'drill' tactics on the whole - can't think of anything more boring, but the softly, softly is simply not sticking with her and I think that short, sharp shock might work better in this instance. I laid out 6 (as she seems to have almost got this one sorted) and 8 (because she likes the 'train-track' clue on this one) and got her to repeat them over and over. Then I called out a number and she had to point to the right one and say it as she did so. When I thought she had it sorted I added in 6 and then she forgot the lot! After 20 minutes we stopped. By then she was befuddled and we weren't gaining any ground anyway. It was very frustrating, to see her apparently know a number one minute and completely not know it the next. She was tearful too and said it was too hard L ! I don't want her to hate school, so I tried to explain to her as best I could, why it is so important that she try to learn these numbers.

Later in the evening P - with his special-needs skills - had a go at teaching her too. Admittedly he was a whole lot more adept at it than me and seemed to make it more fun for her (she was giggling instead of looking glum - how does he manage that?!), but he didn't actually do anything very different to what I had done (I must have learnt some techniques from him along the years J) and he came across the same hurdles as I did: she came away just as confused by those numbers as she had done earlier. So I think over these next two weeks we are going to have to FLOOD her with 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - and HOPE that she gets it! Scary to think that she would actually be learning 13-20 right now, were she at school! Bright as she is, she would already be getting left behind - or riding on the backs of her friends' understanding!

She is definitely going to be linguistic I think - and tbh has very little interest in numbers (maybe why she isn't learning them easily). I guess she sees no reason to learn them just yet, whereas she sees a point in learning her letters - she desperately wants to be able to write stuff down. That was her little achievement today; a piece of slightly more than emergent writing. She wrote n - E - i - i - S - e on a piece of paper - really big and a bit giggledy-piggledy, but none the less the letters were all formed correctly and she could tell me what letters she had written when I asked her. She asked me what she had written. Now, I have read Peggy Kaye's 'Games for Writing' and I know this is an important stage - it was her first 'story' - her first real attempt at writing her very own word! I told her she had almost written 'nise' (spelt wrongly I know), but she also like the sound of the 'neeeice' - what's the betting she makes up her own meaning for it too because that's the kind of thing she would do that none of my others would have thought of doing. In fact I don't recall any of my others going through this stage at all - I hope I didn't just fail to notice it L.

The day was rounded off by a game of King Size Uno (only ours is jungle animals). C played this too and He and E really enjoyed it. C won 4 times out of 5 and the last two times I didn't even really help him pick his cards. He could match the colours, and with a little prompting the numbers - he even knew when to play a 'colour pick' card. I was VERY impressed with him. He seemed to understand it almost as fast as E and certainly his concentration was more sustained. E got silly towards the end and stopped really thinking about what she was doing. She did manage to win one game though (phew!). I think that may be coming out again tomorrow J.

On the subject of C - he is learning his numbers too - and may just learn to recognise them before E does at the rate he is going! He knows 1, 2 and 3 consistently already J. C has a real keenness to learn stuff; numbers, letters, colours, shapes - anything! He is asking lots of questions now (including 'why?' !!) and seemingly taking in the answers quite well. So as long as his language can keep up with his inquisitiveness he will be fine!

If any of you are wondering what is happening about us moving - we are making enquiries, but we are not at liberty to reveal any info atm!