You Are 60% Boyish and 40% Girlish

You are pretty evenly split down the middle - a total eunuch. Okay, kidding about the eunuch part. But you do get along with both sexes. You reject traditional gender roles. However, you don't actively fight them. You're just you. You don't try to be what people expect you to be.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

I loved this - it's pretty accurate, except for the part about rejecting traditional gender roles, because I so don't! I embrace them actually and don't fight them at all. Other than that it sums me up :)

Holidays - where did they go?

I can’t believe half term is over already! We have celebrated two birthdays in our house this month - Abigail was 5 a couple of weeks ago and Phoebe turns 4 tomorrow! We actually pretended her birthday was today as Granny was here and Mondays are always such rushed days with school, playgroup and swimming. Plus Daddy is at work tomorrow, so today was better all round. Bless her, she had asked for a trampoline - so we got her the octagonal one in the Argos catalogue and she and the others have been bouncing all day long in the middle of the lounge! Its destiny is the garden, but at least it fits in the lounge for now :) The girls also got a sandpit between them (the square wooden one in Argos Cat’ - we love Argos!!) and they were thrilled with it. I just hope the weather warms up soon for them now!

Besides birthdays we have had the usual half-term holiday club going on at church, which Paul is always part of and the oldest three children go to now. That left me with three little ones for three afternoons this week. Most afternoons the two smallest slept, leaving Phoebe and me alone together to have some one-on-one time - FAB!!  So, we embarked on her ‘Wheels on the Bus” project (from live’n’learn press) which I have been wanting to do with her for some time and she was SO keen. As soon as the others were out she was asking to ‘do school’ (school especially for her this week - she knew that was a good thing!)  We have had a great week - making box-model buses, painting, printing ‘tyre’ tracks and she has done some beautiful colouring & learnt the letter ‘b’.  I shall post up the pictures (promise), but we have one more flap-bus to add before it’s completed. I was hoping we would do it yesterday, but she went out to a friend’s to play instead.

I’m not too good at blogging at the moment as I and some others are busy organising a children’s charity event to happen in a couple of weeks time (a variety show type thing) and there is lots of admin’, which I volunteered to do too much of! Also I’ve have had ‘puter troubles, so we’ve bought a new tower, but I am still in the throws of trying to collate all my resources and delete all the unnecessary stuff from the old hard drive (which is sitting in the new machine as a slave quite happily, but needs major cleaning up!). The old PC has been re-formatted and is making it’s way downstairs for the kids, but that needs some fiddling with too one day. And what with that and school planning for two and a half children, it’s all busy, busy here and blogging is always top of my ‘want’ to list and bottom of my ‘need’ to list I’m afraid!! But I am still alive and I occasionally do nip around to have a little read and update myself on your lives, so don’t think you are all forgotten about!

Milestones!

I now have a crawling (as of today he learned to go forward without slumping down), clapping SLEEPING through (as of five nights ago) baby!! And a little girl who turns 5 tommorrow!

They grow up :)

Today's Log

Just to log today;
First thing - Bible study (skipped handwritng today), body project ('The Heart') , play, make chocolate brownies (only half as many as I'd hoped but Paul had eaten half the chocolate!!), lunch - including yummy brownies!! Jolly Phonics for Boo and Comprehension for Joel (Phoebe did the JP colouring too). Phoeb's on ed-city, Elly driving me nuts!! Maths with Joel - measuring bendy lines with bits of string. Maths with Boo - count and write (numbers 1-4 - easy!!). Boo dictated a story and drew a picture for it. Not done from the timetable - Joel's reading but we can do that at bedtime. Wow -we almost did it all!! And we were done by 4pm with good breaks taken throughout the day. I also did my washing AND the washing up from breakfast and the cookery session! My new 'fun-focused' timetable seems to working really quite well. I have been as generous as poss' with my time-slots and tried to keep it low-pressure, but still cover everything in stimulating a way as poss. We have three or four slots in the week for project work & that keeps the motivation high. Monday is a high-concentration day (after the weekend rest), but the rest of the week I tried to make evenly spaced between pencil-work and non-pencil work. There are even 'play games' slots and 'you choose' time. Everyone seems to be happy here at the moment and I must confess I wish Jake was here to share it a little, but in the same breath I know that things would not be the same if he were :(

I met Jake's teacher on Friday - she was nice enough and seemed to have the handle on him! Easily distracted, too busy watching the world go by, distracts others too often, can't keep quiet when he's supposed to (i.e. when she is talking he constantly wants to contribute out of turn). I was frank with her and said that this was exactly how he was at home too, and that was partly why he is now at school! I couldn't be constantly sitting on his shoulder and didn't want to damage out relationship any more by having to be constantly 'on' to him. She seemed to understand that - gladly, but at the same time I think she thought I was a bit cheeky to send him in for that reason, to let her deal with it!! Generally, she thought him a very bright boy who could achieve so much more if he applied himself (well I knew that), and a very pleasent child if he could learn to tame his tongue a little (that I knew too!), so she seemed to have him just about sussed!

The handwriting issue was less of an issue than Jake was making it. She is very happy with his writing! She thinks it is beautiful and not too slopey at all. Reading wise she wants him to read more widely at home, but his school books are 'comprehension level' based, so I'll grant them that his comprehension is not too good.

I need to send them in a copy of the speach therapy report becaseu she said she hadn't seen one. But I told her it's finding and gave her a couple of pointers for dealing with his auditory-memory deficit (i.e. he can't remember what he hears, but works better with visual/written prompts). She was fine about that too.

So all is well really. Life is ticking along smoothly and the PC should be home this week (hopefully tomorrow) - that will be nice!

'Puter Troubles!!

It’s always quick these days…

I never seem to have time or energy to properly blog or to blog trawl these days. I’d love to catch up with you all and sincerely hope that your new year is going well so far. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a not so tired spare evening.

We have been having MAJOR computer problems with our upstairs PC and despite me spending nearly two whole days (and most of a night) over the weekend trying to make it happy, it still keeps crashing! Basically it powers down in the middle of everything, but not properly, so you can’t even restart - just have to unplug and start again! In fact if has taken up to six attempts to get it to power up at all at points :( Anyway, at least we have the downstairs one now (just in time it seems!!), so the kids can play and I can keep at least reasonably up to date with emails etc…

School is still good. I’m going in to see Jake’s teacher this week, just to chat. I have a few issues to raise. One is that she is wrecking his handwriting - trying to make him do it ‘her way’ which is not so different to the way I taught him, it’s just that she is working on the standard he was at two years ago! She wants him to write bigger (WHY???), straighter and with diagonal joins. Now you tell me - how do you do diagonal joins on straight writing? And WHY does she have such a problem with his slopping his writing - that’s what they are working towards anyway. (big rrrrrr). He has talked to her about it, but her response is “No, you have to do it our way!!” I don’t think so. His writing has really gone down hill and I have a big problem with that, so that is definitely one I wish to tackle - perhaps more than the reading issue, because we can deal with reading at home more.

The others are doing fine. Phoebe spends many hours in the dining room either working on PC Play and Learn or on EducationCity.com (excellent site) and in my experience an infinitely renewable free trial! I got her some Carol Vorderman books too, just so she has some ‘school books’.

Abigail is coming on well. I have decided to tread slowly and carefully with her. So we have taken three weeks to cover the first six letters in Jolly Phonics and gone over and over the ground. I think they are well cemented now so today we moved on to Book 2, which starts out with letter ‘C’, which happens to be one she already ‘picked up’ somewhere along the line anyway, so was easy. So, so far she knows s, a, t, p, i, n, c, & k. (c & k are covered in the same lesson as they make the same sound). The other day she came to me and asked “what does this say?” She had written ‘stop’ on piece of paper. I asked her where she copied it from. She said she hadn’t, she had just written it. I asked her what it said and she told me. She had simply sounded out the letters onto paper - and I haven’t even taught her ‘o’ yet, but she must have that logged that somewhere already too :) She can also easily read(by sounding out) the CVC words that her learnt letters can make up, so with a little ice-treading I think we’ll be OK!

Both girls had fun with Maths today - a huge play tub of water on the kitchen floor with lots of different tubs, cups and bottles (it was too cold for the garden! I love the versatility of this new house). They were experimenting with quantities of water in different size containers, learning about volume and the basic measuring of. I called it ‘school’ - they called it ‘fun!!’ (albeit a bit wet)

Joel is doing swimmingly too - when he’s in the mood. I try to do a little of ‘making him write’ and a little of ‘Mummy’ll do the writing if you tell her what to put’. It encourages him to ‘dump’ more when he doesn’t have to do the writing - definitely a boy thing. He has great writing, but hates to do it! His maths is progressing slowly, but he just doesn’t get word problems. He’s fine with numbers, it words that muddle him!! I got him this - Papers in Verbal reasoning - to try to help him out. It’s not just with maths(in fact that’s a very small part of it), but lots of logical thinking. I think if he can learn to reason better then the maths problems will be less tricky for him. These books are great and they are quite fun too. There’s loads of freebies on the website too, so go check it out! :)

Sorry there are still no pic’s. Probably won’t be for a while now. I’ll let you know when I post them up, but the main ‘puter is going to the menders (I’ve given up) and I don’t want to put pictures on the kids PC as the HD is not too big for storing all that sort of thing.

Well that’s me. P needs to do some work now on here and I’m going to veg’!!

Happy Burnes Night!!

I just wanted to quickly blog how fantastically everything is going here at Wellyboots this term. We are having a ball! We have three projects on the go and two more in the pipeline. We are currently doing 'our bodies', 'plants' (still not finsihed that yet and spring will soon be here again!) & 'scotland'. So tonight we had a Burns Supper just for the fun of it - and it was too! We began the evening with the Selkirk grace and then had 'broth' as a starter (a choice of cullen skink (smoked haddock broth) & scotch broth) followed by the parading of the Haggis as Paul red "Address to a Haggis" which was accompanied with neeps & tatties (mashed suede and mashed potaoto), homemade bridies (steak & veg mini-pies), - and, because I thought the kids might not like too much of any of that we rounded off with Chocolate fudge cake (to fill them up!) and sang Auld Lang Syne - all the verses! Throughout the meal we read (Paul did a much better job than I did) a few short Burns Poems, listened to traditional scottish music and toasted to the lassies and the laddies (which I think P & I appreciated more than the kids did!!).
Surprisingly most of the children tried everything, but Jake did his usual and conplained loudly the whole way through the meal (rrrr) You'd think a nearly 9yo would appreciate the occasion, enjoy the spirit of the meal and 'have a go' without quite such a babyish attitude - but even Ellie did better than him - she ate her haggis with relish!! And Caleb enjoyed the haddock broth :) Abbie cleared her plate and Joel made a good stab at it. Beefie was not keen but she did TRY everything and she doesn't eat much atm anyway. So that just left Jake making a fuss! P & I really enjoyed the change :)
I will say though it was a mammoth effort. Joel, Boo and I spent the entire afternoon making broth and pies - it was fun, and added to their desire to try it all I'm sure, but boy am I knackered and my back is sore from the standing - not to mention the mountain of washing up it generated!! Anyway at least Joel will have something to jot in his journal tommorrow - he always says he can't think what to write (his life is SO dull!!)

(cullen skink)(bridies) Scotch Broth

Aside from all the Burns prep - yesterday we did some invisible picture painting which the children enjoyed (we now have art built in once a week (last week was junk modeling) and I think I am doing quite well at letting them try new things - so good to have a wood floor again!!). Anyway, it was possibly the first time Ellie has tried her hand with a paint brush and I will post the pics another night - but suffice to say the entire end of the table where she was, was essentially painted Black - as was her face and even her hair!! But she had a great time!!! I shall try to post up some pictures this week, but our upstairs PC is NOT happy (it keeps powering down for no apparent reason, even in the middle of booting up!). But fortunatly I have just added awireless network connection so this is happening from the downstairs PC (which is the kids one and doesn't have all the add-ons, but does the job!). I'm trying to make them talk to each other, so we can file share between them, but it's not happening - not sure why, but at least the internet connection works between them is ok, meaning I can blog :)

( OK - here are the painting pics - better late than never!!)

But its way past bedtime (to much trying to configure the pc's these last two days!!) and the little C. still doesn't sleep well so I best get some shut eye before he wakes again.

Other news before I go though - Ellie is potty trained and dry at night too!!! And Joel is up to Level 6 in his swimming :)

And these were the junk models;

bird table - by Abbie (very little help given from me - all her own idea! ) I was very impressed :)

Joel's TV Robot!

Phoebe's butterfly

Phoebe's telescope - entirely her own creation :)

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.