A New Start

I've decided to make our days more structured. I think this will help all of us, and I want to cover more topics with Lady especially. So for the past few days, we have been gathered round the kitchen table, looking like a magazine picture of a home-ed family, withs books spread out and 3 little heads bent and busy. Well, there was a period of about 10 minutes when it looked like that!

I'm asking Lady to do some maths from the CGP book every morning, then an English task (either a story or letter or blog entry). She has never been able to finish this sort of thing and we have loads of half written letters and stories lying around. I'd also like to see her gain confidence at getting things down on paper. She can tell these long convoluted stories when she's playing with the boys, but dries up when faced with a blank page.

It's been fine these past few days. Lady sits beside me while she's working at her maths, Thomas mostly plays PC games, but he's been colouring in, drawing mazes and rainbows and writing with the stencil. Duncan decided that he wanted to write some numbers too, and wrote in an old maths workbook. Apart from that, we made our pictures and books and he was quite content.

We're going to start using the BBC schools radio programmes again, starting today. We'll be listening to a music programme and a drama one.

Lady has also started back at her Jujitsu and Brownies and I had another Salsa class last night. I've moved up into the intermediate class, and I spent much of it feeling out of my depth and just going wrong over and over. But right at the end, I stopped thinking too hard about the moves, and just allowed myself to be led (there are plenty of men in the intermediate class, whereas in the beginners it was almost all women) and I was getting it! It felt great. I'm glad I started this and look forward to it every week.

But right now, I'm cooking some chips for Duncan. He's already asked me to make a little paper bag, decorated to look like it came from that McD place, to put them in.