Who’s Normal Anyway?

We’ve had a good day of few arguments and getting stuff done we wanted to today M did all his maths with no problems and didn’t get frustrated with himself. He also typed up an amazing page of things he’d found out about some sea creatures and added pictures. He wrote it very chattily, calmly asked for help with some spellings (though he did think the computer should’ve recognised that moonjellies was a word LOL) and sat and tapped away happily for quite a while. He was upset when L found his printout and drew all over it before I noticed , but thank goodness for saving and for printers! Meanwhile L pottered about.

We rearranged the TV and stereo area in the living room to put the DVD/video stand behind the TV unit right in the corner where L can’t reach it, because I found he’d cracked one of his DVDs. Though what to do with the drawerful of videos he can still get at? So I had a good vac out behind there and tidied up.

L joined M in doing some art with some oil pastels. M practised drawing a boat and then did a boat on the sea at night, with waves and reflections. L sat up to the table in his highchair and had some paper like M’s and was enthusiastic about using the oil pastels too, so that kept him engaged for ages My little righthander LOL - going to be the odd one out!

We made some chocolate biscuits together and then later I made tortillas for our chicken fajitas for tea. In and among we had a short walk out to the park too.

This evening A and M have been out to ju jitsu and I took L to church for the Ash Wednesday service. He was very well behaved in church but still rather a distraction I think, rustling his plastic bags of cereal and raisins and pushing his car around. Then he spent a while emptying out wet wipes, washing his head and then the carpet. He was taking it all in during communion and the bit with the ashes though. I thought I’d have him playing quietly on the floor of a pew where no one would see him but it turned out we were all sitting right up round the altar as there were only a few of us, so everyone got to watch his antics. I stopped for a quick coffee afterwards (L had a nap so I knew he wouldn’t be early to bed) but when he decided spitting on the tables (where do they get these ideas?) was fun I decided it was bedtime

This is the FIAR book we’ve been doing for the last week or so.

Before we began reading the book we’d been for a walk over the Christmas holidays and spotted deer hoof prints in the sand in the woods around Sandringham. We made plaster of Paris casts of them and M has painted them up - they look really nice now.

Wednesday

We read the poem together and talked about the basic story of the poem and the illustrations. M picked 4 British woodland creatures to read about and then draw or colour and narrate a few sentences about. I cut out some bunny shapes to stick the animals to to make a booklet to keep the info together. M started writing out the poem for handwriting practice. He can write beautifully with tiny letters when he concentrates. In the afternoon M watched birds in our garden and drew some pictures of them, using a form from this booklet, which I liked because it has a bird shape to fill in rather than having to draw from scratch, which I thought would be too daunting.

Thursday

The main focus today was on art. We read through the book and looked more closely at the illustrations and M tried to work out from whose perspective each picture was drawn - was it another person looking on, a bird looking down from a tree branch, a small animal looking through the bushes? He took drawing things out into the back garden and sat close to the base of our bird feeder pole, looking up at it. He took a photo and drew a picture of the feeder from a “rabbit’s eye view”.Then when he’d finished he came upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window down onto the feeder, took another photo and drew the bird feeder from a “bird’s eye view”.

We finished off with M writing out the next 4 lines of the poem for handwriting practice and then looking at the arrangement of rhyming words through the poem. If you label each line A, B etc giving a new letter to each different rhyming word at the end, you can see the pattern. In this poem it goes A A B A (know, though, here, snow) and then the B from the first verse is the rhyme of the As in the second verse (here rhymes with queer, near etc) and so on.

Friday

Today we looked mostly at poetry related things. We read poems from several poetry books we have, looking for ones we liked. For some we looked at the pattern of rhyming words like yesterday and others we just read. M was impressed with himself for reading the whole of Sea Fever out loud.

Then we went through Stopping By Woods looking for various poetic devices suggested in the FIAR manual (like repetition, metaphor etc) and finding examples. We’ll look for others in more poems next week too.

Monday

Today we did activities about snow. We read about snowflakes and cut some out online. Then M made a hexagonal prism, the basic shape of a snowflake. He made some paper snowflakes and L covered them in glitter (and the rest of the dining room LOL). We also read a short biography of Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley who was the first person to take photos of snowflakes back in the 1800s.

Tuesday

We talked some more about poetry and what makes something a poem. We read more poems together and M had a go at writing his own after initially being sure it was impossible. We found some more examples of various poetic devices to make a booklet about them. M finished writing out Stopping By Woods.

Wednesday

Today we read about Robert Frost’s life and M narrated back the bits he was most interested in - such as Robert Frost dropping out of first and then second grade after a few weeks and being home educated! We also listened to Robert Frost reading Stopping By Woods.

Thursday

This was a finishing off day and I helped M with putting all his things together in a lapbook type arrangement.

Last night I mixed up 4 loaves worth of bread dough using this recipe, having tried the beginner’s bread recipe on the same site with good results last week. So this morning A and M got up first and knocked the dough back for me and put it into loaf tins and on trays to make rolls, so it could get on with the second rising.

We had a slow start to the morning though because L slept until 9am so I didn’t like to disturb him by going back upstairs for a shower and for M to do all his bedroom jobs before L woke up. Once we got going M did some maths and we baked the bread and shared one of the rolls for elevenses. We all like the bread which is a bonus, though M thinks I should have made white bread not half wholemeal.

We’re re-rowing How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World this week. We did it before when M was 4 or 5 maybe, so this time we can talk about different things at a slightly deeper level. It’s funny how much we enjoyed reading the book together again, we haven’t got it out to read for ages. We talked about where all the ingredients for the food we’ve eaten today might have come from and about choosing local food over shipping it long distances.

This afternoon we had to wait in for a landlord’s gas safety check thing so we did some baking. M peeled and chopped apples and helped me make pastry and we made an apple pie for tea - it was gorgeous! When the gas man finished he said he had to leave the boiler off because there was a problem with the gas pressure - luckily the bloke from the gas supply company turned up anout an hour and a half later to change the regulator or something and get everything turned back on again. It’s a shame we had to stay in because it was a lovely sunny afternoon.

This evening A dropped M off to Cubs and L started pulling things out of one of our craft drawers and had a thing for a paint tub (realised afterwards the paint had dried in the pot and I needn’t have had all those palpitations about paint everywhere). I sat him at the table with a little bit of paint and a brush and he dabbled away for a while getting more and more covered in paint. We did some hand painting and prints too. A came back in and ran some warm water to wash him off with afterwards. L got very snuggly and fed off to sleep which was a bit difficult cos I’d promised M I’d go and watch his cub investiture. I managed to get L’s PJs and dressing gown and some socks on and put him in a front cross carry with the wrap and took him to Cubs like that still asleep, though he woke up there and played with the camera taking lots of photos of the Cubs. I found I’d missed lots of paint around his neck and head and he had an especially large patch of blue in his hair. M was invested and got his Cyclist badge so he was happy, though rather tearful at bedtime. Think it was all a bit too much of a long day for him.

The start of last week we didn’t seem to get much done. I was tired with being woken more and for longer as L was teething and restless. M was tired and not feeling very well. Activity wise he got a fair amount of maths done each day and is finishing up in Miquon Green (doing division and ordering including fractions) and we also worked onlearning his 7 x table. We also did some activities around the FIAR book The Finest Horse in Town.

On Monday evening M had Cubs from 6 to 8.30pm because they were going on a visit to work on a badge. That is past his usual bed time, so although he really enjoyed it he was very tired when he got home and took a while to wind down and sleep. Then on Tuesday evening he went to the lad next door’s 9th birthday party and had another long evening. I can’t remember anything about what we did on Wednesday. Oh yes, one thing M did was find pictures and write out information about Russia and Egypt to make some posters to finish off his Friendship badge for Beavers.

On Thursday we did our usual rush out to baby signing first thing, then an early lunch and supermarket shopping. In the evening was M’s last Beaver meeting (except for a bowling night during half term he’s invited to go back for) andwe all went to watch him “swimming up” to Cubs. The Beaver leader was having a bit of a nightmare evening with having to stay later at work so she was late to Beavers and flustered and the Beavers play her up alot. We took a blue sheet because she hadn’t been able to get home and get her stuff, and the sheet was for water for the Beavers to swim up under. M and his friend stood at one side with the Beavers lined upholding the sheet up, then they dissappeared underneath, took off their Beaver sweatshirts leaving their Cub ones underneath and then came out to the Cub leader. On Monday he’s getting invested in Cubs.

On Friday we were supposed to be going to a soap making home ed workshop but it was cancelled at the last minute. Instead we had a bit of a science day. M wanted to do some more with his electronics kit and we spent ages with it once he got a bit stuck because nothing seemed to be working. Alot of time was going through testing the circuit to find what wasn’t working - we found the motor and the buzzer didn’t work and the copper wire wouldn’t conduct electricity (can’t figure out the why of that one - coated maybe? Though it came in the kit and was the part he was supposed to use).

In the afternoon we did one of the First Investigators sheets about rolling cans. M had 4 cans with labels removed and the idea was to roll them down a slope and measure how far they rolled and see if that related to what was in the cans in order to identify which was which. We did loads and it was really fun. L helped as a random environmental anomoly LOL moving the cans before we could measure them or sitting in the middle of the floor in the way. But he did help by bringing the cans back to the slope too. We talked about whether the experiment was reproducible and taking several readings and finding the average. We tried 2 different slope angles and drawing up tables in Word to present results neatly.

After tea we made our Christmas cake. L fell asleep after not napping all day (he seems to be growning out of a daytime nap very early, arghh…!) and so didn’t get to stir the cake and make a wish. M did lots of the mixing and tried to finish off the droplets of Brandy left in the bottle, saying “Mmm, nice”.

I think just about everything I’ve tried to do in the kitchen today has gone wrong! The first major thing was at lunchtime when i realised I hadn’t put the stew on in the slow cooker for tea. I got meat out of the freezer yesterday and even prepped some of the veg, but then completely blanked it this morning. So I set it off on the high setting just after midday, but it was nowhere near cooked by tea time. I eventually transferred it to a big pan and simmered it to death. So we had beans on toast for tea (to put us on) and then A went out for a work’s night down the pub so he’ll probably have chicken and chips in a basket or something and I had stew as a meal while M had some supper before going to bed.

I’d decided to try making a pumpkin pie with the pumpkin we got in the veggie box last week, and roasted pumpkin pulp has been sitting in the fridge for a couple of days now waiting for me to get organised. Theis afternoon I thought I ought to get it sorted so we had a walk out to the shop to get cream and eggs and evaporated milk for making the filling. The shop didn’t have eggs so we drove to the place we usually get eggs from, someone sells them from their front garden with an honesty box. They had none either, so we stopped off at another corner shop on the way home and bought half a dozen.

I started making pastry and decided to just follow the recipe on the card I’d printed out, but didn’t read it closely. So by the time the mixer was almost full of flour and I’d already added sugar and salt I realised the recipe was having me make 4 times as much as I needed with the rest to go in the freezer. I decided to plough on anyway but got something wrong in my conversions for the margarine, because it was far too thick and greasy. I binned all of that and started again with my trusty Bero recipe book. L was sat with me on the side in the kitchen but was determined to dabble in the washing up bowl, so I moved him to the other side and then carried on mixing not looking too closely at what he was fiddling with. Then there was a crash and 6 smashed eggs on the floor. Serves me right. Eggs are really hard to clear up too - resorted to scooping them into the dustpan in the end. So I finished the pie crust and baked it blind but couldn’t do the filling.

L is at the stage of loving emptying cupboards and we’ve sorted the bottom kitchen cupboards so they don’t have anything dangerous in. He particularly likes the baking cupboard with the plastic bowls and sieve and weighing scales in it. He’s distributed some of the weights around the house somewhere (unless he ate them, we can’t find them at the moment) so I sorted out just the 2oz, 4oz and 8oz weights into a plastic tub for him to play with (bigger but not too heavy) and put the rest up into a drawer. Unfortunately he came toddling in to the living room with the 8oz weight this afternoon and dropped it into my (cold) cup of coffee that I didn’t get round to drinking and had left on a low table. So that made a nice mess. But I don’t learn because this evening he brought the same weight through again and then dropped it on my foot - ow! So maybe I’ll put them all away after all. He does enjoy carrying them around in the plastic jug though and transferring them back and forth into some plastic cups - very Montessori. Don’t think I can face rice everywhere though.

What else have we done today? M’s done some more 6 times table practice, some spelling, discussed stories within stories (FIAR Finest Horse in Town) and done some art work on foreground, middle and distance, tried adding and subtracting with decimals and found it’s quite easy really, completed 2 new chapters of his Lego Star Wars 2 game and interviewed our next door neighbour about his job for a Beaver badge. I’ve done loads of laundry, some cleaning and made lots of mess in the kitchen!

I didn’t sleep well last night, I seemed to be awake dealing with L every hour or so. He was restless and unsettled, rolling about the bed and wanting to breastfeed but not particularly hungry. He seemed to be uncomfy in his tummy or need a wee, but didn’t relax and go when I tried him on the potty and it felt too chilly to get out of bed (and that would’ve risked him screeching). He got up before he was really ready to because he couldn’t settle back to sleep this morning.

We got dressed and had breakfast and M had a bit of computer time and then we started his activities. We’re noticing his lack of memorisation of times tables is really starting to hold back his work with fractions and I liked Jan’s idea about the easy sums with a time limit to get practise in, so today I printed him out a multiplication chart and some 6 times table sums to work through referring to the chart. Maybe we can bore the 6 times table into him. I thought he couldn’t possibly go wrong with the answers to refer to but no, he got across with the columns and had half his answers from the 7 times table. So I eventually got him to shade in the 6 times row and column. In and among L had a horrible poo which came all of a sudden and sounded awful, but I rushed him off to the loo and he did the rest there. I though he was going to have the runs but it turned out to just be the one strange poo - but no wonder he had a restless night.

M also did a bit of Miquon and we read a story from the section of God’s Story and Me that I’ve started trying to incorporate into our mornings. Then we read The Finest Horse in Town and looked at the Declaration of Independence and briefly at why the Americans wanted to separate off from the Brits, bringing in bits of history we’ve done before. I was quite impressed he remembered about Paul Revere and about the Pilgrim Fathers and James I and the early colonies. While we were talking L sat on my knee and fed to sleep for a very early nap.

Once L was down upstairs, we had a go at the flag drawing exercise from FIAR and M incorporated a flag into a picture of a school house. I liked his bird poo on the flag pole detail LOL. Then he insisted he wanted to bake cookies during snack time, so that took a while longer than usual. While he made the mixture I put on some leek and potato soup for lunch. I managed not to burn his cookies this week.

We started M’s phonogram cards and had just got as far as beginning spelling when L woke up. It was getting past the time we usually eat lunch and I was getting crosser and crosser with M messing about and feeling hungry and trying to deal with a just woken and still grouchy L, so we eventually called it a day on the spelling after some shouting and I grilled flat breads from the freezer and pureed the soup and we had lunch. Well, I ate lunch, M complained about soup but decided it was OK and then just picked at his flat bread and L threw most of his on the carpet.

So then I spent a while reading emails and M watched TV and played with L, then M had half an hour on the computer. This afternoon we were going to do some more science and carry on with an experiment we’d been planning out for testing soap and hot water for washing, but M was in a mood and so was I and it started badly. We both calmed down eventually and sorted out what things M was going to test and he got the things together. He decided to try using muslins with mud and wash with and without soap and using hot or cold water. What we found was none of the methods got the muslins even slightly clean, but we have a starting point for further investigation another day LOL. M went off to play with his Lego and I played shape sorting and things with L for a while.

The boy next door came round to play and he and M argued over computer games for 20 mins until I said enough and then they went upstairs to argue over playing with swords. Then they went next door, where M stayed until tea time so presumably they found something they could agree on. When M came home I was in the middle of a counselling phone call and trying to sort him out for going to rollerblading at the same time, but managed it just about. A took him when he got in from work and I sorted out lasagne from the freezer for tea. L nodded off so I put him down for a nap/early bed.

This evening we’ve had tea and M’s had a shower and then we read some of The Long Winter as a bedtime story. L woke up and kept falling over, so I put him in his pyjamas and sat upstairs with him watching TV til he went back to sleep and now I’m blogging while I get the chance. I think it may be another disturbed night.

We’ve been doing some more Five in a Row recently and this week we did Who Owns the Sun by Stacy Chbosky for the first time. I do still enjoy the five in a row style of things and M is old enough now at almost 8 to cover some of the harder topics and to do something with lapbooks now and again. Not that lapbooks are necessary to FIAR, but it is nice to do them once in a while. I love how much we find to discuss in FIAR stories and the art lessons are really handy, because I don’t know much about art. We don’t necessarily organise ourselves to do one activity from one subject area per day; I kind of play it by ear and see which things seem like they’ll appeal to M.

On the first day we read the story and then talked about things being too beautiful to own. We looked at the illustrations and the simplicity in the pictures of things the son asks questions about and we talked about which was M’s favourite picture and how it ight have been painted. M made a list of things he thinks are too wonderful to be owned by anyone. Then he had a go at painting his own version of his favourite picture in watercolours and did a second picture along the same lines but this time of some things off the list he made.

On the second day we read the story again and this time M had to point out instances of similes and personification. We’ve covered these and metaphors several times before, so it was a basic review and then trying to spot them in the story. M made flap books to show examples of personification and similes from the story.

On the third day we did some science and talked about healthy eating and went back over the food pyramid idea. This time we did it as a plate of food split into sections showing how much of each food group to eat at a sitting (using a fridge magnet from the BBC Big Challenge). Then we split circles up into sections and M put the father’s lunch items into the correct categories, made a generic food plate example and also planned a healthy lunch, drawing pictures of the items.

The next day we covered slavery which has come up before. We’ve only really talked about slaves in the south of the USA before though (e.g. in Follow the Drinking Gourd) so this time I brought in more information about how Britain was involved in slavery. M completed a map about the slave trade triangle but started getting upset when I asked him to narrate back some info about slavery, because he said it was too upsetting to think about. So we didn’t go on to look at this Slaves’ Stories website I’d found. This is what he narrated instead.

On the 5th day (we didn’t do it Monday to Friday, but fitted in 5 days over a bit longer than a week) we looked at symbolism in the story and especially the trees and how they fit with the events on each page. We also talked about the author a little. Then we got together all the booklets and pictures M had made/found and put them together to make the lapbook. This shows how the opened out folders are arranged.

Then the flap on the right folds in and the slavery things are on the back.

And this is the front cover when the lapbook is folded up completely.