Exploring Explorers

Typing this in the beginning stages of what looks set to be a nice powerful thunderstorm. I love thunderstorms, always have done (so long as I'm nice and safe indoors, lol). I think it must be to do with the negative (or is positive??) ions flying about, it always energises me in much the same way as heavy rain does.

Emily whizzed through some very impressive maths today first thing. Plain old boring black and white with no jazzy pictures seems to have done the trick nicely! We also did lots of work on speech marks and thought of 30 different ways to say "said" which we've written down and will laminate. Think we'll create a vocabulary folder to put that kind of stuff in so she can refer to it when she writes her stories.

The Tudor urge is still going strong, so Emily enjoyed working her way through a reasoning exercise about Henry's wives - what problem he had at each stage, why he thought wife x would solve it, whether she did or not, what happened as a result, whether he made a good decision, how the consequences of that wife's reign led to the next and so on. She makes excellent, intuitively logical (if there is such a thing!) connections when she thinks about history. Of her own accord, she then launched into a long 'what if' scenario, discussing what might have happened if Prince Henry (born to Catherine of Aragon, only lived a couple of months) had survived, or what if Edward VI had lived longer and had children of his own, perhaps that would have meant that Mary I and Elizabeth I would never have come to power.... I was very impressed with her grasp of the "big picture" and how all these events were inter-related and inter-dependent.

And then we had lunch. :-)

Emily's been enjoying playing explorers for the last couple of days, so this afternoon she wanted to find out more concrete information about the various famous land discoveries and seafarers. We found out the dates and routes of Columbus, Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, John & Sebastian Cabot and someone else I can't remember (but I bet she can!), and she plotted their routes on a printed world map in different colours, and did a key for the map. Then we read a library book about life on board a Tudor ship, and she started labelling a ship diagram with where the different types of stores would go, where the captain's cabin was likely to be and so on. (Ha - making a vocabulary folder for Emily and I can't stop saying 'and so on'! Must make one for me too, or else just stop being such a lazy writer on this blog!).

Spent ages playing a fun pretend game where she was Elizabeth and I was various of the explorers, imagining what each would say to the other and how any rivalry might have played out. I gently pointed out at one stage that some of them were dead by the time Elizabeth came to the throne, and they wouldn't all have been alive at the same time to talk to one another anyway....which got me a rather pitiful look and a "I know that, Mummy, but it's more fun to imagine what they would have said to each other!"

Inbetween all the vaguely educational bits and bobs, Emily has rediscovered her love of Catz 5 - this was an absolute obsession for a month or two before Christmas, but she ended up adopting over 70 cats and got upset when they started running away, so hasn't touched it for months. I, um, "rehomed" all the existing ones so she could start afresh today, and she's back loving it again.

Meanwhile, she and Daddy have been watching the Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing and Emily's lapping it up. She was so excited yesterday when Jon put it on for her - she came rushing upstairs to tell me "The words the actors are saying are really Shakespeare, so they're the words he wrote over 400 years ago!!!!"

She has such an infectious giggle, our daughter. Jon never fails to get her into fits of laughter - they have such a wonderfully playful relationship, and they very much share the same sense of humour. More gales of laughter this evening, almost to knicker-wetting point (Emily, not Jon!)

Thunder's kicking in now. And very, very, very blue lightning. Off to have some dinner then, now we've finally finished this evening's packing. I'm off for yet another smear test tomorrow - had to have a biopsy and laser cutterage treatment of precancerous cells 18 months ago (on our wedding anniversary, lol) and since then it seems I've been having smears every flippin' five minutes. Not that I'm ungrateful for the care, but well, is there a less dignified way to spend five minutes of your life (not counting birth!)???