Nine Worlds??? We Need a Map!

Didn't make it to York today. Emily was poorly in the night again, and we all woke up feeling awful. My throat and chest hurt, I keep being sick and I'm losing my voice, Jon's glands are swollen and Emily's snuffly and woozy. Yorvik will have to wait!

We did, however, get stuck into some work. This morning we did lots of times tables problems, and worked on using webs to organise information for writing. I love that Just Write book! This afternoon it was time for some Viking stuff. After a slow start last week, Emily's imagination was captured today by the norse myths. We read lots of the Orchard Book of Viking Stories, and needed lots of help from Usborne Illustrated Guide to Norse Myths & Legends. My fantastic school education had totally failed to prepare me for the um, complexity of norse mythology. Half way through the first myth and Emily and I were rolling about on the floor giggling hysterically because we couldn't keep track of who was who or what was what. Nine worlds?? We struggle with one, sometimes! Think we need to do a big painting of the World Tree and its nine worlds and write or stick pictures in to mark who lives where and what happened where. It's very confusing at first glance, much more so than the Egyptian myths were.

Anyway. While I was reading to her, Emily was doing a big drawing of the runic alphabet (except of course that, much like we discovered with hieroglyphs, the actual rune symbols and the number of them seem to change according to which book you read or which website you're on, sigh). She worked out how to write her name in runes, and then I gave her a set of amethyst runes to work with. We had fun casting them and reading the future from them. Emily's prediction was that she was going to become skilled at something she felt unskilled in, but that she needed lots of patience and to work closely with her family to achieve her dreams. Mathematician, anyone? Mine was skilfully interpreted by Emily as meaning that the balance between Jon and I was being rocked by too much "stuff" that needed getting rid of. All our clutter, she reckoned that was. And that we too needed to be patient because it couldn't yet be cleared. And she interpreted Jon's casting to mean that he is setting himself unrealistic goals and being too hard on himself, and that he needs a break (yay, a holiday!) and to allow others to show him his strengths.

Here's Emily sorting her runes into letter order first, before we looked at the more symbolic meanings:

After "work" had ended for the day, Emily started writing messages in runes, and making up games to play with her being Freya and me being Odin. Daddy will no doubt get to be the mischevious god Loki. Since Freya's chariot is drawn by cats there's a starring role for Romeo and Juliet, too.......