Saturday, Emily went off to ballet, and had an enormous play with Daddy all afternoon while I tried to get some work done - they spent hours playing with Emily's marble run, polly pockets and a gorgeous Eygptian Mummy jigsaw they'd picked up from a charity shop on the way home. Jon also got Emily two beautiful coats from said shop at £1 a throw. Can't be bad. Yesterday, Emily and Daddy went worm hunting in the garden, and founds lots to add to our compost heap. Emily dug up lots of interesting looking pottery too:
They plan to stick any "archaeology" they find from now on onto part of the garden wall, so over time it'll end up as a mosaic effect.
We were up by 7 this morning, so we've managed to fit quite a lot in today. First up we did some maths - among other bits and pieces, Emily completed the "test" in the back of one of her Yr 2 books, supposedly equivalent to a maths SAT (oh the horror!). She breezed through it and ended up with 17/20 questions completely correct. The ones she got wrong were mainly due to daft phrasing of the question if you ask me - for instance, it gave a string of double digit numbers and asked her to complete the (blank) - (blank) = 19 equation underneath. Even I had to stop and think about that one for a moment. If they'd just asked "what's 34-15?" she'd have been fine. Anyway, considering it's not yet even (ahem) "half term", we're very pleased to see that she did so well with stuff that she technically has until July to master. It gave her a boost of confidence too, since she's managed to get it into her head that she's "not good" at maths.
Next we breezed through some English in the Just Write book, which today was all about story sequencing and didn't exactly present a challenge since she's been doing that kind of stuff since she was about 2..... slightly more interesting were the exercises about sequencing words, so lots of practice in stringing together a narrative with then/next/later/finally/first/once blah blah. Onto science; we're working on light at the moment, so we spent some time looking at the different position of the sun in the sky at sunrise, midday and sunset, and some work on shadows. And then we had lunch :)
Kittens had a good long play in the garden after lunch, although there was a moment of gasps and high drama when Juliet pounced into a clump of holly leaves, obviously got nastily prickled and went beserk, running so fast that Emily accidentally dropped her lead and we lost sight of her. Emily was very worried but managed to stay calm and not attempt to chase her - we eventually found her sat near the back door wondering what the fuss was about. Must be nearly time to be brave and let them go - although all the websites I've read say not to allow kittens out unsupervised until at least 6 months...so if we go by that, we've got at least another 8 weeks to go!
This afternoon we finally got back to doing some Italian - it's ages since we last did any, but I was very impressed with Emily's recall. Found lots of lovely Italian printouts on the enchanted learning site, so she did a few of those, working mainly on colours today. Her imagination has been totally captured this last few days by the Latin for Beginners book, and she spent a long time this afternoon comparing the Latin and Italian words for things. We've had many interesting conversations about latin roots in Italian, French and English words. That's mostly why I wanted to learn Latin when I was at school - I was fascinated by the links between languages and the history of the English language too (I'm sure there's a word for that, but it escapes me). Emily likes writing latin tests for me and Jon - she'll write down some vocabulary words in latin and ask us to guess what they are. Often, of course, we CAN guess because of the familiar roots etc, which has been what prompted the discussions in the first place.
Finally (so far) we made time to do some more of our Vikings project. The British Museum Vikings Activity Book is excellent; we love that series. In fact, we love ALL of the British Museum's Children's Shop. They've got the balance just right for kids, I think. Anyway, today we were concentrating on the lands the Vikings discovered and conquered (other than the UK), and what kinds of items they traded where. Question of the day from our six year old before we even started: "Mummy, did they start calling Eric the Red "Eric the Lucky" before he discovered America, or was it because they thought he was lucky for discovering America?" Ummm. Excuse me while I go and look up who the heck Eric the Red even WAS.... it's very disconcerting (in SUCH a nice way) when your little one knows more about something than you do!
Oh, and here's Emily being very grown up on the phone to Nana, Gramps and Grandad (first two in Cumbria, latter in Canada).
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