Getting More Physically Confident

Yep, we're definitely making progress! This morning we took Emily's scooter and bike to a playground that has a cycle track and we were there for two hours having fun and getting plenty of exercise. We took the stabilisers off her bike a while ago but it's only in the last week or so that she's seriously been trying to ride it without. She's not *quite* there yet, but definitely getting there. The last time we went to this particular playground was with Romy and Hazel in the summer, and Emily spent most of her time in tears as she said all the equipment was much too hard for her (it's a newly built one with loads of nice stuff). Today, armed with my new attitude of not taking no for an answer and her new attitude of promising not to say it's too hard, we had a ball. She's now perfectly adept at all the equipment she can physically reach and was climbing, swinging, balancing and jumping off things with gusto.

We had one set of tears, when I asked her to have a go at the sky-ride thing (is that what they're called? Those things where you sit on a small cirle at the bottom of a pole, which then launches itself across a long wire and back up again). She's never, ever agreed to even try one those, even with me holding her. After some discussion she tentatively gave it a go, and now bingo, she loves it and went on it dozens of times with no help at all. :-))

All pretty trivial stuff for your average seven year old, you might think, but trust me, for this seven year old it's amazing progress. We're soooooo pleased for her and you can just see her confidence and self-esteem growing.

Got back home around one-ish just in time to avoid a cloudburst, and after a short play we got back to some work. Lots of maths, mainly telling the time and partitioning numbers into hundreds, tens and units to make mental arithmetic easier. A spelling test (she keeps asking to do those, honestly, it's not me forcing her to, lol) and then some letter writing in reply to various fictitious prompt letters.

Tomorrow Emily starts her new yoga class, which should be interesting. It's certificated so apparently she'll be working straight away towards level one with a certificate day/ceremony due in 10 weeks. The lady running it sounds lovely, so I hope she'll enjoy that. The same place also runs a modern dance class and a youth movement class on Weds and Thurs respectively, so we're having a think about that too.