I did, however, manage to get us up in time to get to the opticians after all. Just. Emily's now the proud owner of a new pair of glasses. She loves them, but it's taking *me* a while to get used to them as they are quite different from the gold style she's had for the last twelve months. Here she is resplendent in purple frames:
We also went to the library on our way back to the car park, where Emily chose some books on mythology, yoga, saints (?), and dreams, with two Jeremy Strong audio books.
Back at home we've had a fairly full day. Emily asked to do some more poetry writing, so we had another look in the poetry book I mentioned the other day and she chose an asignment to write a poem entitled "I wish I could capture..". She did really well, very thoughtful choice of words. Think she's getting to like poetry :-) On the subject of poems, Jon reminded me of a song yesterday which touches a nerve regarding some of our reasons for home educating. It's Flowers Are Red by Harry Chapin. Reminds me, somewhat bitterly, of the time at school Emily was drawing and colouring a beautiful rainbow style multi-coloured unicorn picture for me and Jon. Her pathetic excuse for a teacher told her off for using unrealistic colours (what, exactly, *are* realistic colours for a mythical beast???), and even told her that Mummy and Daddy would be cross with her if she showed it to us. I still seethe at the memory.
Anyway, I digress. After writing her poem Emily did some mental arithmetic and lesson 2 of the Music Express thing. The music task was all about animals in music; there was a piece called Seagull and one called Jellyfish, and she had to think about how the music expressed those particular animals. Then there were some excerpts from Carnival of Animals (which she's never heard but I know we have somewhere, must dig it out) and Emily had to guess which animal each piece of music represented.
After lunch we did some gymnastics and yoga practice, then spent some time looking through the Usborne Children's Book of Art. Emily's imagination was captured by Kadinsky's Improvisation No 26: Rowing so we talked a lot about that particular style of art. We also had a go at "blob painting" ourselves.
We each painted four watercolour splodges/shapes/blobs and gave them to the other one, who had to decide what they could see in each painting and give it a title. Just for good measure we then turned them all upside down and gave them new titles. Was fun. I'd really recommend that book. Even if you don't have it, you can still access the online ideas here - just type in even page numbers starting with 4.
Does anyone know of a really good site, for kids, about British folklore? I haven't really been able to find what I'm looking for on that front. Among the book delivery yesterday was Whispers in the Wood by Mark Bartholomew. It's based on the folklore of the Greeen Children of Woolpit and sounds fascinating. It's next on the list for Jon to read to Emily at bedtime, but I wanted to find a really good, child friendly (as in not overly complicated) site about this kind of thing. No luck so far.
Had a flyer through the door this afternoon from the newly refurbished community centre in the village. They're doing (among lots of other things) a tai chi class on Thursdays during the day, and art classes are "coming soon". Hmm. Sounds interesting. Must find out whether they'll accept - horror! - a child at tai chi (shouldn't she be in school???) and whether the art classes are for children or adults.
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