More of the Same

It's been a very busy week so far, business wise, but we're still having a quiet time as far as education goes. There's a lot going on in our general lives which hasn't been very conducive to sit down education. Still, it is "half term" round these parts, so.....

Emily and Jon have been reading the The Demon Headmaster series this week, and loving it. Rooting through all of our old books we've come across several more books enjoyed by one or other of us in childhood and that we plan to read next: Witch's Daughter by Nina Bawden, Well Met By Witchlight by Nina Beachcroft (or maybe I just liked books by people called Nina!), Over Sea Under Stone and the rest of that series by Susan Cooper, the Borrowers series, and quite a few others whose names now escape me. And I'm still trying to get hold of a copy of The Stream That Stood Still by Beverley Nichols, sequel to the Tree That Sat Down.

At tai chi this morning Emily and Jon picked up a leaflet about the Lincolnshire Young People's Book Award 2006 although Emily was rather cross that you can't vote unless you're 9 or over. Well, not unless you lie ;-) Never read any of the books on that list apart from the Half Blood Prince, although I have to say that not many of the ones in the 9-11 age group sound very inspiring (and why is HBP in the 11-13 category?), but I suppose they're on the list for a reason so we may hunt down some of them to give them a go too.

Emily's been to more ballet lessons and rehearsals than I can shake a stick at. I sat in on the lesson on Tuesday morning and was very impressed with how she's doing. She was picked out to demonstrate several of the sequences and generally praised a great deal, although she does need to practice keeping her heels on the ground when landing from the sequences of sautés. She says she "can't". Hmmm. We shall see.

This afternoon Emily went off for a play at Romy's house while I went to do some top secret shopping at Argos with our £70 worth of nectar points. You've gotta love Viking Direct. We're getting so many nectar points for orders we'd be placing anyway. It was a nice little shopping spree :-))

Once Monday and the Halloween party are "out of the way" (horrible to say it that way, but I'm sure you know what I mean) we really need to settle back into some structure. We've all been a bit up in the air since we came back from holiday at the beginning of October, then we were all ill, then we had to give the business 200% attention for a while....some back to normality would be nice. As far as home ed is concerned, I'd ideally like to settle into a structure whereby we start early and Emily does 15 mins quiet reading on her own while I get things together, then we do half an hour of yoga or something together, then a quick brainteaser type thing to get the brain working, then "work" proper. The few days we've attempted something like that it's worked very well. With the business to attend to as well, leaving everything to be "spontaneous and autonomous" usually means frayed tempers, not enough time or attention given to anything and not a great deal achieved. Nope, we really need a plan.