This Week Emily Has Been Mostly Readin'

...things about the titanic. Blimey, three posts in one day, I must have rediscovered blogging enthusiasm.

This afternoon Emily and Jon watched Titanic (again) and after her sobs at the ending (Emily seems to have discovered the strange cathartic qualities of a weepy film rather early in life...) Emily declared herself determined to "do" a Titanic project for the rest of the week. (OK, get in the queue next to dragons, mythical beasts, weather (still), rocks/soils, Romans and Celts). She and Jon have been reading Voyage on the Great Titanic from the "My Story" diary series, and Emily has also been reading the DK Eyewitness Titanic book with great interest.

Since her request to "do" the Titanic was met with rather blank looks by a Mummy engrossed in romans, weather and other such delights, Emily came up with her own ideas of what to do. She wants to write some diary entries from both a first class and a third class passenger, do lots of drawings and artwork, write about who or what she thinks was to blame for the great loss of life and look up records of who died on the ship and what stories of bravery there were. Daddy's request to do a project on Kate Winslet were denied ;-)) Oh, and just in case she runs out of ideas, Mummy also found these lazy-Mummy's resources on historyonthenet.com.

Forgot to mention that we're also paying attention to Emily's writing at the moment. Eighteen months ago she had the most beautiful writing. Now, her writing style is, um, less easy to read if you're not used to it. I hadn't really noticed until she showed Uncle David and Aunty Barbara some of her work last week when they were here; when looking at it with objective eyes I can see that Emily's writing can be a little tricky to read sometimes. Which is a huge shame as she has such an interesting turn of phrase and she LOVES to write. It's a big dilemma, drawing the fine line between encouraging neater, more legible writing vs stifling the desire to write in the first place. Much the same as with spelling. I'm kinda pleased, in many ways, that Emily's handwriting has its own style instead of the identikit school handwriting....but obviously, it NEEDS to be legible to someone not used to it. A delicate balance. Thing is, she writes *really* quickly and she hates to be slowed down. Today I made some (constructive) comments about some of her letters, for instance that her T's and L's aren't always any taller than her a's and so on and that makes it hard to read....only to look at my own handwriting, which is also very fast, and note the same. Hmmmmmmmm. Yet I consider mine perfectly legible.

Also being read this week: Mirror Mirror, which has some fabulous things to say about "beauty" and, on a different level, about drug abuse. And Dear Mr Sprouts (yay, a comprehensive reviews page that isn't amazon!) which is the book Emily has been sent this month to review for the EO magazine. She's nearly finished it now and was at pains to point out that she thought many people might be offended by the use of a particular swear word in it. Guess she comes from a more, um, colourful background than some.

And Emily's started reading HP & Goblet of Fire, although admittedly the allure of that has somewhat diminished having read the next two books with me and having seen (oooh, about thirty times) the film of GOF...but she's very interested to see what's different in the book vs the film. And there's plenty of that. Oh, and speaking of Mr Potter, am I alone in finding it slightly ironic that this very British series of books has so much more merchandise available in the US than in the UK? Yeah, yeah, evils of merchandising apart...I have an eight year old's birthday coming up with a Harry Potter crazy child - it's vaguely irritating to have to buy things from the US...albeit probably cheaper in the long run. Now if only Emily's birthday coincided with the release of book 7, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have to look so far afield for pressies......