Really Roman

So, it's November :-))

Yesterday, after all the excitement (and disruption!) of Halloween, Emily settled back down to "work" really well. In the morning she worked (without complaint!!) on plenty of maths, especially area and perimeter calculations and she asked to do more fractions.....yes, I thought I'd misheard that one, lol. She also did some English work on latin roots; she enjoyed trying to work out what new words meant from her existing knowledge of some of the roots. Just for fun, we did a reading age test too, which marked Emily as 13.6 years, so she was very chuffed with that.

Yesterday afternoon we gathered up all of our Roman resources for about the fifth time in recent history, but this time we did actually, finally, at long last *begin* the Roman project. Emily wanted to know about the Colosseum and other ampitheatres first so she read a lot about that and then drew a picture and wrote notes about what she'd learnt about gladiator fights, chariot races etc.

We have tons of resources but without planning it's hard to know where to start. Think I'll take them all with me to ballet this afternoon and map some stuff out while I'm waiting for Emily. Speaking of ballet, we're really struggling with ballet shoes at the mo. Emily's wearing a size 2 ballet shoe at the moment and barely fits them any more. For the exam she has to have new satin ones (she's in leather ones at the moment as we got so sick of the satin ones wearing out after half a term). That's all very well except that I've now ordered about four pairs from various sources in various sizes and we still can't find a pair that fits! 2.5 seems to be *exactly* the same size as 3 and both of them are masses too big. Size 2 in satin is too small. None of this is helped by the fact that in some "normal" shoes Emily takes a 2 but in others a 1 is too big....Think I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and take Emily into the ballet shop in Ashby to actually try some on. Yes, I probably should have done that originally instead of ordering on line but I *hate* "real" shopping :-/

This morning Emily and Jon have gone off to tai chi as usual. I'm trying to do a frantic catch up with ebay, hampered somewhat by the site's incredibly slow response times. At the moment we have 102 items with bids on plus hundreds of others listed; trying to keep up with the second chance offers and the bidders who are bidding on several items at once and want to wait for them all to end first is a bit of a nightmare, but we're really moving items now which is a huge help. Better get on with it, then!