On Friday morning we spent ages wrestling with reading. Her feelings of being scared of books came up to the surface and I tried to get her to process them (not sure how successfully). She said she wanted to try reading something that wasn’t a book, because that was less intimidating, so she read “The Wooden Horse” on starfall.com. Then, after further discussion, she read a chapter of Tai’s Penguin. We had worked out that it came down to her feeling like she could mow through words quite efficiently but wasn’t necessarily getting the meaning behind them. So we focused as much as possible on making sure she understood what she had read, and any time she felt confused we stopped and went back over the confusing part. I had to promise not to read it back to her with inflection because I was giving her all the clues she needed to figure out what the author meant, but without going through the process of working it out for herself whenever she got confused, it wasn’t “sticking”. The promise to focus on making sure she understood seemed to increase her confidence, because she absolutely flew through the chapter and only needed to stop once or twice to puzzle over a confusing construction. She also seemed to be paying more attention to punctuation when she was reading explicitly for meaning rather than just ploughing through words. I think that even though she could knock over most of the words in Harry Potter, it was simply too much for her to comprehend what was going on at the same time. So we will stick to books at the Aussie Nibbles reading level until she feels more confident. We also played a number of games of Connect Four, all of which I won comprehensively, even after I told her to stop playing like a wuss and letting me win *g* K watched some Play School, then dragged out the musical instruments basket and experimented with all the noise-makers therein.
Nannie came round to look after them for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and I went off to do the (extremely attenuated) monthly shop. It was sunny out, so K wanted to play in the garden, and Nannie sat out there in the sun with her paper, and B knitted. They went to the park a bit later on, but it rapidly got far too cold to stay out for long, so they came home again and played games. After Nannie went home, B wanted to open another Rune Scape account, but on reading the agreement we came upon the dilemma that under-13s are not supposed to open their own accounts and when C had opened the original one for B she had lied about B’s age, specifically violating one of the terms of the user’s agreement. We discussed the ethics of the situation and the reasons behind Rune Scape making that rule, and came up with the compromise that we wouldn’t make her close her account, but that she wouldn’t open a new one, so it would be easier to keep track of her online presence (if we ever felt the need). I also made the point that we trust her to do the right thing and that her current free and virtually unsupervised access was conditional on her continuing to do the right thing. Then she discovered that the thing she thought she couldn’t change with her current account and was the reason behind wanting a new one actually could be changed, so she didn’t mind too much.
B was keen to play some games with me on Friday night, and we managed to include K in them by choosing Tummy Ache! and geography twister. That one has been out a few times over the last few days, with various handicaps being applied to B to make it more interesting. After she has played for a while she gets bored with the random spinner results so we specifically give her difficult moves to make. In the meanwhile, K runs around like a loon and when it’s her turn, we tell her to put feet or hands on a colour. E made things a bit more interesting for B last night when he started telling her to figure out which continent had a particular city or country he mentioned in it.
The weekend has been pretty quiet. Yesterday B went to the shops with E and K to spend her pocket money, did quite a lot of crafty stuff in her bedroom, knitted, played Duplo with K, played more Rune Scape, watched Doctor Who episodes on her computer, and helped me bake muesli bars. I’m pretty sure she did something else in the afternoon but I can’t remember what…I do know she wasn’t around to help me cook the cake which K and I made after the muesli bars. K also watched one or two episodes of Play School, played in the kitchen with a basin of warm soapy water and some pouring toys, and generally pootled about in the playroom. While B was helping me assemble the lasagne for dinner, E took K off to check the mail and pick up some salad veges, and they came home with a new Kipper book he had won off eBay! So while dinner was cooking, both of us read that several times to K, who adored it. After dinner, everyone except me watched Doctor Who on ABC, although they’d already watched it before. Then B and I cuddled on the beanbags and had a Girly Chat while E put K to bed. It seems that Girly Chats are becoming more important to my almost-a-woman these days…
This morning B got up and had a long conversation with E about operating systems (E, can you elaborate please?) and decided she wants to switch to Linux. There was more Rune Scape, and then B and K got out the busy box and B brought out the craft materials she’d had in her room, and they did some craft together (and made a mess all over the floor, despite having a plastic sheet to sit on!). They also started a shop-keeper game which they didn’t have time to do much with. B finally did her homework in the hour before we had to leave for horse management, and chewed through the questions quickly and with no fuss at all. When we left for Gooroomon Park K was just settling down in front of Play School, while E was doing a phone consult with one of his Luca clients from the living room. I had coffee with Nannie while B was at her course, then B went out to the farm for the night. She took her big chemistry kit with her, and will hopefully get to explore it with Pa. She rang in the evening to say that she had talked to Russell on the phone and seemed very excited and emotionally a little overwhelmed by it. Nannie has arranged a meet-up with him on the 9th July, and B is counting the days…
After coming back from horse management to find K in the bath having paint washed out of her hair, I took her off to the markets with me to do some fruit ‘n’ veg shopping, so E could get some more work done. She helped him clean out the mouse cages while I cooked dinner, but she also came downstairs to feed apple slices to the rats, and managed to drag one of them out of the cage while I was distracted at the stove. I made her put it back, and it looked a bit squashed and shaken but generally all right. From the sound of it, she and E are currently playing Duplo in the playroom.