Today was really productive. B let the chooks out and cleaned the rat cage before we left for the science workshop from 10-12. We managed to get there fifteen minutes early (because apparently I am incapable of actually getting somewhere on time). B had a wonderful time at the workshop, and so did the rest of the kids, from the reactions I saw when I came to pick B up, and from the gushing of the other mums *g* K and I played with the snap-together beads and did some drawing until she decided she was hungry (despite having had a huge breakfast). Then we went down to Lyneham shops and bought yoghurt, a green apple and some chocolate milk. We had to go back again a little later after we discovered we had no plastic spoons in the glovebox! I got myself a coffee and a choc chip muffin, and was amused by the fact that I offered K some muffin but she insisted she wanted her apple first, then when she did ask for a bit she gave it back immediately and wanted yoghurt instead *g* To kill some more time we went to the second hand book shop where I found B a book on knitting patterns designed for girls (the language is self-consciously young and funky but the patterns looked both achievable and trendy, it was only published last year). She has decided what she wants to make out of it and will take it with her to Temora next week.

When we got home I decreed it to be lunchtime, but that B needed to do some spelling and maths before we went out again to meet an on-line friend at 3:30. This worked quite well. K watched that morning’s episode of Play School, then B watched BTN which had recorded afterwards, and everybody had lunch. I played with K for a while, doing some lacing shapes and attempting to play Tummy Ache!, although K insisted on cheating so I gave up. B did a practice session on WizardsSpell, had a minor breakdown in the middle of it, but I tried out a suggestion I had read somewhere that chewing while working helps some kids concentrate better and gave her an apple to munch on. Whatever the reason, she conquered her negative response and completed the practice session without further problems. Then she played a game of Chicktionary, for the first time in ages. Finally she did the hundredths, percentages and decimals unit in Module 4, with absolutely no difficulty. I did a bit more initial explanation than I usually have to do as I felt the introductory page was pretty unhelpful. I think just writing out the hundredths so that the numerator was over the denominator in columns rather than centred made the relationship very obvious. It may or may not have been necessary, of course 🙂 I also used the Math-u-see blocks to show her the quick way of adding up the shaded tens (the questions showed a one hundred square and asked the student to count the shaded units, and B had come up with a very complicated method whereby she counted down the rows and tried to multiply them *g*).

We had a very nice couple of hours at Mel’s, although we did have to spend quite a lot of time stopping our respective toddlers from beating each other up and fighting over toys *rolls eyes* In contrast B got on fabulously with Mel’s two eldest girls (aged 8 and 10-next-week) after they got over their mutual shyness. K fell asleep in the car on the way home, which surprised me not at all. After dinner, B and I talked a bit about vocal technique and did some exercises to practice breathing with her diaphragm, figuring out the point at which her voice switches between resonating in her chest and in her head, and experimenting with humming through nearly-closed lips and contrasting the feel of it when it is fully-supported with her diaphragm, and just vibrating it against a piece of foil (and an explanation of sound waves). She eventually managed to remember to feed the rats, and we also had fun with Zeb who wanted desperately to convince the cat to play chasies, but eventually had to settle for racing around the living and dining rooms like a deranged rabbit *g*