Thursday was very relaxed, with the homeschooling meetup an informal craft/games day at the usual hall. We brought a couple of baskets of crafty stuff with us, but the squids spent a lot of time playing with other people’s stuff (as could be expected, I guess!). K did a collage, played with a basketball both inside and outside the hall, and we discovered a mosaic pegboard toy which was so cool that I’m now keeping an eye out for it for K and B. The family who brought it had obviously been collecting kits for a long time as they had huge quantities of it. It was so much fun I imagine that I will play with it just as much *g* B did some crafty stuff, played a complicated game about Egypt, played ball and explored outside, helped st up a big domino run, and generally pottered. We left by 11ish and got home just before 3pm, so didn’t do much else. B played lots of piano, as well as the usual TV watching.

This morning, we got off to a more organised start than usual. I set B up with some multiplication practice and a new spelling list as I was about to get into the shower. I wanted her to get back into the habit of skip-counting as I think she gets intimidated by multiplication as being random and abstract, so we went back to Year 3 and practiced the skip-counting exercise for 4s and 5s. She did that with no problem and then moved onto the actual multiplication practice, which totally intimidated her and she fell in a sleep. I made her have a break to get out of the “I-can’t-do-it!” mindset (she played some Rune Scape), then I made her number lines for the 4 and 5 times table on strips of paper, on which she filled in the jumps. She then had another go at the multiplication practice, and just knowing that she had the number lines there if she needed them was so helpful that she got 19/20 without any drama. I think about 95 percent of helping B to learn anything is finding ways to ensure she doesn’t let her insecurities get in the way of achieving successes… After that, she did her last spelling test again and got 10/10. Right now, she is making and decorating folding paper doll chains, and K is drawing.