The Brick House

* bead-looming: involves following a pattern, counting out beads of different colours etc
* took Katy out to feed the chickens and check for eggs
* made a sculpture in the sandpit (which was then demolished by Katy, causing a great wailing and gnashing of teeth)
* watched Take on Technology (ABC, 10am), which happened to be about commercial and domestic worm farms – a useful coincidence, considering one of the things I had in mind to do today or on the weekend was set up our worm farm!
* watched BTN Specials: Disasters and Emergencies (ABC, 10:15am)
* watched Our Earth: Pushing and Shoving (ABC, 10:30am), on geology
* watched Atoms of Fire: Improving on Nature (ABC, 10:45am)
* watched Wild Weather (ABC 11am-12pm)
* scrubbed out and rinsed the worm farm with Katy
* started making a shirt for Katy, which involved measuring her (and attempting to convince her to stay still so said measurements could be taken!), planning the pattern and cutting out fabric. Right now I am in the process of pinning on bias binding for a decorative hem.
* hand-training the rabbits
* bead-loom
* played in the garden, including with the chickens
* visual memory: she did really well. Longest word was “outback”, other 2 syllable words deport and desert. She knew exactly where to divide the syllables according to the rule. She is having less and less difficulty recognising the “-ck” spelling pattern, although still needs a lot of reinforcement with “-rk”. I also included “gecko”, which she had no difficulty with.
* reading aloud: “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, from a library book, Sing a Song of Sixpence: a pocketful of nursery rhymes and tales by Jane Chapman (a rather beautiful volume – nice pictures, and the font is very heavy and simple and easy for B to read. Maybe one for our library?). Beth is doing BRILLIANTLY. She’s never see this book before and she’s missing less than one word in ten and sounding out incredibly well.
* 6:30-8:30 Cubs
* read some random phrases E wrote on his Palm Pilot, then E talked about phonetics (although I don’t know if she was paying much attention)

Katy had her first experience of finding an egg in the nesting box, carrying it very carefully into the house, and then eating it ten minutes later, lightly boiled and served with toast fingers. She was so excited when she looked into the henhouse and first saw the egg, her mouth opened so wide she could have fit the egg into it whole *g*

We have also been building towers with the round nesting/stacking pieces, playing with dolls, pottering in the garden, playing in the sandpit, etc.

I have been plugging away at the laundry and washing up (hence the paucity of bookwork in the above list), and have to date managed five loads of laundry and three of washing up…

* came home from farm with chickens, put them in run, helped me put nesting material in the nesting boxes, settled them in etc
* helped me mulch garden bed
* visual memory: wasn’t concentrating and made a few mistakes, but recognised some of the words very quickly. When she rebooted and started concentrating again, her sounding out was quite competent. Needs more practise on “-ark” – she’s much more confident on -ck, I think because she’s had the practice writing them in sentences
* keyboard practice
* 11:00-2:00 – swimming at CISAC with HENCAST. I had a long chat with the mother of Beth’s friend Caitlin, and they are going to try to start coming swimming at CISAC when Beth is there with Nannie on Tuesday afternoons. She also said she would call and arrange a playdate. I told her about the feast, which she hadn’t heard about but was very interested in, so I will send her the various emails with the details and links
* met Anne in the mall to pick up Katy, but since she went to sleep in the pram five minutes before we got there, we sat and had coffee with Anne, then fossicked in the Oxfam shop. Beth stayed with Anne, and Katy and I went home to feed the chickens and potter in the garden
* Anne bought Beth some clay at The Art Store
* went out to check the chickens and found another egg!
* did some maths with E: fractions, counting by fours, counting down by fours, twos, tens, etc, dividing shapes and groups into halves, quarters and numbered subsets
* talked briefly about Luca Pacioli, roman numerals and the introduction of arabic numerals (seemed interested about the idea that digits all fit neatly into a seven-segment shape because of them being chiselled on stone before paper was invented, which is slightly inaccurate but a good approximation)

* let rabbits out for a wander around the dining room, since it’s too cold for them outside today
* the plan for today has changed – Nannie isn’t coming in for swimming, so I will take B and K out to the farm after 3pm and she will stay the night
* 10:30-11:30 preschool storytime at the Belconnen Library. Beth sat at the tables and read a couple of books to herself while Katy listened to one story, then I followed Katy around the library for a bit. Beth ended up borrowing some books and a couple of DVDs
* went to the markets so I could buy sulfate-free shampoo, red lentils and peanut butter. Beth looked after Katy for me so I could choose shampoo, so I gave her enough change that she and K could both have a go on the rocking deer ride
* made herself lunch – tried peanut butter on wholegrain toast (she ended up licking the peanut butter off because she didn’t like the bread, but at least she liked the PB *g*)
* after lunch, I spent nearly an hour getting Katy to go to sleep without mamas – she nursed til she was getting sleepy, then I took her off the breast and she SCREAMED for about half an hour, then fell asleep like I’d turned off a switch or something…
* Beth drew a picture using stencils, then wrote a passage about relationships which had some fairly sophisticated ideas as well as some pretty darn good attempts at spelling! She was dissatisfied with what she’d written becase it didn’t express what she wanted it to, so we talked about the authorial practice of re-reading and editing, and that what she had written was a first draft
* reading aloud: The Diary of Watkin Stench
* visual memory: had no trouble with “skylark” and “embark”. When we looked at the word “remark” she put in a line between the syllables without prompting
* played word families bingo, with me encouraging her to sound out the syllables and look for the word, rather than always just telling her how to spell them. I made up funny little sentences to illustrate the sounds, one of which (me avoiding – in a very obvious way – saying the word “shit”) inspired her to write a note, “You are a shit”, addressed to “A Shit, Shit St”. Not exactly accepted educational practice but at least it got her writing! *g* We wrote a few notes back and forth and much hilarity ensued. Beth demonstrated another tactic for improving her spelling: looking up the word. She copied “unlawful” and “dangerous” from the Feeding Bears sign, and “good” from OFTFRFBF. We made so much noise we woke up the baby, but anyway…
* drove out to the farm, where Katy played with Beth’s farmyard set in her room, then both girls went out and bounced on the trampoline and played on the swingset. We walked down to feed the donkeys, and then back up to feed the chickens. Katy tried to go paddling in the pond, and generally had a lovely time.

* did some washing up for me so I could cook breakfast
* helped me put the rabbits outside
* used construction paper and the dinosaur stickers Nannie gave her to make a landscape
* visual memory – tackled “mistake” without any difficulty (barring a little nervousness). Lost concentration by the second last word and made a mistake, but otherwise, her speed and confidence has increased markedly. She is starting to self-correct by looking at what she has written and checking it against the word, although she still needs to strengthen this aspect. She is beginning to look at the word to see if there are rules she can apply (eg. magic -e, suffix -ck means short vowel, etc) – needs a lot more work on this until it becomes automatic. But in general, this is giving her valuable reinforcement of word attack skills as well as improving her visual memory. It is also interesting to see how she reinforces the word to herself by drawing a picture in the margin of the board to illustrate the word (she doesn’t use it to remind herself about the word when she’s writing it down, just to help herself fix it in her head when she’s worked out what it is).
* playing with Katy – they had the new hose and were taking it in turns to make noises down one end and listen at the other. B then unrolled it to see if it made a difference to the sound transmission.
* word-building – four worksheets on -ark
* making a nature collage with Katy
* reading: started The Cat in the Hat to p. 8 – reading at about 75% accuracy without being read to first (I will p/c a couple of pages and actually measure that next time we read)
* went back to the hose experiment – we unrolled it and B took one end to the swings, and we could still have a (muffled) conversation. I asked B if she knew why and she said, “Echoes”. Now she is patiently showing Katy how to play “telephones” with it *g*
* 1:30-3:30 – swimming with Nannie
* talking about nutrition, and what changes she could start making to her diet to improve it. She decided to cook herself dinner, and whipped up pasta with sauce made with onions, mushrooms, olives, corn and tomatoes. She even ate all of it, too!
* tutoring with Dennis, 6:15-7:15
* came home around 9ish, and wanted to tidy her room, so I helped her with that.

Katy: reading books together and looking at them by herself; drawing and making collages with B; playing in sandpit and garden; Duplo; rolling around on the mattress with B; playing “telephones” with the hose; cubby and slide.

* vacuumed the living room
* played with Katy
* read the whole of OFTFRFBF to Nannie
* looked at the rainfall radar, and we were pleased to see lots and lots of rain heading our way! B asked if the rain would be falling on the catchment areas, so we looked at the map here and then compared the area with the rainfall map to see that yes, the dams will be getting rain today too. Yay!
* 11:00-12:30 pottery lesson
* 1 page in handwriting book
* visual memory practice
* Ancient Egypt project – nearly finished the courtyard page
* science: went through the natural water cycle (inc. talking about aquifers) using the ACTEWAGL interactive module here. B already knew most of the components, but we put it together and saw how the cycle works in nature. [Plan for tomorrow: get creative with construction paper and textas etc and draw the components of the water cycle, labelling them appropriately. Also, explore this story of a water droplet.]
* word-building/writing: I did up a worksheet designed to show her that she knows instinctively how to use -s, -ed and -ing. She completed it without a problem (and read most of it without needing any help, too), and I think feels much less as though these are impenetrable mysteries!
* hand training the rabbits (who are looking very happy to be outside full-time, even in the torrential rain. Their bedroom wasn’t even damp)
* playing with Katy
* reading aloud: The Diary of Watkin Stench, by Meredith Hooper. The arrival of the First Fleet as told from the perspective of the ships’ rats (rather loosely based on the journal of Watkin Tench, who travelled to the new colony on board the Charlotte).

* word-building practice: did four graded worksheets on -ack word family, which I printed off from a new site I found with awesome free printable literacy resources
* writing: I agreed that the worksheets probably counted as writing, especially when you consider that the fourth worksheet was a grid where she had to write out 9 root words each with the suffixes -s, -ed and -ing added!
* Australian history: reading aloud one of our new library books, Little Felons: Child Convicts 1788-1853, by Melanie Guile, part of the Children in Australian History series. Beth loved it and wants me to look for the rest of the books in the series
* reading: read 6 new pages out from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
* cooked herself lunch using the stove
* reading: repeated the new pages from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
* I requested the other three books in the Children in Australian History series from the library
* “weight-lifting”: once again, she did all ten words without a mistake. We practiced “-ck” words to reinforce the earlier worksheets. I introduced one 6-letter word (“struck”), which she found intimidating at first but was able to sound out and copy from memory, which increased her confidence. I also stopped including 3-letter words at all, and she had absolutely no difficulty with the 4-letter words.
* tutoring with Dennis 6-7pm
* looking over my shoulder while I read customers_suck, she had no trouble reading and sounding out a random comment: “the…the…the… THE GRINCH!” Funny that we were just reading that story yesterday 🙂

* writing: look/cover/write sentences from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
* watched BTN and Our History: National Parks [Attitudes to the natural environment have changed over time: using the Royal National Park in Sydney- the first national park in Australia and only the second national park in the world – as a case study.]
* wordbuilding activities: word families bingo (both calling and playing). When she was calling she was spontaneously using the sounds in words
* visited markets for F&V shopping and to get pet food – also came home with a new little female mouse!
* cleaned out mouse cage
* reading: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
* weight-lifting: still practicing magic-e words
* talked about possible ways we could figure out the distance travelled on E and B’s bike ride round the lake, using the map
* maths (with E after dinner)

* “weightlifting” – we tried using a timer and found that when she was actually focusing, she could do the ten words in less than five minutes with no mistakes.
* reading – 50 pages of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
* reading aloud: some nonsense verse by Edward Lear
* 11:00-12:30 pottery lesson
* 3:00-4:00 ACT Govt shopfront to drop off a form; library visit
* 4:00-4:30 swimming lesson
* reading aloud: Dr Seuss’ My Book About Me, which inspired B to want to make one of her own, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Saturday:
* went out to Murrumbateman to visit Pa and to attempt to catch our chickens
* she and K stayed with D&M while E and I went to D’s housewarming party
* tutoring with D

Sunday:
* Mama-daughter bonding over breakfast at the Mall; then we went to Coles to get supplies for picnic
* helped pack car/look after K while we packed car
* drown to Gundagai for mini family reunion picnic and general sightseeing trip
* sang many silly songs in the car on the way
* visited Rusconi’s Marvellous Marble, the Dog on the Tuckerbox, and a historic bridge with D&M on the way home

* collected B from D&M’s mid-morning
* “weight-lifting” – started working on magic E words; also wrote down and illustrated a few examples in her exercise book
* Scouts 6:30-8:30 – went canoeing

Other stuff wot I forget.