The Brick House

* spent the day at Dennis and Margaret’s
* tutoring with Dennis

* optometrists appointment 10:30-11:00. Optometrist said her focus was fine, bar a little residual tightness, and she should not need to continue wearing glasses (just as well!). She also showed her how to measure out safe reading distance – for a book, the distance from your elbow to your knuckles tucked under the chin; for computer, the end of your arm.
* saw a parking inspector giving a ticket to the car next to us, talked about why and how parking inspectors work
* showed B the Reserve Bank Building and explained a little bit about who they are/what they do
* talked about nutrition: where do we find protein? and how the divided plates make it easy to serve out the right proportion of foods and make sure all food groups are covered, eg. 2x vegetables, 1x fruit, 2x grain, 1x protein
* played in garden with Katy
* played dress-ups on ‘puter while I put Katy down for nap
* “weightlifting” – is now very fast doing the three letter words, and improving a lot on the four-letter words. Five letter words she still needs to explicitly break them down into phonemes/phonograms, but that seems to be working better as well. She is very quick on phonograms she has mastered, eg. “-ing”. After correctly reproducing “thing” she went on to write down eight more “-ing” words on the whiteboard, then read over the list and used them (verbally) in a story.
* cursive handwriting practice – her full name
* independent reading: the first paragraph of Laura’s Pa. She only had difficulty with 5 words out of 58 on the second read-through!
* reading aloud Laura’s Pa, while she did more Christmas crafty stuff
* played in garden with Katy; tried our home-grown lettuce for the first time (yum – will be a bit of a challenge to stop Katy defoliating it now!)
* Katy and I pootled around in the garden, mostly playing in the sandpit (including building and decorating a sand castle, which was a lot of fun) while Beth watched Rollercoaster etc
* tutoring session with Dennis at 6pm
* staying the night at Dennis and Margaret’s

* crafty stuff: brought out busy box, and she and Katy spent over an hour making Christmassy-themed stuff (and a hideous mess)
* wrote her requests on the shopping lists, and copied the correct spellings
* went to Margaret’s 1:00-5:00 while I did the monthly supermarket shopping, unpacked and put it away, and did some general cleaning up
* made Halloween decorations
* watched Geldof in Africa (ABC)

* pottery 11:00-12:30
* “weight-lifting”
* practicing cursive writing
* swimming 4:00-4:30
* returned overdue library books
* independent reading: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
* shared reading: Laura’s Pa (Little House Chapter Book series)

* went for a bike ride
* talked about carbon emissions from plane travel, and how we can use Greenfleet to offset carbon emissions. I checked using the Greenfleet Tree Totaller last night and it will cost $4.70 to offset the emissions caused by her return trip to Darwin (we contrasted that with the $87.50 it will cost to offset Nannie and Pa’s return tickets to England for Christmas!). We discussed using Greenfleet to work out carbon emissions from future holiday plans (inc. by car) and budgeting to offset them as part of the cost of the holiday.
* also discussed ways that we can save electricity/emissions around the home, and started with the idea of turning off lights in rooms we aren’t using, and opening blinds to use natural light instead of electricity in her bedroom. She also knows about turning off her monitor when she’s not using the computer, and the TV when not in use
* making words from syllables (still practising -ble, -ple, -tle and -dle), then writing them down on the whiteboard. B started writing “little” in cursive and realised it was so much easier to write it joined together, so we started practising her other words in cursive on the whiteboard as well. She then concentrated on writing her name in cursive in her exercise book, and was getting irritated by the jerky joins she was doing. I demonstrated that essentially cursive is about drawing a line which goes up and down, and likened it to riding a trotting horse, so we played with the idea for a while and then she practised a smooth wavy line
* discussed “stranger danger” and why I wouldn’t let her walk around the Botanical Gardens by herself but would be okay with her doing so with a friend
* watched ABC schools’ TV: Take on Technology – Food Containers, Behind the News Special – Personal Health Choices, then recorded Our Earth – How Old Is It?, Atoms of Fire – The Organic Mystery and came out to play in the garden with me and K
* “weightlifting” – she tends to have most difficulty with five-letter words, and start to struggle with four-letter sequences after the first six or seven words. We talked about how when she’s remembering longer sequences, it helps to break them into smaller chunks (eg. “sh-art” or “tr-and”) and to sound them out as well as trying to memorise the sequence of letters, so that they are easier to remember
* independent/shared reading: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
* lunch at ANBG with Pa; we saw heaps of the Eastern Water Dragons, particularly as we walked around the Tasmanian Gardens, where we also saw fingerlings and what were probably tadpoles in the various ponds. There were lots of baby lizards about as well, which I’ve never seen before, so it looks like they’ve had a mini population explosion recently. I mentioned the orchid greenhouse to Pa, who hadn’t visited it before and didn’t know it was open to the public. After Pa left, we took the pram back to the car and went to the Rainforest Gully. Katy seemed to really enjoy climbing up and down the stairs and going over the boardwalks in the upper reaches. She didn’t want to go home!
* while Katy watched Playschool, we explored a new purchase together: Shape by Shape, a puzzle based on tangrams and produced by Binary Arts. We fiddled around trying to fit the pieces into the frame freeform, then did the first six of the challenge cards. Lots of fun and quite challenging. I noticed that B was initially having difficulty orienting the shape she was building on the board with the gamecard: she would be building at right angles or even mirror reversed in the first two patterns we did, but eventually got the hang of it (I’ve noticed her having this difficulty in orienting in other situations, such as when she was using the Brain Box kit to build a circuit at a Science Festival workshop, and mirror-reversing the layout)
* the three of us played in the garden for an hour, including Katy wanting to climb up into the treehouse an awful lot because Beth was up there washing the window! We did a lot of sliding, until she lost interest and wanted to go on the swing instead…
* took dog for a walk
* played with E’s swirly colourful music webthang
* Scouts 7:00-8:30

* played syllable bingo: first I called and she found them on her board/s, then she called. She extended it while calling so that she was reading blends from the posters on the wall as well as the list of syllables I had written up
* keyboard practice
* sorted/tidied her room and collected up everything which she doesn’t want to keep in her room any more
* looked at CAA Oxfam Christmas catalogue together and talked about my wanting to have a more sustainable ethos behind our gift-giving, ie. giving less “stuff” and trying to buy sustainable/ethical gifts wherever possible. Discussed starting a new Christmas tradition of getting her and K a CAA Christmas tree ornament every year (she looked at the catalogue and decided which one she liked best). Also talked about other gifts she might like.
* looked after K outside while I tidied/vacced one half of the dining room
* reading aloud: first chapter, “Captain Cook”, from The Australian History Collection
* playing in sandpit with hose
* reading aloud: subsequent chapters “The First Fleet”, “Bass and Flinders” and “Buckley’s Chance”, from The Australian History Collection
* reading aloud: Once Upon a Starry Night, by Jacqueline Mitton (the stories behind some of the major constellations)
* made tuna pasta salad for lunch
* watched ABC schools’ TV recorded from earlier: Count Us In – Length, and For The Juniors – Minibeasts Bush Pond
* went to the Markets for F&V shopping
* keyboard practice
* reading: mental “weightlifting” to improve her visual memory
* reading aloud (getting through as many of the overdue library books as we can before we have to take them back!): The Faery’s Gift, by Tanya Robyn Batt, The Legendary Unicorn by Udo Weigelt, Mr Archimedes’ Bath by Pamela Allen, Patrick’s Dream by Cynthia and William Birrer, and East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon, a Norwegian folktale translated/retold by Sir George Webbe Dasent. The latter was definitely my favourite – a fabulous rollicking tale which, despite being very long and repetitive, absolutely rolled off the tongue. Pure magic to read aloud 🙂 The fact that Mr Archimede’s Bath is a retelling of the Eureka!-in-the-bath story is fairly obvious, but I should probably note that the book Patrick’s Dream was a retelling of the story of St Patrick bringing Christianity to Ireland.

* watched ABC schools’ TV: BTN (drought package, Korea kids, Point Nepean, kids’ training, Mars); Our History (Isolated Schooling)
* reading: mental “weightlifting” to improve her visual memory
* keyboard practice
* gardening
* drawing: used How To Draw Really Cool Things (or whatever it’s called) to do a sketch of an eagle
* syllable speed drill: practised random syllables from speed drill grid, then I found/wrote out a couple of examples (simple, ripple) to show how mastering these common symbols will help her word attack skills
* reading aloud: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (her next choice for reading practice)

* gardening
* keyboard practice
* homeschooling group pottery lesson 11:00-12:30
* went to Margaret’s 1:00-3:00ish while I had a massage
* decided not to go to swimming lesson
* anniversary dinner @ Belluci’s and Rubee’s; read some of K’s board books to her

* keyboard practice
* spent most of the morning, on and off, watching our spider weaving an egg case and laying eggs. I found a factsheet on huntsman spiders at the Australian Museum Online site (also another couple of webpages about spiders in general), and we read about mating/reproduction etc. Apparently we won’t need to banish her and her brood outside immediately since when they hatch they will be too small to disperse until they’ve shed their skins a couple of times…
* wrote (reluctantly) a sentence in her new nature journal about the spider’s exertions
* other stuff wot I forget
* Scouts 7:00-8:30; stayed at Dennis and Margaret’s overnight

* independent reading: Green Eggs and Ham. She read it as soon as she woke up (7ish), commenting that she knew something much better than just getting up and going downstairs to watch TV. When she’d finished reading, she said that it was the first time she’d read a book all the way through without getting bored, and that she was definitely her mother’s daughter, since she loves reading! Dare I hope that we may have turned a corner here…?
* came downstairs to discover that one of the rabbits had inexplicably escaped in the night and was hopping around happily. We rounded her up and caught her without too much difficulty. B’s theory was that the top gate had been left unsecured, Susan had pushed her way through onto the top of the cage, then bounced on it which pushed it down and secured it again. Seems plausible to me, and we certainly couldn’t come up with another idea. Must remember to secure cage from now on…
* also discovered that the yabby had died overnight
* gardening
* copywriting: read and copied from memory a section from Green Eggs and Ham – spelled perfectly
* discussed the sexualisation of childhood eg. inappropriately adult clothing, and why I am not comfortable with her wearing some “trendy” things eg. very short skirts, tops etc
* went for a trip into Belconnen Mall to get the A3 construction paper we need to make the pockets for the Ancient Egypt projects; also had lunch out
* had a girly bonding time where I put plaits in her hair and various other frivolities
* maths: practised 2x and 3x tables
* rang pet stores to find out if they sell yabbies – the one in Mitchell has some available
* discussed starting a nature journal to provide a framework for regular writing opportunities
* keyboard practice
* talked to Grandmoogi about her neighbour’s daughter’s diagnosis of Prader-Willi Syndrome
* watched her birthday DVD about snakes