The Brick House

* gardening
* collected snails in the garden, while I read from a book of snails by Sally Moffet Kellin. B now has a few snails in a large jar in the dining room. She found one which had part of its shell missing, so that you could see the mantle underneath. We think we can also see it breathing, since the shell is missing in the approximate area where the lung is positioned, according to the diagram we looked at
* went shopping at Belconnen SVDP: I bought myself a pair of 3/4 length pants, K a T-shirt and little cardigan, and B a new skirt and some material for her shirt-making ambitions, as well as the usual bunch of books
* went to Belconnen Mall to get ingredients for dinner
* keyboard practice
* independent reading: Green Eggs and Ham
* shared reading (with E): Boo to a Goose
* discussed with me that she hates being told that she has to read, but she loves reading when she gets to choose when/what. We came up with a deal that she would try and read more often, and that if she did so, I wouldn’t make her sit down and practice reading. If she doesn’t, I reserved the right to remind her…

* discussed whether she still wanted to do circus training and if not, what she wanted to do instead
* keyboard practice
* gardening: pruning, weeding, planning what to plant where, talking about “weed” species and how some trees can be weeds too
* art: drew a silhouette of a woman’s face/shoulders, then cut it out and mounted it on two different colours of construction paper. She then cut out smaller strips of construction paper and glued them on the contrasting colour to produce a “woven” effect
* English: mental “weightlifting” – looking at then writing nonsense words from memory, to help “train” the part of her brain which has trouble remembering letter sequences
* watched BTN
* took yabby out of tank and observed changes; put yabby into outside bowl to see if it changed colour again with the (presumably) lower temperatures
* watched rerun of last week’s The New Inventors
* saw the microwave spark and make a horrible noise while she was microwaving something
* reading aloud: Winnie the Pooh
* independent reading: Green Eggs and Ham
* played with mouse and rats
* looked through the two David Suzuki books, Looking at Weather and Looking at Insects, with me, and decided that they looked cool and she would like us to do some of the activities (we also have Looking at the Environment from the same series, but I can’t find it right now)
* smashed a snail, then asked a few questions about its insides and whether it could take off its shell; I found a simple anatomical diagram in a book of snails (1968, Sally Moffet Kellin) and showed it to her but she had mostly lost interest by then. Maybe tomorrow…
* looked through the Egypt book to decide what activity she wanted to do; I scanned and copied it, then she coloured it in
* playdate with Taylor: washed the dog; discussed/modelled her new shirt designs; played keyboard, took dog for a walk together

* keyboard practice
* helped me cook sausages, bacon and scrambled eggs for our not-back-to-school Big Breakfast
* made ice cream; talked about similarities/differences with the experiment of making ice cream in a bag full of ice cubes which she tried (unsuccessfully) yesterday
* gardening: talked about pruning and curly leaf, identified the sapling growing next to the magnolia as the same thing as the big tree by the green shed by looking at its flowers
* maths
* quick bike ride
* played keyboard while I put K to sleep
* reading aloud: Winnie the Pooh
* watched Pyramid: In The Name Of The King and Pilot Guide: Brussels and Luxembourg
(ABC); lots of cool info about the European Union, WWI and WWII
* gardening (potted up second big terracotta tub by her slide)
* played in garden with Katy
* swimming lesson 4:00-4:30; played in the pool before the lesson with some of the girls in her class
* visited Grandmoogi: got GM to overlock the top of the bodice B designed, looked at the pre-wedding pictures of Tim and Lily; I photocopied the first pocket-worth of activities from Ancient Egypt Historical Pockets book
* reading aloud: In Flanders Fields by John McRae. Given that the Pilot Guide visited Ypres and talked extensively about the campaigns there, I thought it was an appropriate moment to introduce this poem

Also worth noting is the conversation about the Space Race and the Cold War more broadly which we had on Sunday night.

* got home at 9:00ish and walked the dog
* Botanic Gardens from 10:30ish – running around like a loony with Julian before the activity started at 11:00, then they all went off for a tour along the Using Bush Plants walk, accompanied by volunteer guides. That went for an hour or so, after which she and Julian ran around like loonies again (well, she claims they walked sensibly and chatted, but who believes that?).
* home again to pootle in the garden and watch TV
* shared reading: a Goosebumps book. I read most of it, but I did insist that she try to read a couple of pages of it. She did pretty darn well, too!
* drew a fabulous portrait
* went to Margaret’s with Katy while I picked E up from work

* maths revision
* did some writing about her rats, this turned into a comic! She asked me for spellings, given verbally or written down, then coppied/wrote carefully, and illustrated. It also counts as reading as she must have read it over several dozen times 😉 We also discussed the possibility of doing her Pets Badge at Cubs using comic format to talk about how to look after rats.
* gardening
* swimming with Nannie from 1:30, then going out to the farm for the night

* maths revision
* watched BTN
* spelling workbook
* wrote and illustrated a sentence using -ot words; she originally wrote “cot” as “kot” but on her second draft wrote it correctly, when I asked her why she had changed the spelling, she grinned hugely and said, “Because in English almost no words start with ‘k’ instead of ‘c’!” Hurray, she remembered! If she switches her default initial “k” sound spelling to “c” she should make fewer spelling mistakes…
* independent reading: McGuffey reader
* reading aloud: Bodies from the Past
* swimming with Nannie 1:30-3ish
* circus 4-6
* spent her pocket money on Freaky Sugar at the Freaky Sugar Shop on the way home from circus
* watched Two Men in a Tinnie

* recycling centre tour
* played at Lauren and Julian’s house
* kambah adventure playground picnic

* told me what she remembered about erosion and what she had observed from her sandpit play
* postcard filing, and tidying up the folder to present at Cubs this week
* drawing (started making a book of artwork for Hazel)
* wrote a thank you letter to Helen and David, with some assistance with spelling
* watched the Steve Irwin Memorial Service (recorded from earlier) and talked a bit about grief and mourning
* maths (revision)
* repeated reading (fluency): How To Talk Dog
* independent reading: A Cat and a Dog: read it out loud, with some assistance in decoding words, then read it over silently to herself (only needed help with one word)
* told me a story about a train – in contrast to a lot of her stories, in this one she set the scene and introduced the character in the beginning, and had a rhythmic plot which came to a dramatic climax and had a nice, neat ending
* I Googled for photos of the kind of erosion she was talking about, she preferred this one.
* read about the life of Andrew Carnegie
* went swimming with Nannie, then out to the farm for the night – took A Cat and a Dog and How To Talk Dog with her

* took the dog for a walk
* maths workbook (revision)
* sightword flashcards (revision – 75%+ recognition) – she has increased her wordbank considerably and was able to cope with many more words before she overloaded
* watched BTN and part of Our History
* went for a short bike ride
* practical maths lesson in volume: she built a pool with lengths of wood and a tarpaulin. She built it on a slope with the point facing downhill, so there wasn’t an awful lot of water in the wider top part. I asked her what she would have to re-do in order to get the most water possible into her pool. After a bit of thinking, she figured out she would have to rebuild it with the base of the triangle on the downhill side. She did this, adding the modification of a wider piece of wood for the downhill wall, propped up with bricks.
* read some of the Big Book of Pirates, mostly about women pirates
* swimming with Nannie from 1:30pm
* circus 4-6pm
* reading aloud: Captain Abdul’s Little Treasure – a very suitable yarn for TLAPD. Ooh-aargh, ye swabs!

* took Zebedee for a walk; discussed how to deal with strangers wanting to talk to her when she is alone
* Nannie and Pa came past to pick up red car
* repeated reading (fluency): How to Talk Dog (we are nearly finished)
* watched For the Juniors – The Sea, Mangroves
* watched The Text Files: 09. Computer Adventure Games
* postcard filing; also located and labelled Florida and South Dakota on the outline US map
* did some of a wordsearch from new book
* checked mealworms: some of the beetles have emerged; we observed that they were pale brown rather than black and hypothesised that they will darken as they get older
* post office to mail latest batch of cards
* supermarket to buy ingredients for baking (biscuits for Pa and MG)

• technology: discussed the various grades for milling sugar; located some different grades (ie. icing, caster, white, raw) and arranged them in order from fine to coarse
• health: read and discussed the recall notices on various products in the dried fruit section
• maths: compared different brands of chocolate chips and determined which were bigger or smaller (eg. is 230g bigger or smaller than 250g?); compared weight of two different brands of cooking chocolate to quantity called for in recipe and decided which would produce less wastage

* hosed off old red rocker for Katy, and watered plants out the front and new ones out the back
* lunch
* maths: used choc chips as manipulatives to practise regrouping, with the bribe of getting to eat them if she did it correctly *g* She has mostly got the hang of it, she just objects to having to go through the whole regrouping process when she can find the answer in her head much more quickly! So I said I would make some more worksheets with harder sums so she can practise (she also wants me to add places for stickers). We concentrated on reinforcing the idea of adding up the ones column first by using something to cover over the 10s column til she was ready to regroup.
* syllable speed drill
* swimming lesson 4pm
* library visit – used library catalogue (with assistance), chose books to borrow, used self-checker to check them out. Read one of them in the library and in the car (with assistance in decoding).
* picked up E from work