An Update On the Week…

Last week went well, with the mural completed and looking pretty good.  Unfortunately there may be some problem with the wood-the shop may well have given us ordinary ply rather than external…when putting up (after the painting) someone queried-mental note must learn how to check myself as we’ll be gutted if it rots!

Curriculum reviewing was a bit of a mixed bag, but still all the year groups are done, there has been real progress.  It all needs to come together now and hopefully staff will make that happen.  It took longer than i imagined and there was still a clinginess to current themes-can’t believe no one wanted to do dinosaurs as a theme such fun :0)

Anyway-done so all good!

This week we’ve been cracking on with some mommy directed stuff (maths, sentence writing their own topic choice but my suggestions at the moment, some Spanish, story of the world, phonics and that’s about it-some of all of that everyday before lunch.)  It is a lot and there is huge resistance to ‘work’ (I HATE THAT WORD) at the moment.  I know that many out there would argue for child directed and autonomous but I really believe that for us the basic skills need to be done little and often-partly due to their personalities, interests and partly because I need that…..lots of issues there but ultimately I don’t feel i can rely on them to realise they need maths then learn it what if they don’t then because they don’t have basic skills can’t get to do things they want????  ANyway I’m though pondering there will be mommy directed stuff and stuff they direct and in the big picture they a much bigger proportion of time which they direct than they would in school, a huge amount of time to play and get out and about plus when it is directed by me I try to be led by their interests (currently cells, the titanic and chemistry based stuff.).

I am disliking the lack of arty stuff that we are getting to do but I think this will pan out over the next few weeks.  I am thinking about getting each of them a special book and getting them to start a diary/scrapbook.

Over the week Tiger has been incessantly watching videos of making Transformers from Lego and is producing really innovative miniature transformers.  Elliot is playing Transformers and so is Ben.  Ben has been doing lots and lots of drawing and we’ve been looking at some letter sounds, using alphablocks, magnetic letters, print outs etc  Mainly because he wants to join in :0)

We haven’t done much reading together or stories this week but it has been busy.

Went to London yesterday but Ben stayed at home with Aunty E.  I’ve been thinking lots about faces, portraits and arty stuff for school.  ALso want to have a think about Y6′s as I really know we need to make sure we start with the drawings and move to the textile and often the drawing step is poor quality and I think it needs to be better.

Cooking chilli/lasagne/bolegnaise/burritos so off now, with Ben dressed up as Bumble Bee to help!