Falling behind!

Oh dear, I've gone from daily blogging, to weekly - oops!!

I think we've been busy though! I was having another 'uh oh, we're not doing enough home-eddy stuff' moment over the past week, but at the weekend we went to a birthday party of one of E's school friends, and was chatting to one of the mums. She was fascinated by the whole HE thing, and was quizzing me! I also met up with another school friend's mum last week. They didn't tell me anything about the school that made me want to jump back there in a flash. They now have after-school clubs: art, cookery and french. There may be others, but that was all that were mentioned. I felt a bit better, as we do cooking ALL THE TIME! E loves it, and is getting loads better, even H is showing an interest at last! At the weekend, E made a crumble to go on the stewed apple I'd cooked, she had loads of fun getting stuck in with her hands, and it tasted fab too - always good!! We do loads of art and craft - pretty much daily, and she likes learning random french vocabulary, so I think we save on the extra 3 hours she could spend at school at clubs! Plus we fit in the reading and writing bits too.

Yesterday I managed to get H to bed nice and early, but E just wasn't doing it! We were reading the favourite book of the moment, Angelina Ballerina. I'd read it to her, then she was 'reading' it to me. Then we started looking at the words, and working out which one said 'Angelina' and 'dance' etc. I pointed at the question mark and explained what that was, and E then pointed to the speech marks, and told me that they meant people were speaking!! How did she know that?! We talked about full stops, then about capital letters at the beginning of each bit writing. E said she was still not sure about all the big letters, so my job this week is to dig out some fun games involving capital letters.

Yesterday a friend posted a link to the Science and Engineering Week challenge packs, so after a very social day, we finally headed home and tried them out. We started with one about 'changes', which unfortunately involved seeing how you can make chocolate dissolve most quickly and most slowly in your mouth! Of course I had to force E into doing this one!! She sat with a mirror in front of her, so she could keep poking her tongue out to check on the chocolate's progress!! Today we progressed to building a 'mould garden', in which E decided to include some manky banana, a piece of melon, some banana skin, and a coffee lake (silver foil dish with coffee tipped in), and some bread. This has now been sealed and will be closely watched over the next couple of weeks - yum!! I was about to write a label to go on the tub (in case anyone got the munchies!!), and E asked to write it - why didn't I think of that?? For the first time ever, she wrote her first name and surname (she spent a few moments saying her surname over and over trying to work out what letters were in it!!), then I helped her spell 'mould garden'! The only letter she struggled with was 'g'! Major improvement from a few weeks ago when we last did writing in any depth.

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