A few conversations.

Today K & M shut themselves away and made some special TeamLucy bracelets for her and her family.  We talked a bit about breast cancer and the treatment.  When we talked about mastectomy, M wanted to know if the breast would grow back or if the doctor would sew it back on afterwards.  K was utterly incredulous when I told her that some women chose to have 'fake' breasts because they don't like their own, to which after a pause M said 'Imagine if someone decided they wanted blue booboos.' (Booboo being the word that K & M used and still use for both breastfeeding and breasts).

We also had one of those conversations that seem to come around every so often.  On the spectrum of structured to completely autonomous home education we are definitely very much towards the autonomous end, but every so often it feels to me as though the balance isn't right.  For example at the moment, although when we talked about things that they would like to do, learn or find out about this year, both K & M have said that they are interested in learning to cook better and K has said she would like to do some more maths from a book we'd been using earlier last year among other things, whenever I ask if they'd like to do something about these goals, they are always 'too busy'.  While I believe absolutely in the importance of play, my girls have plenty of time to do just that, and will continue to do so, but we've agreed that we will make sure that on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the days we don't usually have any regular activities during the day, we will do a bit more planning on Tuesdays between gymnastics & korfball about what they'd like to do on the following three days and plan when to do it, so that there's a bit less drifting and they actually get on with some of the other things that they're interested in.

This afternoon, having finished reading The Railway Children yesterday, we did watch the film on dvd and then got out a Christmas present that K & M had been given.

 After having a good look at the contents, the girls decided that they weren't really interested in the first activity, which was making a paper wizard's hat, but we did do the next one, which involved using colour tablets in water to make first blue, then, by adding red, purple water, then adding polyacrylamide crystals, which absorb around 300 times their weight in water and waiting an hour or so while they did their absorbing.  This wasn't too much of a problem though, as they added the crystals before their swimming lesson and when we got back they had become 'like quite solid grated jelly' to put in the plastic tube, as a magic wand.

Magic or Science?

K in particular objected somewhat to the labelling of this as 'magic' when it's clearly just science, so we talked a bit about why that might be; about how some people might think that children wouldn't think that science was interesting, so call it magic to make it sound more so, and also how before people had discovered the reason for why some of the things in these experiments, the chemical reactions for example, it really must have seemed like it was magic.