Getting on with things.

I wasn't expecting K & M to do quite as much as they did today.  This morning K spent quite a while reading Maths Quest books that we borrowed (again) from friends yesterday, in fact she wanted to carry on reading while M had her piano lesson rather than playing Phase 10 with me as she usually does.  M, meanwhile, has decided that for lent she is going to write letters to people.  She started a letter to Nana for her first one, but then stopped because she decided she wanted to make her something to enclose.  She thought she might knit her something, but eventually settled on plaiting her a bracelet, then finished off the letter.  It was quite short, but I was struck by how much smaller and neater her handwriting looked.  She had asked me how to spell 'learn', but despite that there were only two spelling mistakes, one of which she spotted herself (she'd written 'prasant' instead of 'present') and the other I pointed out to her ('planing' instead of 'planning').  She is also still writing some of her letters as capitals rather than lower case, but is open to the idea of trying to get this side of things 'right' too.  M also told me about a big dinosaur book that she has got out and started reading.  While K was having her lesson, given the weather is still beautiful, M wanted to go to the park, which we did posting her letter to Nana en route.

Over lunch, I reminded the girls that they had decided that a little bit more structure might be good and asked if we should do a bit of French, which they agreed to.  I dug out a folder of the teachers' resources from the book I used to teach from at school, Metro, and introduced some vocabulary of things you find in a pencil case, using a couple of little worksheets.  Then when K & M had had enough, suggested that they could fill in the worksheets later on.  I'm not entirely sure what they were up to for much of the afternoon, as they disappeared and were quiet, so I did some LLL work.  By about 4 o'clock, I gently reminded K that I had asked her to do the worksheet and that she had asked me to insist if she didn't want to do things but she still wasn't ready at that point, however half an hour later I tried again and somewhat to my surprise, she straight away sat down and got on with it and M joined her!  They worked together, reminding each other of some of the words and I didn't mind helping if they got stuck and it only took about 10 minutes, but that was fine because then it was time for tea and after that korfball.  I read some more of the Gemma book while they were having tea, because I'd really quite like to get it over and done with!