A very early birthday present.

Yesterday, K & M had their piano lessons.  While K had hers, M & I continued working on learning the countries, flags and capitals of Oceania, and then K & I played Phase 10 while M had her lesson.  We went to the library on the way home and K requested Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows on cd and M got out a big book on penguins and More Shakespeare Without the Boring Bits on cd.  After lunch, I read quite a lot more of Roman Britain.  Then I read the story of Joseph from the girls' First Bible, then from The New International Version Bible before we watched Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat on dvd.

Today we had an LLL toddler meeting.  K & M are generally a bit reluctant to go to these (partly because it involves leaving the house earlier than they'd like), but usually have good time once there and often there friend L is there, as she was told, which helps.  On the way home we went to Windblowers and, having talked to M who thought it was a good idea, we bought her a very early birthday present (her birthday isn't until June!).

Taking it home.

Having a go.

She is very pleased with it indeed and has had it out of its case at least half a dozen times this afternoon.  Early this evening we popped next door to our adjoining neighbours to let them know that M will be learning a brass instrument and to please let us know if it's ever a problem.  Having talked about this to my friend S, the mum of M's best friend J, who is learning the trumpet, she said that J only plays in a room that doesn't adjoin the neighbour, with the door shut.  Given that we're frequently in during the day when our neighbours are out, I've said that M can play in her bedroom if we think they're out, but otherwise it's in the playroom, in both cases with the door shut. 

This afternoon, we finished off Roman Britain and continued with a few chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  After that, since we've finally sorted out our printer, I had printed off a worksheet on division for K and we had a look at that together.  It included, the two ways of thinking of division i.e. sharing out and repeated subtraction (the latter is particularly helpful compared to the former when dividing by a fraction), factors and multiples, using knowledge of times tables to help with division, helpful tips and tricks to find out if numbers are divisible by certain numbers (e.g. ending in 0 or 5, digits adding up to multiples of 3 or 9) and 'chunking'.  We worked through most of it together, but for the final section K preferred to have a go on her own and use a calculator to check her answers, which she did and go them correct.  M rather reluctantly left K & me alone for this, but insisted on her own half hour alone with me afterwards, so she got out the Flags of the World again and we found that she's pretty much sorted on all the flags and capitals of Oceania, to go with South America and Europe, which she's rock solid on, so we're starting on North America (there are more of them than you'd think!).

A went to the supermarket after work this evening and both girls decided to go with him, so I had an hour and half or so to myself.  It was very quiet!