Other things last week and into this one.

A final post to catch up with a really rather busy week.  Both girls have at various times been a bit off colour and it's been rather chilly, so I have been reading to them quite a bit.  Yesterday I finished reading the latest Ruby Redfort book Feel the Fear, which we ordered from the library before it was published several months ago (along with two other friends, so we all got calls from the library and each collected a brand new copy of the book on the same day!).  As usual with the Ruby Redfort there are various things that we can follow up, particularly regarding the codes used in the book.

In other news, K has started a blog.  It's just for her, although I am going to be allowed to look at some of the posts, so that we can use it to help her improve her written English.  The impetus was that last week was such a good week, with something on almost every day that she was particularly looking forward to, so I suggested she might like to write things down as a way of remembering them.  She thought it was a good idea and decided on a blog rather than handwritten in a diary and has been doing quite a lot on it.  Although I'm not allowed to look, she has told me what the private post is about.  She has been doing a number profiles, in the first person, of various characters she has come up with including information about them and their likes and dislikes.  From what she has shared with me, it sounds as though it's done in a quite wordy way, with sentences rather than single words for categories such as favourite food.  It's not out of the question, that I might be allowed to see one day!

On my suggestion, M dug out a workbook to have a go at.  It's a Letts one: Mythical Maths.  She whizzed through the number sequences pages and those about number place and value in 4 digit numbers.  Her mental maths is pretty good, but we very rarely do much written down and so it's perhaps not surprising that doing addition and subtraction in columns was a bit of a stumbling block.  Both K & M are usually quite keen (aka stubborn) to do things *their* way, even though in many cases the conventional way of doing things makes things either much simpler or less easy to lose track of working.  M consented to give the conventional way of carrying and borrowing in addition and subtraction and having got the hang of it very quickly, went back to the sums in the workbook and managed them easily.  We had an interesting talk about borrowing in subtraction and came up with the following alternative way of doing it, although I think we'll stick to the usual way.

 Also today, M issued me with an egg box challenge.  We each had an egg box and had to decorate it with just the things she had got out on the table in a rather short amount of time.  Here are the results.

Mine's on the left, M's is on the right.

This afternoon we had friends round for tea, play and to meet the rats of course, before the four of them went off to korfball.

Finally, we have been listening to When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr on iplayer, although we've now caught up and need to wait for the next episodes to be broadcast.