The day did not start well.

A follow up conversation to the one we had recently about our home education with M started with her telling me that she wasn't going to write a letter to me about home education, degenerated into both of us shouting at each other and her stomping upstairs, whilst yelling that she wasn't going to do anything.  Once she'd calmed down a bit, I gave her the message from the library that they'd got a book in that she'd ordered.  A bit later she decided that she would go out and pick it up and have a look round the charity shops, before she left though we had a very big hug and made up.  Things got better from that point on.  M returned home having been to Oxfam and bought some chocolate to share with K and me, and a photo frame which she presented to me with a photo of the two of us in it.

The day continued really positively and turned out to be really quite productive:

• Both girls did piano practice
• M did French horn practice
• M did two double pages of her maths workbook, one on measuring small things with millimetres, one measuring volume
• K had a go a maths problem, finding the next number in a sequence of numbers that are both the product of three consecutive numbers and the sum of three consecutive numbers.  She'd found the three numbers that gave the sum, but was struggling with the three that gave the product, so we looked at it together and with support she managed to work it out.
• M did a page of a spelling workbook
• K finished two more beautiful quilled cards that she'd made as thank yous for birthday presents
• M & I went to the park with a (unfortunately rather flat but we can still practise passing!) korfball
• I made chocolate ice-cream with a bit of help from M
• K & I continued our conversation about home ed and she started thinking about the letter she is going to write to me and A about it, making some notes of the ideas she wants to include
• M watched all three parts of a nature documentary series about tigers that we recorded a while ago
• I read another three chapters of Life, the Universe and Everything to the girls, while they watched some of the gymnastics world championships women's team final (which GB won bronze in)
• The girls went upstairs to bed and I believe K read another chapter of the book she is currently reading to M at bedtime

This evening I had a chat on the phone with A, who is currently in Brussels.  He asked how our day was and I told him about the bad start and as I did, it clarified some thoughts for me.  K & M are pretty close in age, with only 20 months between them.  It is probably as a result of this that I have a tendency to have very similar expectations of them and most of the time that is reasonable.  However, given that it has been noticeable only recently that K has matured in a number of ways that have an effect on what we can do in terms of home education, it's not fair to expect that her little sister will have done so too.