That'll Larn 'Em

Today we started Five in a Row.

You see, there was a birthday at the weekend, and one of the gifts was a Thunder Maker and the first book was called Storm in the Night and the day before the birthday party we had had a thunderstorm which the children were actually OUT in...

And then when they woke up today we were all in the garden and Linnea said "Can we have homeschool in the garden?" and I said "Of course," and she said "The best thing about HOME school is that you can tell the teacher what you want to learn, I think." Then she skipped off and did whatever it was she wanted to do. I wasn't called upon to be a teacher at all.

I did really really want to get laundry done, though, and then we had lunch, and then we popped off with a family of friends to the community gardens again, and then we came home, and I read the book while feeding the baby, and the children opened our new delivery of extremely fancy marker pens, and so we decided to do some of the Art exercises, and actually did one of them - facial expressions. They mainly enjoyed using the Thunder Maker every time thunder rolled in the book, and working out where to hold the Thunder Maker to make the thunder louder or quieter (the further from the spring you hold it, the louder the noise gets, because your fingers don't stop it so soon).

I think as the week wears on we will get more out of the book, not least because a fair bit of the very American language had to be translated, but that too will get easier - they have as yet been exposed to very little in the way of "faucet" for tap and so on. It's nice to be reading extremely British stuff like Joan Aiken (we've started reading one about Arabel's Raven alongside very American-flavoured ones. I must have a look to see what else I have; I know that when I was little I had a mix of Irish, British and Canadian or American stories, so they must be knocking around somewhere. We also had translations of various Astrid Lindgrens, but those are ubiquitous, I think.

The main difficulty will be keeping the elder girl in check to give the younger one a chance to join in fully. But we'll figure something diplomatic out, I think.