Progress and development

It has all been very informal and unstructured around here lately. Linnea has been practising reading; occasionally I hear her working hard on punctuation, reading things aloud with different inflections to work out what the punctuation marks mean. She also reads to Emer, especially late at night after they've gone to bed and turned off the light. Emer has been writing, and painting. She likes to copy my ways of painting, I think to learn how to "do it right." She does still improve on my ideas and techniques, though, so she's not following me blindly, so that's ok.

They are both casually number-aware. It turns out that Linnea figured out and memorised, at some stage, which colour Cuisenaire rods are which number. I haven't worked that out, what with them not being my toy, so it's a bit confusing when she asks me for a specific one and I don't hand it to her immediately. And Emer's not as clear on number-bonds up to ten as Linnea was at her age, but is a lot clearer on occasionally doing what she's told, so I'll take what I can get here.

Other languages have fallen slightly by the wayside lately but I'm sure they'll be picked up again. I might try to find a conversation group of some sort, though given how they are about attending groups, perhaps not.

And art is big, as usual. We all have tiny little Cotman/Winsor & Newton watercolour sketching sets, and last night we spent ages sorting out huge stacks of artworks. Oil pastels, Pitt markers, watercolours, poster paints, oil paints, crayons, biro, pencil, acrylics. We throw away more than we keep and we keep tens per week.

Oh and Emer has starting making up rhyming couplets.