Saturday 28 May 2016

Our Weekly Round-Up #1

I have always enjoyed and admired Natalie's weekly round-up on her blog called  
Thursday Photo. It captures the week that she has had and ends on a photo. It's good to see everything laid out and documented in front of you; I thought I would do something similar.

Weekly Round-up #1

This week has been unusually busy and hard; I know there are moments where everything seems to all come at once and it feels a little like that.

This last week we have had James’ birthday and his BBQ party so I have been trying to push to make it as special as possible. For William’s birthday, back in February, I was really disappointed in my family and the effort that they made for him. Only my brother and his partner turned up and that was last minute and under the conditions that it was held at my dad’s. The reason for this apparently is that I live too far away; in reality we are only a 15 minute drive.




I didn’t want this to be the same for James and subsequently asked our church friends to come and have the BBQ with us. It might have meant that there were few children here but I would rather have a flat full of people who wanted to come and James feel special.

As you have probably seen, the BBQ was a success and James thoroughly enjoyed himself.
The problem I have had since is that James has entered diva mode.

He has had presents and new toys and activities to play with. He has had snack related food and cake. Finally, he was made to feel like the special boy he is. This, however, has lead him to be having more mini meltdowns, demanding what he wants to eat or do and, ultimately, everything should end with birthday cake and it should happen NOW!
I know he is young but wow, it is demanding!

Monday came and I tried to keep us busy in Home Ed to distract Prince James and yet, as it can often happen, the boys saw straight through my ploy and started just being awkward. There are no other words than awkward.
We created a superhero each and were assigning nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives to them. 




Great activity I thought, and something I will hopefully share with you, but, once again, the boys had other ideas. They started delving into complex questions about different word uses; something I thought I could handle. 10 years of teaching this and I will be honest they left me a little braindead. I just had to stop!

I suppose this aspect is a good example of the difference between class and Home Ed teaching. One thing it made me realise however was to not do activities like this on a Monday. It really frazzled my brain for work that evening where I made quite a few mistakes!
Tuesday came and I started a new aspect of work. It isn’t a big task and I can work from home but like any new jobs you have to get your head around it especially between doing the other jobs that I do.

Wednesday I had learnt from my lesson from Monday and decided that we would do a level or alternative learning; cover the basics and then just have some fun with it.
We’ve been looking at measurements as part of our numeracy and our All about Me topic. Brilliant idea Martyn, paint their hands with acrylic paint and make a handprint ladder!! Why didn’t anyone stop me from painting James’ hand without having something to wash it off instantly with?




Luckily it was acrylic paint so with soapy warm water and a bit of a scrub all the handprints across the flat was erased; despite this it was a fun lesson which, like above, I need to write about!
Thursday was much better and after a trip to the library to get some new books whilst avoiding moody single home ed Mums who don’t like me we went off to my Dads to spend some time and help sort his garden out.




That’s this week and I am exhausted! The demanding behaviour from James is slightly disappearing thankfully and I am just about juggling everything that I have going on.
Sadly though I haven’t had much time to blog, read or comment so I need a massive catch up with everyone; hopefully I'll get time this weekend.

Positives this week though:
1. James had a great birthday.

2. I have my sponsor for BritMums
3. I have a relaxed weekend a head!

4. I have time to hopefully get a lot of writing done this weekend!

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