Over the past few days I have been trying to practice the skills in Siblings Without Rivalry and How to Talk so Kids Will Listen. I must confess to not doing great a lot of the time. It is very much a case of practice makes perfect - but thankfully (thankfully? Not sure how thankful I truly am for multiple arguments a day!) the kids give me plenty of opportunities to practice. If anyone has read the books, you'll see how similar this is to the examples in the books: there was screaming and crying coming from Small Clanger's bedroom, and upon entering I discovered him and Tiny locked together shouting at the tops of their voices and yanking each others' clothing. Turns out they were disagreeing over who should have a library book. After removing the book I calmed them both down and helped them each say how they were feeling... then I said "so you both want to read the book at the same time. That's tough, I wonder how we can work this out..." and Small immediately sat up and said "I can read the book to her!" and Tiny beamed a huge grin. Then they both fetched cushions to sit on, I handed them back the book and I left them looking at it together. Little Clanger is definitely taking more work... when I say to her that she needs to work with the others to find something that is fair to everyone she usually feeds back later that she "decided nicely" that it should be the way she wanted and manipulated the others into doing what she wanted via the use of their special teddies :/
Anyway, we dropped the car back off yesterday morning *sob*sob*I miss my car* afterwards we walked into town and dropped a bag of things off in a charity shop. We then had a nosey about in another charity shop and came home with a learn to tell the time game; a game called Topple where you have to place pieces on top of a board which is balanced on a stick, and the person who causes it to topple over loses; and a jigsaw. Not just any jigsaw, one of those 3D jigsaws. We thought it looked like fun, and it turned out it was... once the kids had gotten over the fact that it was a model, not a toy and wasn't really intended for playing with (which means "play with it very carefully" in their eyes). We started building it yesterday almost as soon as we got home (lunchtime) and finished it lunchtime today. The build pictures:
There is a little blue roof bit missing, and also a single piece of wall (maybe, we need to check on the floor etc again just to make sure), but considering I was expecting there would be many more pieces than that missing considering its' origin, it's not too shabby at all! :) box says it's a model of Camelot, which is very familiar to the kids as we've avidly watched all 5 seasons of Merlin on BBC.
So, after finishing the castle off, I asked the kids if they would be interested in lapbooking. I'd never heard of them before, but they were mentioned on a fb home ed group a couple of weeks back, so I did some research and they look great. I was greeted with some very unimpressed faces when I described them, and strong reluctance when I said I would show them a video, but then after they had watched 2 videos on here, they suddenly warmed up to the idea and were quite keen to get creative. I pointed out that we don't have any square cut folders, but that we can still start making some minibooks to stick in when we get our folders. They didn't seem very enamored by the idea of a castle lapbook though, so I am going to ponder topics that they are more interested in and suggest those next week.
Tomorrow we are going to a monthly home ed group for the first time. Hoping we will enjoy it :) this weekend we are going to put the Christmas tree up and will be seeing some friends too.
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