starting up on gymnastics and Reading Eggs again

On Monday we went to gymnastics as usual, but for a change Small joined in with the lesson. He has been practicing his handstands and bridges and felt a lot more confident in his ability to do things and decided that he wanted to join in with the others and show their instructor what he could do. He really enjoyed the lesson, and came over telling me all the things he had discovered he could do. The instructor came over to speak to me at the end and said how proud she was of the progress Little was making and that Small had done brilliantly too and she was really hoping to see him in the lesson again next week. Fingers crossed he has gotten over his emotional hump that was preventing him from taking part before.

Today we had hoped to go for a walk to take some bottles to the bottle bank and perhaps play in the park. However the wind and wet changed our minds and we ended up staying in and working a bit on our spring topic, playing some games, and I decided to start a 2 week trial of Reading Eggs for Tiny. She has been doing pretend writing a lot recently (to the extent of "writing" on a rather important form that Podd and I had filled in but not yet posted), and has also started forming letters of her own accord (like A and i), so I wondered if perhaps the time was right to give it a go. We started at lesson 1 and she took to it immediately. She was thrilled at the different parts of the lesson, and couldn't wait for her critter to hatch at the end. I think when we have finished her colour lapbook we will start on a letters lapbook, or perhaps individual letter lapbooks.

While we were doing her Reading Eggs lesson, Little and Small started watching... and were laughing at the various lesson parts (having neither of them started at the beginning when they got their subscriptions). Once we had finished Small asked if he could have a turn so we went to his next lesson and he whizzed through it.

Then Little had a turn (although on the laptop rather than the desktop as the desktop won't run the floating island of Reading Eggspress) and did a comprehension lesson which she also whizzed through as quick as anything. Small commented that Little's was a lot harder than his, and we spent a while talking about how Reading Eggs teaches you how to read, but Reading Eggspress is more about making sure you can understand the things you are reading. Anyway, after Little finished her lesson one of her friends from over the road came round to play so she and Tiny went upstairs and Small did 2 more lessons and then his end of map quiz, which he sailed through amid excited cries of "I can really do this!" and "I can read it!" He's excited to do another lesson tomorrow :)

I am pondering what we can do with these:

They are wooden boxes which we have been buying our strawberries in (partly because the strawberries were really yummy and partly because the boxes were so lovely!), and now we have three the sprogs want to "make something" with them. Podd and I are thinking about spray painting them first, but after that we are unsure what we might do with them.