Today has been an excellent day!!
Not the earliest of starts but very productive nonetheless. It was one of those rare days when it was just Hannah and me I(and the puppy and the eleven guinea pigs!) at home. I like those; we don't have many due to my husband's shift work and looking after L and all the activities H does and visits to places of interest.
This morning, after I'd done some housework type stuff and of course after we'd had pancakes for breakfast, we settled down to some work. Hannah started working her way through the next section of her favourite maths workbook while I made her some spelling cards. She hasn;t bothered too much about spelling until she got into playing on the Times Spelling Bee website recently. She does get disappointed if she scores badly, but we have noticed the same words do tend to repeat so she is writing them down in her "Writing" book, then I am making her flashcards so she can learn them.
I try not to, but I do feel under pressure about her progress. My poor husband is constantly getting grief from his family and it doesn't help when Hannah looks illiterate compared to her cousins who are younger. It may just be that writing is their thing...or maybe it's because all the other kids have been subject to the repetitive drilling of Kumon....which is so not mine or Hannah's style, but she seems ready to take the spelling thing on now and that will do as a trae off between her autonomy and the needs her father and I have to make sticking our necks out for this just a little easier.
Hannah has a bit of a fascination with very big numbers so we looked up a googolplex to look at the number of zeros involved and discovered that it is the second largest named number, so of course it made sense to look up what the largest was (a googolplexian) and the zeros made our eyes go funny!
After that, we wanted to grow crystals so we went to the chemist in search of powdered alum. They didnt have any so we were going to do something else instead, but found a crystal kit she got for her birthday last year and set that up in bowls of vinegar instead. A break for lunch and a mooch in the garden in the gorgeous sunshine, then as it was International Women's Day we did some research for our Edwardian project about the suffragettes. We read some info online, listened to a recording of a speech by Christabel Pankhurst in 1908 (our year of choice for our project) and looked at some images of women marching, then Hannah drew a picture of a woman in suffragette colours waving a banner that read "Women shood be allowed to vote!"
We watched about half of Wonders of the Universe (I do like Brian Cox...) before the cookies were finally cooked (did I mention the cookies before..made a batch of dough on Sunday but they spread so much and take so much longer to cook than the recipe suggests that I ended up having to cook them on three separate days!) then headed off to Connaught Water to walk the dog. It was a beautiful evening for it and we met a very nice family of mum, grandma, boy about Hannah's age with whom she struck up an instant rapport and a puppy of about Bella's age so dog also had a good play. It is so cute watching her play with orher pups!!!
Finally swimming and then home.
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