What did we do today?…. well it is day one of a very new term, and we have been on holiday. In reality we didn’t need to go down that path after all every day is a holiday as much as it is a school day. It depends on who asks as to whether I say “our life is just one big holiday” or the equally true that “Helena has to go to school every day”.

Today I thought I’d go for the “woo hoo” new term excitement – I wasn’t sure she’d go for it because I’m not sure she knew we were on holiday. We have been away for nearly 6 weeks but we’d been having our Monday meetings (that don’t always fall on a Monday) regularly and making the same commitment to thinking about what we wanted to do/learn for the week ahead. Helena however totally went for the whole new term idea. We made a cover page for the the term and after she was told that it was actually term 3 she wanted to find more of the new term pages. Helena was totally focused on the meeting, even though the Toy Library ‘baby’ had to come it was forgotten quickly, and she even wrote the date. It was an assessment dream! Still not consistently doing a 3 the right way round but can notice this… made a pattern with her colouring in… could tell the time on an analogue face with support… skip counted in 5s and that was just doing the date!

We wrote Term goals. This was much more successful after I set some for my self and made them countable. We had a conversation over if ‘Learn to Swim’ was a goal – what does it mean? We also had a conversation on which parts of our routines she likes. Our holiday diary turned out to be something that Helena liked which is strange as all the evidence I had was that she hated it, as in storming resentment and complaints! Turns out doing it is un-fun but having it afterwards is awesome. Note to self -read her the meeting notes.

The rest of the day was filled up with finishing things that were hanging over us with some nagging/refocusing but mainly Helena being independent and BUSY. She made birthday door hangers saying ‘Please come in’ on one side and ‘Keep Out’ on the other. There has been conversation about these for weeks…. and today she made rough patterns to make sure they would hang, traced her pattern and off she went, even doing the writing.

This evening she read me some of her ‘secret’ reading – she says she can’t read then reads saying how she was tricking me, telling me her tricks and sounding words out. I’m never sure how much she can read. Her goal seems to be to read the important things like chocolate so she can tell in any packaging if there is actually chocolate and if I’m holding out!

A good day.