Rain, rain and more rain… It has rained every day for the last few weeks. Our garden is a bog, and a very muddy cold bog at that. We have been somewhat stuck inside – I know we could go brave the weather but neither of us want to……

So Helena has put her pile of school journals in order! with a bit of reading in between,

She did nearly a days worth of painting with a lot of blending paints on the canvas and even washed her paint brushes!! I think there is still unused paint on her palette… but it’s ok as it is taking forever for anything to dry.

Then there is this work along the school theme, except that this is a preschool. Interestingly not a play-centre (where Helena went) as parents do not come with the children. There has also been the ongoing game of the abandoned children fending for themselves which is so common in both literature, and in children’s games that I think it must be some kind of developmental necessity… or is cultural? In the room there is a space for the babies to sleep, book corner, art on the walls, and a TV which they are allowed to watch David Attenborough on or a movie if they all agree! They also have an outside space – the lid so she can carry around her set up. When Helena was 2 we went to a friend’s wedding and I used a small shoe box to make a carry around play set. I wall papered the inside and a five year old drew the picture to be what the characters could see outside the “window” and it contained her then people (pre Sylvanians) and some furniture. It was so she had something to do on the plane and the waiting in-between flights. I have made fancier ones since then as I liked the idea and now Helena is making her own. That one little idea has born fruit.

We have been doing more maths than usual, probably as it is something we actually do together – I was bribing her with lollies but she didn’t ask this time. Our maths programme doesn’t follow a pattern. The week before last I was showing her the algorithm for adding large numbers to each other, or decimal numbers (she had baulked at adding something up in a shop) which led to subtraction of large numbers. During this time period we also did some mean, median and mode with the tea bag citizen science. Because Helena asked me to time her scooting around a pump track last week we generated data.. (gotta love data).. so this also meant more opportunity for mean, median and mode. Helena made the statement she went at a steady speed so I graphed her cumulative results and got a straight line proving this while Helena looked over my shoulder bouncing.

It is only now she is restless, ‘bored, and looking for talking book so she can tune out!