Going out this afternoon, Stringbean wanted to put on her Jelly Shoes, couldn’t find both (I think one is in the car) so she decided to wear two odd shoes. Of course, normal parental response can be’ Well that’s a bit silly wearing odd shoes, wear something else’ , but bites tongue, if you can’t happily wear odd shoes when as she says you are ’3 to 4′ (she got it from her clothes size labels…) then when can you…
Nanny and Grandad Johnson went back home today, so we will have a bit of ‘ just us’ time before we get a visit from Nanna and Grandad French to see their new Grandaughter. After they went home we had a bit of marathon maths session with Stringbean – though she still tends to call the books ‘Match and sort’ as the first one she had was about matching up and sorting things. We ahven’t done anything much like this for a while really, so it was good to do something for a change.
She used one of the Singapore Maths“> ‘Maths Pals ‘ books. We pretty much just let here choose whatever bit she fancies, using the ‘I’ve forgot what they are called’ blocks we did a bit of simple counting, then some adding using the blocks, while also talking about how additions are written on the page etc. Then we did some number grouping – numbers less than 5, more than 5 , more than 10 etc. She spotted that 5 was in the middle of both ‘less than ‘ and ‘more than’ groups, which I thought was pretty clever, she also seemed to spot that any number with a ’1 and something’ was bigger than 10, since I don’t think she can read the ‘teens’ yet very much, even though she can count them. After I went to fit up some new lights in the hall and landing, Stringbean and mummy continued with stuff on ‘balancing’ numbers etc. and more.
On the topic of numbers, she’s made a bit of a breakthrough on spotting the repeating patterns as you go up though the ‘tens’, she’d been stuck at about 20 for a while, but yesterday counted by herself up to 35 (or 37) 
Butterbean is oblivious to all this of course, but is feeding away like there is no tommorrow She even seems to be smiling occasionaly, though I assume it’s just one of her faces at the moment, rather than in response to something. Cute though.