and we are still here. my thoughts are with SB as i worry about her settling this in, as the first month is the hard one. fingers crossed an all that.
BB has got back into doing some gentle home ed and have got the ticksheet going. I think our gentle approach is paying off. she is such a different temperement and personality to SB and we have to be careful to balance moving forwards against overstretching. However, since we have been concentrating on gently moving with reading, I think she is finally a reader [tho she would deny this] . Have also spent some time reading interesting comic style fact books with her, with her reading some bits, which then later on saw her get one of these books out to read/look at the pictures herself. This is great 
as the start of being able to follow her own interests in reading [as apart from watching youtube videos of minecraft, lego and snake care ] a slow move forward with maths i think has confirmed she has finally ‘got’ hundreds, tens and units. also great as we didn’t want to move on without this being solid, and she has restarted conquer maths. we restarted piano, and took ginas advice to ‘consolidate’ before moving on, so we are getting bb’s fav carols shipshape and the agreement is we always start with what she can play and then we do a single bit of ‘moving on’ . BB really struggles at not being perfect or things easy, and seems to have no real concept of practice or learning to make things work. it makes education [and life] hard. we are planning to concetrate really hard on scaffolding and supporting her learning, partic with SB away, so that hopefully she gains confidence in learning new things!
but it isn’t all about structured learning. in fact this is just a very small part of life. we are hoping that being able to concentrate on her needs and wishes rather than sharing, we can also work on the difficult moments, and strategies for when life isn’t going her way – less shouting and conflict would be good. helping her find away to develop some control and strategies would be bliss. its a long job, and as parents it is so difficult to see where to help often. and for bb, there is the minecraft, lego, building stuff, playing with stuff, imaginative play and meeting and playing with friends.
This week we had a tentative start at a new weds meetup, with katy and babs coming with their kids. it seemed to work really well. they mostly played, but i did my first young engineers club activity, which was a nice simple one of making paper and straw rockets. bit of individual making, bit of group experimenting and theorising and lots of fun Barbara brought a really interetsing maths game, which i enjoyed . em and jax will hopefully join us too on other dates and we will add in some craft/art, some chess, geography, some animation and music etc just as the kids enjoy. i am looking forward to see how it shakes out
friday was the local HE group not back to school party at the conservation place. BB loved meeting up with her friends there and playing, even tho the weather could be better and this weekend bb has had a playdate with josie, which she loved . there was a thought she might stay over, but she didn’t really feel up to it yet, but maybe and it was a good feeling that she considered it. thanks merry .
so i think a good first week back to home ed