Run for your lives..... the authorities are coming! Hide!

We had The Phone Call today, from the learning authorities. Why they have to be called 'Authorities', I don't know. So Nazi. Anyway - they are coming out to do their initial visit on Tuesday as we expected. We don't have to see them if we don't want, but we have nothing to hide so there is no point being confrontational for the sake of it. In a booklet we were sent by them, it says

Visits will be by mutual agreement and are generally to the home or wherever the education takes place. we are very grateful to the many parents who have agreed to these visits, as we find them extremely helpful in making a genuine assessment of the provision. We hope that you will find the visit by the teacher informal and friendly. The teacher is seeking evidence that suitable education is being provided, and during the meeting the teacher will probably take a few notes to assis in writing a short report of the visit (You will get a copy of this). The teachers role is NOT to tell you what would be a suitable education - that is for each family to decide.
A second visit takes place normally within 6 months of the first and after that if the teacher is satisfied that a suitable education is proceeding contacts are likely to be annual.

So that doesn't sound too awful! We shall see anyway. If she's awful, we'll just get Alex to bite her :-)

So to today. I'll keep it brief because we have an early night ahead of us due to tomorrow's trip to Skipton! We basically spent the day on fairy tales - we read Rumpelstiltskin, talked about Sleeping Beauty, Princess and the Pea etc, anything with a generally castle-y theme. We talked about the Brothers Grimm and how such tales originated. Callum especially enjoyed the fact that they were first written with much more gruesome details. Issy then did some rhyming words work while Callum did letter patterns, ie recognising 'tion' and 'ough' in words, and how to use them. He then worked in his Manchester Utd workbook and had to decide which would be the best words to use to fill in the blanks of a mascot's description of what happens on match day. He did really well, and on some of them came up with several valid alternative words, so we were pleased with that. As previously mentioned, he is not a bad speller, but we have taken to making sure any words he gets wrong end up written in the back of his exercise book for him to try and learn. Hopefully it will be a less stressful method than rigid spelling tests, but we shall see. That
really is a big part of the experience for us, learning both with the children and about them and how best to communicate with them. Issy did some more reading, and she is sloooooowly improving, recognising simple word structures and sounds.

The afternoon was lots of fun. We all worked together to take basic theme words of a variety of fairy tales (ie eg Cinderella - 'shoe'), and find rhymes for them so we could make a poem. After a little trial and error, and not being able to come up with a decent rhyme for 'dwarves', we had plenty, and Callum used them to write the following poem:

Fairy Tales

Rapunzel let down her long hair
Goldilocks saw a bear
Rumpelstiltskin can spin gold
Sleeping Beauty's prince was bold
There was a girl called Snow White
From an apple she took a bite
There was a Princess who slept on a pea
And Cinderella married me!

However, he was at great pains to say to anyone reading this that he doesn't really like girls, and marrying Cinderella was simply an interesting plot device used for the completion of his opus.

While he was writing that, I sat Isobel down and asked her to tell me a story about a princess. With a little gentle nudging and editing, here, in its entirety, is what happens when Issy's brain is let loose.

Once upon a time there was a princess called Goldilocks. She found a secret door. She opened it and there was a farm. On the farm was a pig and a cow. She looked around and saw lots of cows, but there was only one pig, here in Spain. She went back, but left the door open, and the pig followed her. The pig escaped outside. The princess chased the pig round and round the castle, up and up the stairs to the top of the tower. The pig jumped out of the window and landed safely in a bush. A brave Knight, Sir Connor, saw the pig and thought "I will kill him for my dinner". The knight chased him round and round the castle, up and up the stairs, to the top of the tower. The pig jumped out of the window, and landed safely on some straw. Queen Elizabeth saw the pig, and thought "I'll get the stinky pig out of my castle". So she chased him round and round the castle, up and up the stairs to the top of the tower where Sir Connor was. He took out his sword, lifted it in the air, but then there was a very loud "MOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" All the cows had come rushing through the secret door and knocked Sir Connor and Queen Elizabeth off the tower, and they landed in the moat. The Queen was not impressed when she climbed out and stepped in pig poo.
The End.

And on that bombshell, GoodNight x