Been Busy - Feeling wiped!
It's been a hectic few days and promises to not get much better until after the weekend - and I still haven't got sorted from our week away!
Monday was Jacob's birthday - as blogged - and poor little love his presents all went a bit pear-shaped! Not only was his Pirate ship a disaster, but when we got his street-scooter it too was faulty and by Wednesday we had exchanged it! Bless him - he was so good about it all and the new, bigger, better Pirate ship has arrived now and he is thrilled with it - phew!
Tuesday saw lots of coming and goings. Paul had his final exam, I had an ante-natal and seriously sprained my ankle (majorly swollen, but better now). Then in the evening we went out for a meal with Paul's tutor group - which was lovely, but tiring and a late night.
Wednesday was a calmer day, but still seemed very full and yesterday we were out again at the 'end of year bash' (college again) - another long & late night. I slept most of this afternoon, but still feel wiped! Tommorrow is 'Commissioning day' and promises another hectic schedule; the kids have tennis and ballet in the morning, the commissioning service is at 1pm followed by lots of sad goodbyes to good friends in the afternoon as everyone goes their seperate ways 
(+ BBQ) and going out for a meal with Paul's parents in the evening - their shout - to celebrate P. completeing his degree!
School has been going a bit better this week (but hasn't helped me feel less tired of course!) and our 
project seems to be coming together at last - thanks to some resources from Evan Moor - I've got the 'Ancient Civilisation' pack & the 'Egypt' pack - which although it says is for Gr4-6 is easy reading and down-gradable! Seems to be going down very well - phew again! (If you are wondering how I got them so quickly AIM is a wonderful thing!!)
I'm feeling a bit as if we're sailing close to the summer hol's now though and I need to start wrapping-up things, but still have stacks to do. We still need to finish off our look at Ireland - so much for covering it in a half-term, and having Scotland and Wales covered by the summer hol's too. Ho-Hum! We have 12 weeks of Jolly grammar left to cover to finish off the Yr1 syllabus, so I might have to double portions of that some days (hmmm!), but Joel is almost ready to move on to Year2 stuff for certain, so I want it finished. We have finished 1B of Singapore maths with him, but I still don't feel he has a good handle on his addition and subtraction and word problems seem to throw him into total confusion. He only scored 23/30 in his review tests at the end (about 76%) - as it is generally considered that it's best to get 85%+ before moving on we need to do some more work on that for sure. Sadly Joel is reluctant to use manipulatives because he thinks their "babyish" but I think he needs to 'see' how it works a few more times! I'll re-test him at the end of the year (another few weeks away yet) and hopefully he will have 'got it ' better by then. J
Jacob is flying through CGP Yr3 stuff (when he's in the mood to fly that is!) and I think he will all-but cover a whole year's work this term. Really it's easy for him and we're just doing it to tread water. We could move on to Singapore 3A, but not only does the level of maths rise, but the quantity expected per sitting rises too, so I'm reluctant to push that door just yet - being that his attention span is simply not that of an average 8yo. Also I want him to have a more balanced outlook. Maths he can do because it is so 'concrete' and he applies numbers to everything, but I want him to be a little less 'fixed' on numbers, so that's why I'm not pushing him full-steam ahead!
And that's about us for tonight - I'm too tired to think very straight any more!
