The Wellyboots Tribe Step Forth - again!!

Today started Ok, except for Jake deliberatly flicking his fountain pen and getting blue ink all over the table and some of Joel Bible study (  ) and then it all went a bit nutty when Jacob thought that his CGP book should say something that it didn't and refused to do what it asked! He was working on 'reflections' and thought the picture would look wrong if he drew it the way he should! He got totally 'fixed' on NOT doing it their way and refused point-blank to try. In the end we told him to put it away - something else for him to do 'in his own time' - just not worth persisting with the fixation/tantrum. Fortunately it wasn't me that got the brunt of that one as I was being defeated by the printer at the time, so Paul dealt with him - admirably and with a whole lot more patience than I would have had!

I tried a new exercise today for English - 'listening skills' - following directions. The boys both have a picture (today's was of an ant colony) and then I read out a list of instructions for them to follow. E.g ; "colour the ant at the top of the picture, that is on it's own, yellow", circle the antantae of the ants that are facing each other, etc..." There are about 7 instructions per picture and they are given time to complete each one before the next is given. They seemed to enjoy that . Joel was pretty good at it and Jacob, as I expected, got a couple wrong - drew 1 baby ant instead of 2, wrote 4 names instead of 3. It seems to be these 'fine details' of life that he often misses (attention) and which I think lead to many of his frustrations. My aim with this exercise is to have fun and to raise his level of attention/listening. For Joel it's more just fun, but it never can be a bad thing to learn to attend to detail! I am also going to give this as a reading/attending/following instructions exercise sometimes too, because it's not only listening to someone else that Jake apparently has problems with, but he often seems to struggle to really 'hear' even what he is reading himself and therefore misses the meaning and the point. He frequently gets fixated on a single word in a sentence that he doesn't fully understand and then thinks that he cannot make sense of any of the rest of the sentence - no 'contextual' understanding, just a total fixation on not understanding this one word and often he refuses to even read past it in an attempt to understand it.

Anyway - moving on - so then we did a couple of little mini-books about Egyptian homes, BUT Jacob ended up wrecking one of them just as we were sticking it together and so had to start that all over again. I was a little annoyed, but I SO want this project finished now (and so do they - although they are a little more into it than they were), that I made him do it there and then (call me harsh, but some of it was Joel's work too, so it didn't seem fair to let him get away with his 'lack of thought' yet again - and that was in the end what caused the error). Eventually he finished it and both books are lovely. I'm not quite sure HOW all this is going to fit into one lapbook, but I'm sure that where there's a will there's a way!!

Another big frustration today included the printing out of the 'pictures' book for the new activity. Our new printer has a powerful 'ejection' of the paper and frequently throws it all over the floor. It also has the fantastic facility of being able to print little books (A5 size) in numbered page order, BUT once it's thrown the pages all over the floor it's a nightmare to try and work out how to arrange them in order to re-load them for the other side to be printed. Usually it's not that much of a problem (I'm getting used to it!), but occassionally it shoots through blank pages too, or jams the cartridge and then skips printing that page to carry on with the next one - just to confuse me even more and, to top it all, todays book didn't even have page numbers to help me, but did need to correspond to the 'instructions' book!! It only took me about 6 attempts to get it printed out right  !

The really nice thing about today though, has been that we had some good friends we made this year around for tea. Anna and Joachin are Swedish friends who have been studying with Paul this year. Their little girls LOVE to play with all our toys (and children!). They left a good many of their own toys in Sweden and I think they feel our house is a little like Santa's grotto! And we growny-ups love to chat of course!! You should have seen the playroom when they left at 9.30pm! P. and I had to tidy it as it is also a bedroom and you couldn't see much of the floor and the kids were far too tired to get them to do it.  Sadly though this was a "goodbye" meal because tomorrow our friends leave us to travel back to Sweden.  

Then this evening I have spent about 2 hours on the phone to another friend as she is building her life-coaching website  - checking links for her etc...

And now it's far too late and I must hit the sack or I shall be fit for nothing tomorrow.