Rain and routines with random elements and bolding

Wednesday

F and I played her Wii Babysitting Party game - lots of mini-games where babies do various things. Not as irritating as it sounds, honest. F won and the computer babies we were playing against were very rubbish at some games and very good at others, oddly.

Then I did some Kinect Fitness - mainly Cardio Boxing. I love all that punching and kicking to rhythm. Excellent! I've noticed the feedback being quite good, in that my 'trainer' encourages me and tells me when I've done it well, and I get a percentage representing how well I did over the repetitions of each thing.

Whilst I was doing that, F had some hot chocolate and played Spore Creatures and we intermittently discussed various plans.

Then we had picky bits to eat (fruit, small sandwiches, crackers, crisps) and watched Finding Nemo - as a precursor to today's activities really. We hadn't watched it for ages, love the colour and light in it and the dialogue and characters are pretty good too. Had to pause it when the shopping came, then watched the end, which had me a bit teary. FFS over a fish! It's when he looks at his son and thinks he might be dead and for a moment you see him remember the egg at the beginning... Oh gawd.

Today

Today we started a Whole New Thing. We have been working our way towards a new way of home ed for a while, trying things, dithering, bickering, getting input from friends on what they do/did, putting stuff together from what we do and don't like. I think we might have found something that could work for us - it satisfies the difficult criteria of being able to be planned, on one level, yet leaving room for spontaneity, on another - F seems to like a lot of advanced knowing what we're going to do and sticking to it and us being booked up with lots of stuff. At times over the past year she has wanted to have us on a tight routine, and sometimes this has actually happened. But as soon as a routine is established I desperately want to destroy it. And sometimes do. When we're all booked up I find that any break in the routine (cancelled groups/trips, illness!) I welcome and feel relieved by. So that's been tricky for both of us.

 

We have now come up with a plan to cover themes over 3 to 5 days. 1 day or more of going out to relevant place(s), experiencing and observing the theme in whatever form or way - very loose and tenuous connections actively encouraged! Another day or more of exploring the theme through arts and crafts/fiction/films/poems etc. Another day or more of exploring the same theme through science/factual elements - experiments, documentaries, etc. This would seem to suit both of us and we're rather excited about it all. F described the arts day as 'that's when you get the chance to really fall in love with the subject and explore it emotionally'. She can be very eloquent :)

So we started today with Water (and intend going on to Fire, Earth and Air all to be fitted in sometime over next couple of months, before looking for further subjects...). Fittingly the weather demonstrated an admirable commitment to our first topic! 

After I'd done what I needed to do with work e-mails and we'd both done breakfasting, we headed out walking in the rain.

On the way, we did lots of observing water - raindrops in the winter stream and the different wave patterns, especially characteristic interference wave criss-crossing, which F noticed as being like sound and light interference patterns we'd looked at. Splashes, puddles, the sounds of the drops, the channels of water rushing down steep streets, we focused on it all, talked about it and it was great. I love to be in that mode, setting out to observe a particular thing as much as possible, to notice and describe what you see, hear, what it makes you think of and feel, etc. So it was a great walk, despite us both being soaked by the time we arrived.

Our destination was the highly water-relevant swimming pool! Again! So F was able to improve her swimming a bit more. She practised and practised, discovered how tiring it is to actually swim a lot, managed 40 strokes in one go at one point, about a third of the length of the main pool, and did lots of sets of 12 or more strokes, she must have swum over 200 strokes total. She started getting her legs going more too, think that will take more practise to work out, but it all helps. She also put goggles on and practised putting her face under, sometimes whole head, looking underwater. We looked at the reflected lights on the big pool surface and the way waves moved too in different depths.

And I had the dubious pleasure of encountering someone J works with, who is also married to a home-ed friend. Not someone I would have chosen to have my thighs looming over. We exchanged home-ed banter 'Shouldn't you be in school, F?' 'Shouldn't you be at work, N?' and I got into the water (why do they make that stuff transparent?) as quickly as I could. Seriously, my legs have rarely been less lovely than they are now and I would happily swim in a full-length skirt tbh. Still, maybe the Cardio Boxing (it does involve kicks!) will see to that over time...

Also encountered another home-ed friend, small world here.

We left the pool a bit later than should have done but it's time well spent for us at the moment, so we tend to keep having 'another 15 minutes'. 

I had tried to be the sort of organized person who takes a bottle of shampoo and washes their hair under the shower after their swim but had turned out to just be me again and grabbed a random bottle of conditioner instead. I used it anyway, for reasons of general hair appearance improvement.

We had to get dressed in slightly damp clothes from our walk as we hadn't worn waterproofs (seems kind of silly now!), then we went into town via the college short cut and footbridge over the railway, bought a few travel bottles in Boots to use for water samples on our science day, plus a Jacqueline Wilson book in Smiths for F, and had (no, not water!) a hot chocolate and some drying out time in the coffee shop. 

Then onto our next water-related experience - we got the train down to Newhaven and back, to look at the changes in the river (Ouse - the train runs near it for most of the way) as it flows towards the sea. In the event, the visibility was so poor that we couldn't see a great deal but we did notice some changes in width and depth and got a feel of the shape of the river, the meanders and the valley, various tributaries.

Back home, a neighbour brought his netbook over for J to sort out over the next few days, F read her book and J cooked lovely pasta with onions, olives, sundried toms, mushrooms and courgettes.

F is still 'experiencing' water as she has just commented on some refraction in a snow globe.