Rainbows under the bed

Yesterday evening in bed F showed me a play she had started writing. It was called 'A Terrain' and was about Native Americans and started with sounds representing the four elements: fire, earth, air and water! Not sure what will happen but did think the ideas were interesting and I love that she is into writing and creating so much at the moment. Have bought her loads of different books to write in, from cheap thin exercise books to hardback 'journal' type books, and she is very appreciative of having so much lovely new stationery and making good use of it.

We also read a bit yesterday about the Stone Age and F answered some questions in GP History book. She really likes the GP books and has done bits of all of them, sometimes with me or J, sometimes on her own.

Today we got out an optics kit that I had bought online ages ago and fiddled around with the prism, lenses, holographic card, mirror foil and other stuff. Talked about refraction, the spectrum and other concepts. Reasonably good kit, but the light source wasn't working so we had to do a lot of improvising with various torches, none of which were entirely satisfactory but did get some interesting effects.

Then she went off and used her new optics mad skillz to make a rainbow under her bed for her ponies. She had already prepared a picture of sky with 2 clouds. Am intrigued lately to see how she can do quite careful, well-presented artwork but doesn't always choose to. Must admit I am reassured that she can! Despite all my leanings towards children developing own style in own time, etc. It's still rather a relief to see that she can do something very recognizable, when she wants to. 

We giggled at the Harry Potter references in a very bad Bear Behaving Badly 'dream' episode, also watched some Simpsons and a short clip from Coast about the crazy Brighton to Rottingdean Volks railway with the underwater track and the boat-on-stilts carriages. Was great to see film of that, have wanted to ever since first heard about it.

At dinnertime, F wanted to talk about death and how when she was little she didn't know people died unless they ran into roads or something. And how hard it was when my dad died and how she still wishes she could visit him and feel that lovely safety again. I wasn't as receptive as I should have been as it just tweaked all my worries about mum a bit.

Later we watched a documentary about Victorian children's role in the Industrial Revolution, which we were both very engaged by, imagining other lives we could have lived.