Archives: homework

Voom! – Hey! -it’s Friday? Ah well – not unexpected, I guess, but there never seems enough time; it just races.

What has been a doing in this old week? Jack had a day off school on the Wednesday – I suppose that might be the weekly anomaly. He also started helping Eve with some of that ‘Home maths’ stuff – the sort of thing Jack was doing… This approach seemed to work well for Eve, she was calm enough to deal with it. I don’t quite know why she protests so much & gets so upset when we help her – well- when I help her in particular because I take it calmly, ut she seems to dig her heels in about it & not I a good way – she starts to believe she cannot do something & therefore puts up mental blocks to actually doing it (rather than staying calm & focussed). This becomes a little galling, but I just try to reiterate the point that I don’t think she’s talking in in a slightly different way. That said there’s usually some form of noisey distraction as well – perhaps she’s not so good with those either… it’s not like Louise or I could remove ourselves from the noisy Distractocons to assist Eve as they would just follow & persist; they are difficult to ignore & dismiss. I guess the difference with Jack helping her was that they were able to go to Jack’s room & close the door…. hmmmm

Eve also did her homework OK last night (although I had to remove Jude from sitting on the table Eve was working on; he was complaining about some or other injustice that he perceived the world had dealt him. He was not in a good mood last night – not sure why… he had been better on the whole these last 2 weeks (quite delightful at times) & there were little bits of ‘really good and helpful’ behaviour seeping out from him from time to time, but on the whole he was argumentative & stubborn.

Mind you Esme was wild & wilful yesterday evening as well… She’d been playing with Lilly since they got home & they are always getting themselves all hyped up; such is the intensity of their playing.

It seems a while since I was on what I consider to be my ‘normal train’ . Perhaps things have been more lax than I was leading myself to believe? I have a head cold – that probably assists in promoting this disjointed feeling I have this morning.

Despite better efforts I was not especially earlier to bed, but I did fall asleep somewhat after reading to Eve, so that might have helped (amount of sleep) & not helped (took a while to actually get to sleep properly when went to bed).

Perhaps I think about sleep too much? I think Jack went to sleep OK – he did get up in the night to go to the toilet (which woke me up: the ‘thump’ as he hops out of his tall bed) but when I popped down to turn the bathroom light off (he left it on) I checked in on him & he was jolly sleepy – so I think he’d actually woken up to go to the toilet. It would seem his body still has bad habits even if he’s trying to sleep better now.

So what was his first day at school like? It’s difficult to get any really deep impression out of him, but he’s most definitely happy. It was outside PE (& they should have had their outside kit (yet to be delivered by the school) so when he said that they should have had their other kit Louise & I were worried that we had made a mistake, but it seems that everyone else had made the same mistake; Jack said everyone was wearing their indoor whites outside, In a tremendously heavy shower from which they may have had to retreat. All his kit was damp in his bag; we’d not thought to supply a plastic bag for these events. I’m not sure now what lessons he’s actually done, but it might not be the case that at this early stage there hasn’t been too much in that way. All he’s had to do in the way of ‘homework’ is to copy his timetable into his log book; nothing too arduous to start with.

After all this I didn’t really get info from Jude & Eve as to what their new classes were like. Jude is with a teacher that Jack didn’t get along with, so we’re needing to keep an eye on that one & Eve s with a teacher that Jack really got on with, but then had a really bad year with his classmates… So again, it may be a case of keeping an eye on Eve, because there area lot of (shall we say) ‘competitive’ girls in her class; not necessarily academically competitive.

Esme has Lilly (from across the road) in playgroup with her now, so she likes that. They were making a noise & fuss upstairs on their own yesterday when I got home, so I went quietly up too see what nonsense they might be getting up to & they had set themselves out with a play picnic & were ‘reading’ Pingu books to each other. I slipped quietly away again – that’s the sort of play to encourage, not disturb.