We love Mondays

I've noticed over the last few weeks that in the rhythm we seem to have developed Mondays are good. Its one day where we are almost always at home together all day, often after a hectic, social weekend. For me its like a sigh of relief - we don't have to rush about or be anywhere at a certain time, and the day just seems to flow. It always feels like we achieve quite a lot too, not in a planned or structured way, but in a spontaneous 'hey - look at this!' kind of way.

After her bath this morning A sneaked into bed with me where I was reading the Gatto book I mentioned in the last post. She asked me to read it aloud to her, so I read the remaining half of the chapter I was on, then asked her what she'd got from it. "Well, a lot of big words, but basically that at school they try to turn you into a robot". A pretty accurate description of what he'd been saying really!
After a walk down to the shops and back, we put up our Christmas decorations, as you can see:

Our festive mantelpiece - the snowball lights look huge here!

Lovely candles
Hanging angels (not as cruel as it looks!)

We did a bit of maths from the workbook, working on division and remainders at the moment, so we got the marbles out to help. I've been trying to find different ways to help A with her maths as she finds it very hard to work everything out in her head, and even with fairly simple stuff seems to lose track of where she's going with it. I've encouraged her to use lots of extra paper for her workings out, but the marbles seemed to appeal much more - not only was she sorting them into groups of 7 or 8 or whatever, she was also making sure the groups of marbles were all colour co-ordinated! It seemed to make it more interesting for her anyway.

We then decided to watch Einstein_and_Eddington, which I had videoed a few weeks back. I thought this might inspire some further scientific interest in A, and also be interesting to her as Eddington was a Quaker and a conscientious objector (A goes to Quaker meetings, and we had many discussions about COs when the subject came up around remembrance day). We both enjoyed the film, and it led on to some investigations about solar and lunar eclipses, which we are going to follow up with some experiments about gravity and angled light.

As we were already on the computer by this time - from googling stuff on eclipses - A went on to her games sites and found a hangman game (one of her favourite games for train journeys) which she played for a while. She then found a great geography game, which we both played for a while.

After that we made some pizzas for tea, and watched some rubbish TV for a little while, and then A went off to bed and spent some time making cards.