Last week I showed Alex some images of lego mazes. He doesn’t play with lego that much, he gets excited about the prospect of a new lego kit, or starts to build a ‘super-long-truck’ but gets quickly distracted. So we grabbed the base plate and found all of the single line pieces and off he went. I suggested he could use the marbles and he intuitively built the passage wide enough for them marble. In the end it was less of a maze and more of a marble run – he tried to include it in the set he has by making it lead up to a long drop off the table. Daniel foiled his plans and we all got distracted so didn’t see if it would work, but the idea was planted at least. He can now do with it as he wishes. We also set up his lego hogwarts – a gift from when he was younger. It is also a game, which we played. It’s pretty hard for his age I think but we had fun adjusting to it.
We had a fairly average day at our homeschoolers park day this week. We had fun in the river as always, but Alex is having some issues with the other boys. Unfortunately our homeschool park days are not attracting many families and so Alex is limited in his choice of playmates. Though saying that he really wants to be included with these boys, but it seems they no longer have a place for him. I’m not sure if it’s a clash of personalities or a maturity thing, but needless to say I will not be encouraging get togethers with these families outside of park day. It’s a shame as in our year of homeschooling so far these boys have been playmates for Alex. When he sees them separately, they still are but for some reason the group dynamic is failing. Fortunately Alex has lots of places to interact with other children, though he is expressing his sadness at missing his now schooled friends quite frequently. He has been clear that he does not wish to go to school himself though. Afterwards we decided to go to the local skate park. The other day when we came Alex was wearing the wrong shoes. today he was wearing his ‘sticky shoes’ which would help him up the ramps. We were trying to run up the side of the half-pipe and make it to the top. Alex explained to me how we couldn’t just run straight up it but it helped if we went back and forth a few times. Of a similar nature, Alex has been playing Angry Birds (Star Wars) on the PS3 that we borrowed from the library. The first time he played dual player with Vio. They had lots of fun, and Alex talked about his trajectory – I didn’t know he knew such words! But he was actually quite good at it and has played a few times by himself too. He finds the levels hard where there are more bad guys than number of attacks – he couldn’t work out how to kill more than one bad guy. I showed him the button to call for an attack using the Falcon (space ship). He overused it though and unfortunately it had a limit. Instead he asked to go back to the beginning and do the first levels again.
Since the tyrannosaurs exhibit, Alex has been playing with his dinosaurs. We’ve also been enjoying playing a board game called tyrannosaurs that he got for christmas.
We also did a science experiment! I had all the things ready for the kids. The first time did not go so well, but after that we got a reasonable result. It wasn’t as great as I had expected but the kids liked making a mess.
Daniel and I have had some nice quiet moments, though I do think he needs more of my attention. It’s easy to get swept away with Alex as he is very dominating. And I find myself doing chores instead of doing things with Daniel. But this is no doubt just my ‘mummy guilt’ stepping it to keep a check on myself. I’ve said before that ‘cheery neglect’ is my biggest worry with unschooling. So often in the mornings before Alex wakes up we have a bit of time. One particular day we just sat and watched some birds in the yard. It was quiet nice, and Daniel’s smile was a joy to me. I remember the bird species as the common myna from some stuffed specimens at scienceworks. We probably proceeded to paint after that, he has taken to painting. Though as a toddler it never lasts long!
There have been lots of words lately too, strings of them. Daniel is using lots of commands like ‘push’ and ‘up’. But this week he has said ‘brush teeth’ and ‘shut up’! I love his little voice.