A Wild Call

One of the table-time tasks Fluff, Petal and Dot do most days is handwriting practice. Those books, with all the lines... it's one of those things that kills several birds with one stone because we use poetry for this. They choose a poem out of one of our many anthologies and I write out a line in pencil each time for them to trace over with biro or a gel pen until we've finished the poem.

It's always interesting to see what they choose... Fluff has a love of D.H.Lawrence and Robert Frost, all of them adored Bishop Hatto and Dot likes nonsense verse. Petal is currently working on 'What Is It?' by Joan Poulson and I thought these lines from it were deeply profound and very apt, especially as applied to home edding-

and I'm always being told

that I should be more sensible

use less imagination

but that's the way

I find out things

a sort of education

The wind's song

 This is one of the books we are using for our current Survival Skills project. Ray Mears has written many others of course, some detailed survival handbooks but this has proven the most useful as it consists of some of the many photos he has taken on his travels, and explanations about the skills or points he is illustrating.

 As such it is perfect as a table time read aloud, and we've been doing a little most days.

It is also, quite simply, beautiful.

The wheel's kick

My Book People order arrived yesterday!

Yes, I succumbed to them again... well, they sent me a discount code, what's a girl to do?! Besides, you can't have too many reading schemes, that's what I've discovered. You can never be sure which child takes to what and besides, if you have several then you can alternate and switch things up and really, Dot and I have both had enough of the ladybird readers and Letterland, she's done with Peter and Jane and doesn't want to go back to Piggie and Elephant.

So, I got the complete Appletree Farm stories- we have a few of these, mostly in miniature or sticker book form and they really are great and, more importantly, Dot rather likes them so she got those out of the parcel.

I also got the complete set of the Ladybird Keyword series. My originals are falling apart and the set is incomplete and the 1a to 3c replacement set I got ages ago went down well, and Hoof claimed these and is avidly leafing through them. Of course as far as I'm concerned they have the 'wrong' illustrations but they're still enjoyable!

Petal and Fluff are both avidly into coding and Scratch at the moment and are booked on a Scratch coding course for the end of the month so I got an Usbourne flap book on Computers and Coding for Petal and a book on Scratch coding for Fluff. At least one if not both were in the sale so I made double savings and both have gone down very well indeed. Petal is carrying hers about with her at the moment, showing everyone who will listen 'my coding book. It's about computers!'.

The final thing was four write on wipe off grammar books on verbs, adjectives, tenses and nouns. I thought we could do with some of these and they're really well put together. The children all love them in that slightly mysterious way that sometimes happens, I think it's do with a wondrous box arriving and everything wanting what's in it!