Rest of week 1

Wednesday 11th April

I was expecting to do a Tarot course and have a meeting today, so we arranged for the girls to be out most of the day. They walked over to the Leisure centre this morning and went swimming, so that covered PE.

When they came back, Jacqueline did some more of her Devon diary. She seemed much more interested in the events of last Tuesday, when we visited the Glenn Lyn Gorge and saw the money tree. She wrote a lot more than she did yesterday. She cut out some pictures from the leaflets and found some other pictures of the Lynmouth Flood on the Internet.

Stephanie did not progress as well because she wanted to use some of Greg’s photos to illustrate her writing and did not know where to find them on the computer.

Greg is going to show me some basic image techniques in Photoshop, so I can teach the girls how to manipulate their images for their writing and also for their web pages.

With the Maths, Stephanie printed off some more sheets from the Exeter University site. Today’s module was on Algebra, which she did at the end of last term at school.

She got very frustrated because the information was presented in a different way than she had seen before and she felt she could not do the exercises. When Greg came home, he explained it to her and she felt much happier.

We have decided to go right through this Maths programme from the very beginning, which is Maths for 5 and 6 year olds. Stephanie has printed off loads of sheets and the girls are going to work through it together.

As the programme builds on itself, we should be able to highlight any gaps of things they have not covered- or not covered in any great depth.

With Jacqueline I tried to follow the rest of the lesson plan about units, tens and hundreds and it confused me. So I found her some division practice to do in one of the old, incomplete workbooks.

We will be working through all of those in due course.

Both girls worked solidly for a couple of hours and then went to the cinema to watch the film, “Meet the Robinsons”. English work for tomorrow will be to write a film review and also to continue with the diary from last week.

We did not manage to get out with the dog today , so he was a bit of a grumpy grouch

Thursday 12th April

It is becoming clearer by the minute where my children’s passions lie and it is not really in the conventional academic subjects.

Jacqueline wrote about 5 lines on her English and filled the rest out with copies from the guide books of the places we had visited. Stephanie wrote a couple of lines about her holiday in Devon last week. She is still on Monday!

Stephanie had printed off a whole load of practice work from the Maths section on the Exeter University project. As she had struggled a bit with the Year 8 work and Jacqueline had found the Year 6 work challenging, we decided to start from the beginning.

Stephanie printed off heaps of sheets from Year 1 (5/6 year olds) and Year (6/7 year olds). She completed a bit section of the Year 2 work, although she told me there were things she was unsure of.

Jacqueline did a few sheets of the Year 2 work and got stuck on equations with “greater then” “less than” and “equal to”. It turns out she had done that after Christmas in Year 6. Clearly not paying much attention at the time!

The kids interest level perked up considerably when we started on their business plans.

Jacqueline was itching to start building her website. Patience is not her strong point!

I asked her a few questions about her business including:

What were her goals for it?
What is her business about?
Who is it aimed at?
How is she going to reach those people?
What will on her site that is free? What will be chargeable?

To the question, “What will her business look like when it is finished?” I got the answer of “A website!”

Perhaps I need to review the coaching questions!

Once we had done this, we had a pretty good idea of the answers to those questions and what is going to appear on each page, as well as the action steps Jacqueline, me and Greg need to take to get it up and running.

Stephanie made a start on her list of things she knows how to do and things she loves to do.

We took the dog for a walk and used that time to discuss their businesses.

When we came back I started to show Jacqueline how to build her site in Dreamweaver. By the time we finished, we had the outline of the site with the basic pages.

Then she told me that she did not think we were progressing very fast ! Talk about wanting it done yesterday!

Nearly at the end of week 1
With love and abundant blessings
Amanda Goldston