Happiness is Family Shaped (by sarah)

Stroud Dance Festival 2012 (by sarah)

This is Jean getting ready for her dancing at the Stroud Dance Festival. She did really well though had to sit out one of the dances due to feeling sick towards the end - it was very hot in the hall and the kids were doing A LOT of dancing.

I Spy… (by sarah)

Last night we went for a walk with the kids, we were playing eye spy - as any parent will know eye spy with kids is always interesting 🙂

We spent ages trying to guess what began with H and falls off of trees and is a seed with spiky bits (we allow glues if you get stuck in eye spy). The answer was of course Haycorns!

Of course - silly mummy and daddy - Jean has had the whole collection of pooh and piglet and all the other random poems read to her several times.

As it is she thought they weren't acorns and they weren't pine cones but those little almost pine cone things you get on some succulent looking spikey trees we see growing in various places.

She showed us one - and yes it does look like a cross between a pine cone and an acorn 🙂 Felt a bit sad to have to tell her they weren't haycorns and that it is just piglet can't say acorn as he's too little.

The game then progressed and Jean began introducing things like 'I spy with my little eye something beginning with COT' the answer to which was Cut Of Twigs. There was also SWNCII - Sky With No Cloud In It.

She then began to get more and more abstract so we changed the game to 20 questions. But Jean tended to just repeatedly ask if the answer was Horace her House Dragon (a series of stories I've written for her).

When me and Alaric got distracted she announced 'You Guys! Come On Focus, we are trying to play a game here'.

So we then ended up playing word association which was lots of fun though had a tendency to end up in loops of characters from various stories or films - namely Mysterious Cities of Gold and Harry Potter.

It was a fun outing though we did have to keep telling Jean she couldn't whack the bushes with her stick as they were peoples fences but then we found a lovely set of park and tree lined lanes to walk through right near our new house!

Colours Song (by sarah)

The lyrics are wrong and Jean forgot what she was doing and it was filmed before we moved but I thought it fitted with the National Science and Engineering theme I was going for with this weeks posts - so here is what is essentially an outtake of a science song for kids I am working on.

World Book Day (by sarah)

Jean's school are having their World Book Day celebrations today and this year Jean decided to go as a dinosaur from Harry and His Bucket of Dinosaurs. She loves these books - we met the author last year at Wychwood Festival and she got a signed copy of one of his more recent books - they are really aimed for an older age group than her but she wanted it as a Daddy read (ie Daddy reads it to her when it's bed time!). My friend Ulrike then got her the book she is currently holding for Christmas 🙂

Jean loves books and she loves stories - including making them up - this morning we had a game of what was going to happen to her eggs whilst she was at dinosaur book day - she was taking in the book Cera and Her Bucket of Humans.

But it has come to my attention that other parents may not appreciate World Book Day - they think it is a hassel and just more work for them. I find this incredibly sad and wonder if they feel the same about all dress up days or weather it is just because they don't see the point of books.

We love books so it is unsuprising that Jean loves books but what has astonished me is that she now has an academic age of 8 and a half and a reading age that is higher. I have worked with her on literacy skills and stuff at home as I wanted to give her a good foundation if she turned out to be dyslexic like me.

But there is still a lot of illitracy and stuff in this country and I just wondered looking at peoples reactions weather the schools need to try and include the parents a bit more in World Book Day - unfortunatly that would probably be seen as the schools just being too demanding on time again. This is a double problem as even those parents that do want to be involved will actually be too busy. The normal work regime most families have leaves little time for the fun stuff that is seen as 'optional' or as a pouncy extra rich kids get.

It is all very well for people to say things like they should read instead of watching TV but alot of people are exhorsted when they come in from work and the TV is a relax time - the other issue being what if the parents themselves are not exactly literate?

We are a first world country and yet I come across teens who just scrap by. I'm not sure what the solution is nor weather McDonalds attempt at looking good by putting books in Happy Meals was a good thing or not. The kids seemed happy as it came with a handpuppet.

I think encouraging people into the libraries would be a good thing - but the libraries need to advatise outside of themselves and offer events similar to the litretary festivals where they have people dressed up as the characters and things - but this all takes money and one thing the libraries do not have is money. They are currently an endangered species and if they go then the kids that do use them are going to be even more screwed than usual. And increase in illiteracy means an increase in crime and an increase in poverty gaps which causes an increase in crime.

I do think the libraries are corner stones to solving this issues which is one of the reasons that I am trying so hard to provide books for Jean's school library.