Perfect day (well, almost)

There was nothing remarkable about today. It was just simple and happy. As I finished the morning chores, I could hear Charlie singing to himself as he played with his Lego or chatting to his Kind Carrots on the window ledge.

We started work, sitting at the dining-room table: handwriting practice, followed by spelling. At school, Charlie had come home with lists of spellings to learn every week. It was a dull way to learn, but he was good at spelling and didn't have to try too hard.

But the Galore Park Junior English textbook makes spelling much more interesting. In the exercise we covered, the author points out how many words have the 'dge' combination. Then there is a challenge - find words with those letter combinations in them. There are clues. Charlie was delighted when he guessed all of them. He spelt them correctly because he had the letters 'dge' fresh in his mind. 

The next exercise was a wordsearch and, again, Charlie was practising words and reinforcing his learning, but in an enjoyable way.

 

A short break, then it was time for Maths. Charlie struggled with the concept of rounding up last time we tackled it, so we watched a video on the BBC 'Skillswise' website, then played a game (downloaded from the same website).  Every time we landed on a question mark, we had to decide whether we had to round up or down. Charlie won.

With basic lessons out of the way, Charlie decided to have a look at the 'Tom Gates' website I'd downloaded for him the other day.

He was soon producing beautiful pictures, using the online drawing tool.

Home

Modern

A bird's eye view

The sun was blazing outside, so we packed sandwiches and went out for a picnic. We found a nature trail in a local park...

Then we settled down to eat our picnic. 

After that, Charlie went off to spend a couple of hours with his grandma, whilst we went to an appointment at CAMHS with our eldest son. And all the sweetness and joy of the day was destroyed.