Recovering today · Thursday August 9, 2007 by Ann
The girls were most unwell last night, with Lucy in particular running a temperature. She said she hadn’t felt that unwell since she was a little girl.
I’m not surprised really, I think the girls had burnt the candle at both ends -and in the middle, with their desire to fit in as much as possible at the Big Green Gathering.
The girls have spent today recovering and seem brighter this evening. Alice is having a big tidy up and reorganisation of her bedroom and is playing loud music.
Lucy has been on the computer, writing her diary, keeping her ‘myspace’ up to date and exploring new to Lucy music on ‘You tube’. She recently watched “Walk the line” the Johnny Cash story and has been looking at his music -her ‘myspace’ is presently playing “A boy named Sue”. Lucy’s musical taste is certainly eclectic!
She has just done a tarot card reading with me-interesting that the Tarot card book is one of her learning to read books-it was something she was most interested in and so she has been making a huge effort to be able to read it.
I accept now, that there are good days and bad days for a dyslexic who has had problems as severe as Lucy did and therefore days when she can read better than others. And today, recovering from illness has not been the best of days, so I read a lot of the tarot card meanings-after Lucy had pronounced her interpretation of them.
Yesterdays meeting at the Malvern Outdoor Centre went really well.
I think there were about 20 or so young people there for the actual activities on offer, but several other of our local families who have very young children came along for the day just to socialise. It has always been one of the wonderful things about our local home ed group meetings to see children of all ages and both genders mixing freely. The older ones tend to look out for the younger ones and give them a hand when needed. My heart always warms when i see an older teenage lad, down at eye level with a three year old and chatting seriously. This isn’t unusual in our group and everyone accepts it as normal-until someone new joins the group and comments on it.
The older children had enormous fun and excitement on the high wires course, where they completed and obstacle/assault course high up in the tree tops. This was followed by the ‘parachute jump’ where they climbed a ladder high into the trees onto a platform approx 10 metres from the ground and then jumped off as though they were in a parachute. The harness caught them and they stopped falling several feet from the ground and then they were lowered the rest of the way. Lucy found her courage and succeeded in climbing to the top of the ladder on the second attempt and jumping off. Some of the youngsters made it all look so easy. Activities for the 7-11 age group were on the low ropes course, which included the zip wires and the rope swing (where the older ones joined them for a little while) and then the climbing tower.
Fabulous time had by all!
I had a lovely chat yesterday with the granny of one of the lads in the group. Granny and Grandad do a large part of this lads HE, as his parents work full time and they are the ones we usually see at meetings. Granny has commented before that they have reason to believe that George is dyslexic and was having real difficulty at school with numeracy and literacy.
George has recently found a ‘new’ word game called ‘Backwards’ at a local charity shop. Apparently it requires you to read increasingly difficult words that are written backwards. George and Granny and Grandad have apparently had great fun with this. Granny says it is the best fiver she has ever spent. George is asking to play ‘Backwards’ frequently at the moment and they are now tackling the difficult words. George would still run a mile at any suggestion of working on his spellings or doing a spelling test, yet here he is loving doing just that. Why? because it is fun, in a relaxed atmosphere with no pressure and he is in control of it. George can stop as soon as he likes. Or play as long as he likes
;o)
I’ll be looking out for that game now, as I had not heard of it before.
I have talked about board games, word games and card games before, we play them a lot-when one of the children has a craze on card games we can play for days and find them excellent for helping with mental maths. I remember being down the caravan one time with our children and a couple of HE friends and going out with the girls and coming back and finding David and his mohican sporting friend Ben playing a game of scrabble. The rules they were playing to were not quite what i would have used, but they were playing and having such a good time together. Again I considered this a triumph in our dyslexic family. Dh Tom had always found it such a trial when none of us would play with him before, but now we enjoy a game together.
Absolute Balderdash is a game we play to complete hysterics. It is simply so funny that we all enjoy playing together, in spite of the combined reading and writing difficulties.
All of this fits in quite well with a couple of conversations I have been having with folks lately about what ‘do’ you do if you don’t do school at home? I was looking at posting about this when I came across I live therefore I learn and it says it all really.
The other conversations I seem to be having is do we give the children a break in the summer holidays and was going to blog about that, but Gill has done that so well-and then I noticed that someone has linked to the ‘I live therefore I learn’ post in Gill’s comments! It seems we are all being asked the same questions at the moment!
