This blog seems to have morphed from a journal of the girls’ lives to a journal of my thoughts and feelings!  Still, I try to remember from time to time to keep a record of what they’re up to, for us to look back on in the future.  So here goes:

Flopsy is learning to read like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird - she looks over my shoulder when I’m reading a book, perfectly happy while I periodically say ‘come on!  Can’t I read my book for just a few minutes???’.  She gets chuffed to bits when she recognises words she knows - ‘the’, ‘and’ & ‘you’ mostly (as ‘cat’, ‘dog’ and other usual children’s first words don’t tend to be scattered throughout the text of the books I choose to read!).  Then she decides she’d rather point to each word of a sentence while I tell her what it says - she also likes to hear what the page number is as well.  So I guess that in the process of me lazily sitting down to try to read a book for myself for ten or twenty minutes, Flopsy is getting some intense literacy and numeracy time as well - autonomous learning in action!  She also tells us we’ve forgotten to say ‘the’ or ‘and’ when we’re reading her her books, even though we haven’t - she just likes to make sure we’ve remembered all the words on the page I suppose.  It’s nice though, as it shows she’s starting to follow the text as well as looking at the pictures. 

On the numeracy front, she’s got a big book about numbers that has an introduction to basic sums towards the back, which she’s very interested in.  We get lego bricks out and do the sums with those and she’s now started to freqently use the words ‘plus’, ‘add’ and ‘equals’ in her vocabulary - testing them out to see if she’s got the right understanding of them, I think.  Again, it’s amazing to watch all this learning going on without me sitting down and saying ‘right, it’s time to learn how to add’ - she just does it!  She’ll be counting books for us to read before bed (we usually set a limit e.g. ‘we’ve got time for 8 tonight’), and will go and check how many she’s chosen so she knows how many more she needs to choose to make up the number.  She’ll be sharing out pencils or toys with Mopsy and taking a certain number from her own pile so Mopsy’s got the same amount.  There’s nothing contrived at all about the maths going on in our house, and it’s a real pleasure to watch and be invovled with, when we’re allowed to be involved, of course!

Flopsy’s writing is also coming on in leaps and bounds - she is still nuts about tracing over dotted letters and is more confident to try the seemingly harder ones now.  She can confidently write T, O, i, E, l, A and is happy to have a go at V, U and Y but won’t attempt anything else at the moment.  One of her uncles is called Tom and she spends a lot of time writing To Tom (coming up to ask us to write the M for her) on any piece of paper she can find.

Mopsy has become a puzzle fiend and is becoming really adept at putting jigsaw puzzle pieces together.  We’ve got a really nice puzzle that consists of twenty little puzzles of two pieces each, and she’ll sit and concentrate on doing it twice over sometimes!  This is a real example of how she’s learnt from Flopsy, as Flopsy wasn’t putting puzzle pieces together until she was about 22m old, but then she didn’t have the chance to see anyone else doing it over and over again like Mopsy has. 

Mopsy is also really good at colouring in - she can colour in specific places, rather than randomly over the page.  Interestingly, she holds the pencil in her fist, with the lead sticking out by her thumb, with her forefinger outstretched to guide the pencil.  It’s a very accurate and neat method she’s found and I wonder if she’ll have the motivation to ever change it!  I suppose she might once she starts writing, but what’s interesting is that Flopsy has held the pencil the way we’re taught to from the very start - maybe it’s something to do with the fact that Mopsy had access to pencils and crayons from a much younger age than Flopsy had and by the time Flopsy got a chance to draw, her fine motor skills had got to the stage where she could easily hold and control a pencil that way.

Mopsy’s speech is also coming along very quickly - she’s got to that point where she’s learning several words a day and I really enjoy deciphering what she’s saying and the feeling of delight on both our parts when we work it out.  She’s a really happy, helpful child who is totally obsessed with cleaning and putting things away or ‘way’ as she puts it.  If I’m ever stuck for some way to amuse her, all I have to do is give her a damp cloth and she’ll be happy for ages! 

Ok, DH has just left for work now, so I’ll have to stop this post and go and play for a bit!  I’m glad I got some of it down, though, as it was long overdue!