Soph's School of the Mad: Week Four

First things first, Jack turned nine! You remember the cake we were making?

Look at it! A glorious specimen. Except...I put the cake carrier on the floor, in a secluded corner overnight to keep it out of the way of the boys. I forgot that our kitchen is plagued with ants.

And ants got into the cake carrier.
And THAT was bad.

And then it transpired that I had left the baking parchment on the base of the top cake. Mmm. Baking paper.

So, it was a catastrophe, but the bottom layer tasted nice!

Anyway. School continues. Monday was shit. Isn't it always? Five weeks of lockdown, and Mondays STILL feel wrong.We decided to bin off Andy's Wild Workouts and try Cosmic Yoga. A lovely, earnest, BENDY woman called Hayley did Pokemon yoga. Alex got right into it, when he wasn't just lying on the floor:

Jim had run out of school-set work, so we made a temperature graph:

I asked him, "what do you think would happen if you did this graph all year?"
"The temperature would just keep going up" he replied
Looking forward to our apocalyptic winter...

Jack was given a colourful floating drone thing for his birthday. It arrived on Monday afternoon. "Place your hand under the drone and watch it hover" said the instructions. It did not hover. It flew away. It is free now.

On Tuesday, Jack made a video explaining partitioning in maths. He is truly a genius. He also did a Warhol portrait:

Jim had a bad day on Tuesday. For about three years, he's had a phobia of bubbles. This has become so extreme, that we do not even SAY THE WORD in this house, but instead say 'the B word'. He was doing Cosmic Yoga with the cheery maiden, and she said bubble. Jim lost his shit and never really recovered. But Wednesday was much better. He designed a castle powerpoint about a trip to Castle Rising, and just about coped with having a video lesson over Teams. I mentioned his castle topic. He was asked to build a model in 'any medium'. How about...in Stronghold?

Yaaaas, much better than pizza boxes and bogroll tubes!

Jim's school holds a regular community cafe. Children and their parents are invited, and the older children serve the food and take the money. It helps teach the kids to socialise, and the 'script' for going to a cafe, and lets their parents meet each other and see their kids in school - when your child goes to school by taxi, there's very limited interaction with the school itself. Anyway, these cafes cannot happen in lockdown, so we did one over video chat instead with Jim's teacher and another member of staff. The kids were in raptures at the idea of having tea and cake in the middle of the morning, and broadly speaking, it worked quite well. Except Jack kept being obnoxious, and Jim started picking his nose halfway through, and Alex came in and started trying to CLIMB INTO the laptop which is his new reaction to any video call.  Speaking of Alex, he can now write his numbers one to ten. They're not entirely recognisable, but they exist. And Tom continues to teach him French. Monsieur Daddy indeed! I try and save fun work for Friday, because I am not actually a tyrant. Jack's been really grouchy all week. He misses his friends, he's sick to death of Jim, and the weather hasn't been good enough for him to prowl about the garden - his favourite pastime. So, he looked at Lichtenstein and comic strips, and had a go at designing his own:

Boom! Jim likes food. He really, really likes food. We were talking about green food last week, and I told him about matcha tea kitkats. Three English pounds sterling and several days later, this arrived:

Three bloody quid! Robbed. Green, sweet, bit meh if you ask me, the Kitkat purist, but he loved it. For his school work, he was asked to write or film a news report. You know by now that my children will choose to make a video over writing any day...
He didn't disappoint.

And that has been a WHOLE TWENTY EIGHT DAYS of home schooling. We've all survived. Sometimes we've even enjoyed it. God only knows how much longer this will go on for, but on it will go. Enjoy the weekend!