Ay ay may I play Jumping Clay today..

Ferdy is still doing a lot of mirror writing so our day started with him practising writing the letters a, b, d, g & s with our friend George who was staying.

He seems to find the s particularly impossible to get the right way around, even when he watches someone else write it. It's really hard to teach him because it feels like we're making him do something totally against his instincts.

After some number work at my computer, instigated by Ferdy, we went off to do some Jumping Clay.




This is a home ed group and they focus on a topic which lasts three weeks; we were in the last week so caught the tail end of it which had been all about food and where it comes from, how it's made etc.

We've done it before, primarily to help with his fine motor skills but, when he wasn't distracted by all the Jumping Clay characters around the room from his favourite books, Ferdy quite enjoyed talking about bacteria and then moulding a petri dish for it. 

Even better, however, was creating a character from one of his favourite stories (Sticky Beaked Sid from Open The Door in the Slinky Malinki series) and then listening to the story making Sticky Beaked Sid act it out - oh how Ferdy loves a story.

We're off to Hay on Wye for the book festival next Friday, so will be writing a special Hay Festival blog covering a whole week of storytelling. We're attending readings and performances by; Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen, Sarah Cruddas (books about space), Andy Stanton (new Mr Gum books), Yuval Zommer (Big Book of Birds), plus we're doing some foraged art, going to a folk concert about nature and landscape and meeting Tove Jannsen (who wrote the Moomins)'s granddaughter. All surrounded by probably a lot of rain...

Us caught on the Hay festival camera last year

And what do you do with this leftover goo?...

Both boys have been wanting me to read The Lorax (quoted in the title) countless times this week, and with all the kids' protests about climate change happening on Fridays around the world, I have been feeling we should somehow have an eco Friday.

However, an eco Friday could really mean anything from looking at green energy, the food we eat, protecting our wildlife (or lack of it), to recycling, understanding climate change.. the list is endless. And whilst I quite like the idea of us joining the climate change protesters on a Friday, I think that Ferdy and Gil are too young to understand it all and I have to be careful not to project my own beliefs onto theirs, before they've even had a chance to form them. Better to just incorporate thinking about the environment into our Fridays for the moment.

So we read a few more books focussing on the plight of the environment: The Green Giant and Pesky Plastic, which is about different animals around the world thinking plastic is food. Ferdy's also learning about adjectives at school so we had to shout whenever we read one (who can ignore the The Lorax's rippulous pond and smogulous smoke).

Then, after a trip to the library, we went out to look for some trees at the Buddhist Centre.

On the 50m walk between our car and the entrance, we managed to pick up a bag's worth of people's leftover goo - crisp packets, plastic bags etc on the roadside.

Boy vs. Nature

There are some fine and majestic trees at the Buddhist Centre, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. We tried to climb the trees, bashed them with a litter picker (not quite appropriate for an eco day), gathered leaves and daisies, made friends with a cat, hid behind the trees, got stung by stinging nettles, spotted butterflies and ladybirds, and ate beans on toast in the cafe.

Later on, at Ferdy's request we made some leaf paintings and had a gloomy conversation about a world without trees (we would all die wouldn't we Mummy). 

The Lorax was written in 1971 and we have been destroying our planet every since then. But essentially it ends in hope with the Once-ler (factory man) passing on the very last Truffula Seed to a young boy so he can plant a new Truffula Tree and, 'Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back'.

Perhaps it doesn't need to be complicated with kids, perhaps we can start with small things like picking up litter, appreciating wildlife and nature and thinking about recycling and reusing, borrowing or mending things before we buy new ones. We agreed that we'd all like the Lorax to come back.

It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

This blog could have been about how we went to see the Sandmartins nesting near Nottingham this Friday, and how we spotted herons, snails and slugs on a woodland walk. Or it could have been about the division by sharing that Ferdy requested we do before we go out, (although that may have been a bit boring).

But it's actually going to have to be about reading.

As mentioned a few times, Ferdy has not wanted to learn to read at all. He managed to spend his first year at school not reading any of the books that he brought home, and seems to have been extremely successful in getting us to read to him all the time, whilst totally ignoring all mention of looking at words or letters.

He has quite recently, encouraged by speech bubbles in The Beano, started to read properly. But since Easter (when no one was paying any attention to his reading) things have abruptly clicked and he is suddenly spelling out and reading everything he can see. 

In the last 24 hours tl clockwise to middle: reading instead of going to bed; reading instead of getting up;
reading to Gil instead of eating breakfast; reading in the car; reading instead of eating supper; reading in a cafe;
reading instead of lunch; reading when we got home; reading in the evening...

Ferdy didn't walk until he was nearly two; we were seeing a paediatrician as he showed no signs of walking at all. She suggested some exercises, which he wouldn't do. One day, when I was on the phone, he got up, walked past me in the kitchen, through the hallway and into the garden. I had never seen him walk before. He walked everywhere from that moment onwards. 

He is my son, so of course I think he's pretty amazing, but I am in awe of his ability to do things when he is ready, and only then, despite all the pressure surrounding him. Who knows what our children could become if we gave them the resources, but left them to do things at their own pace?

(title quote copyright Oscar Wilde)