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