How to Train Your Children

The current obsession in our house is the How to Train your Dragon books, which we listen to in the car on the way to and from school, in the playroom before and after school and at bedtime every night. Ferdy's excuse for not being able to read his own writing is that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third (the hero) can't either. We are currently on book 8 (we have had a few long car journeys) but the first book begins with the young Vikings trying to train their untrainable dragons, and Hiccup works out that actually the best way to train his maverick dragon Toothless, is to be nice to him and treat him with respect, rather than 'yell', the one word instruction in the tome used by Vikings for many years.. I sometimes find myself needing some tips from Hiccup.

It's proving a bit tricky to get Ferdy to do things at home at the moment, and he once again seems to be very tired and getting upset about doing any work related stuff. So, after some yelling (only joking), we decided to play a Vikings game. He and Gil set up their Viking ship (The Hopeful Puffin) to set off on a voyage to America.

tl-br: setting up The Hopeful Puffin; Stoick the Vast;
sailing in the Green Sea; the ship sets sail

Ferdy's been learning about positions at school and we'd watched a few videos earlier, so the (Mummy) goddess Aphrodite (my name chosen by Ferdy but I'm not complaining about being associated with the beautiful Goddess of Love) shouted out positions from the sky 'turn a quarter left, a quarter right, half right, full turn etc' and displayed cards with things like 'straight on, up, down, beside etc directing them towards the treasure/glasses case with Smarties in.

Just because there is a How to Train Your Dragon obsession in our house, it doesn't mean Star Wars has been forgotten about so Ferdy then read us a book and did some writing (albeit a bit reluctantly) about Luke's Jedi training. And I learnt that when you want to write a capital A, you have to turn your page upside down and write a V first...

Then it was off to the library to read books to a carrot.

Our afternoon's activity was to see Horrible Histories Dreadful Deaf at Derby Theatre. It was all about deaf people in history, of which not much has been recorded. We'd discussed a little in the morning about what being deaf was and also watched a video about a deaf boy communicating in sign language with his classmates, who had learnt some. Both boys were quite intrigued although Gil did shout 'is him deaf?' quite a lot whilst we queued up to go in to the theatre.

We learnt some good facts like that the Romans didn't let deaf people marry or have children; that Alexander Graham Bell (who invented the telephone) got the use of sign language banned and claimed that all deaf people should be taught to speak (despite having a deaf wife and mother); that Prince Phillip's mother was deaf, and that it's funny to shout Deaf and Dead at the end of a story...

It was a good lesson in historical oppression, something I don't think kids are ever too young to learn about. And also in treating people kindly and with respect. In book 7 of How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup (the hero) gets a slave mark, and later as an old man and great King and leader, he suggests that all kings should perhaps get a slave mark so that they understand what it is like to be oppressed. He's a wise man, that Hiccup is, who needs to read their own writing anyway...?