Ferdy's Law of Emotion

 Some Fridays work well, and some less well. This was a less well kind of a Friday.. We've all had colds this week and I'm still recovering, plus Ferdy's been getting upset about work and unable to concentrate for very long. And also, we often fill our Fridays with an exciting and enriching day out (this was part of the reason for flexischooling in the first place!) but it feels difficult to arrange anything at the moment, especially anything further afield.

However, many places are still open so Mum just needs to do a bit more creative thinking and stop feeling negative.

We are doing quite a bit of maths at the moment, which often works well through games, so we started with a game called Happy Maths Families. This involved me giving Ferdy a number sentence and him finding the other members (facts) of the number sentence family.

After Gil had done all the worksheets he had asked for (he is doing the letters g, o, c and k this week), he ordered numbers 1-10 and did some sums adding up to 5.

Ferdy really enjoyed his work at school this week on emotions so we then decided to look at some famous paintings and think about what they made us feel (we couldn't look at Munch's The Scream as both boys are scared of it).

Slightly frustratingly (this was one of our emotions hehe), Ferdy has denoted a colour to each emotion (perhaps from a book at school?), a law from which he won't budge. So when we looked at Dr Seuss's beautiful My Many Coloured Days, he was adamant that Dr Seuss had it wrong. He also repeated the same mantra for looking at paintings; when asked why a painting made him feel calm he stated, 'because it's green of course'.

I tried to counter Ferdy's Law of Emotion by introducing a few black and white pictures but was promptly told that black is 'scared', so that was slightly unsuccessful.

We then decided to move on and watched a video about the difference between emotions and feelings, listened to some songs and Ferdy wrote some sentences about when he feels sad, angry, calm, scared and brave. He then insisted on drawing colourful monsters to accompany these sentences (blue, red, green, black and orange). I tried to remain green and embrace rather than reject Ferdy's law.

On our way to the woods, Gil made up a beautiful song about what we feel and that 'our emotions are always there, we can't run away from them'.

The song ended with the fact that we are going to the woods to 'run away from our emotions'.

Later on, we all did some paintings and felt yellow. I surrender.