T-Bird Anni Rides Again

The LEA lady came, she saw, she smiled in an encouraging sort of way and then she went! 

 
She asked what we did on a typical day… so I told the poor woman, she had that "OMG I’m trapped in a house with a very strange woman" look about her.  She’d never heard of Sonlight you see so I felt duty bound to show her exactly what one gets in the K package, what I’ve added to it to make it last another year etc.  I explained how it was all very literature based in a Charlotte Mason kind of style (I suspect she had heard that name before but wasn’t terribly aquainted with the dear lady   ) and that as I had a story monster of a child it suited us currently very nicely.  She suggested that as time went by Aprilia may not want to be read to so much, I pointed out that I had a 6 year old and I reserved the right to do things differently when I had a young woman not a little girl.  (but secretly I still think I’ll be reading to her when she’s BIG, I love being read to, it’s a sort of gift isn’t it?  an act of love almost and she’s frighteningly like me!)

Then she asked about Maths (didn’t learn did she   )  So I waved our collection of maths puzzle books at her, expounded the virtues of Singapore, Montessori based "golden bead/base 10 block" work, shopping with Miquon rods etc. and mentioned the various maths games on her PC (which got the ICT box ticked)

Then the poor fool asked about reading and writing so she got chapter and verse on Reading A-Z, Starfall (which she had never heard of - I dunno….), Starter Stile, Jolly Phonics yada yada yada.  "so does she write independently yet?"  "no but she’s teaching herself to touch type, I don’t think she really sees much need to write just yet"    "oh, okay, she is still young though isn’t she?  I’m sure it will come"(said in a reassuring tone, just in case I was worried…. well okay, but I’m not worried this week, the hormones are behaving themselves!)

So, just needing to tick a few more boxs she soldiered bravely on, French?  Spanish? "Not that we expect it at this age of course" That would be Muzzy and Dora then  

"mmm, very good, and I can see that there’s a lot of arts and crafts" (u-huh, and I’d tidied a lot of it away!!  She did like the life sized Aprilia though!)  Music?  Oh, she has a violin?  Lovely. (well, it keeps the mouse population down!)  And music ad the dinner table, what a lovely idea.

She nodded sagely and said "you are fairly organic in your aproach then aren’t you"  I resisted the temptation to say "yes, I don’t try to artificially force her onwards against her nature just to get good looking but poor quality results" as I’m not sure she was meaning "organic" in a gardening sense and instead said, well, yes, at this early stage I like to allow her to take her own pace and have choices in what bookwork we do with a perfectly straight face.  

So she asked how I recorded her progress, did we, for example, date work, keep a journal…  I suggested that as there was only her that I didn’t really feel the need to record her progress, I could remember where we left off last time and anyway I sort of blogged what she did as an informal reminder to myself to look back on in future years.

Then we got to the "social interaction" bit.  So I listed off the schedule…. and mentioned MP holidays… so that got ticked leaving not a single box un-ticked so she said that she may come back again next year "if that was okay" and off she went!

So I had a celebratory biscuit or two, messed about on Aprilia’s PC to try to fathom why Study Dog will work perfectly if I go to it’s location in the "C-drive" but no matter how I make the shortcut I can’t get it to work from the desktop.  Still non the wiser so the next step is to teach Aprilia how to navigate through Linux’s file system to .wine then to the "C-drive"  Non of which made any sense to anyone did it