I’m reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to RoRo at the moment. Contrary to our normal rules (for most books that have been made into films, we insist on reading the book first – yes, we’re meanies, but it’s so much better that way, isn’t it?), she has seen the film already a couple of times and has also seen Prince Caspian. She most recently saw Prince Caspian (and was not impressed with the fighting scenes, incidentally) and is getting a little muddled between the two.

I loved all the Narnia books as a child. My parents read them to me and then I read them myself, over and over and over and over again. I created my own Narnia stories in my head and got lost in the magical world where animals talk and four children can become kings and queens. The Magician’s Nephew scared me quite a bit, as I recall.

What I can safely say, however, is that I had absolutely no impression of any religious undertones, allegories or anything of the kind. To me it was just a magical series of books about a magical world and lots of fun adventures. I didn’t even get annoyed about sexual stereotypes, like I did with Enid Blyton – because, frankly, the girls do get to have a lot of fun and do some fighting, too, in Narnia.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying reading it to RoRo – sharing books you loved as a child with your children I think is one of those things you fantasise about when you get pregnant, or before even (or is that just me?), yet so often it can be a disappointment, because they don’t always share your enthusiasm (when I first tried reading the Brambly Hedge books to RoRo she wasn’t at all interested, except in the fabulous ice hall in the Winter one). But she is enjoying The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – at the moment she’s worried and sad about Mr Tumnus and she’s rather in awe of Aslan (I’m curious as to whether she will spot the religious elements, because I think she is far more ‘into’ Jesus and God than I was at school – I took my parents’ atheism on with pride and sometimes perhaps a little too much enthusiasm).

Sadly, though, she has been rather spoiled (or very lucky, I should perhaps say) by having her father read many ‘chapter books’ to her, because he does amazing voices and puts bucketloads of meaning and drama into his readings. I’m not quite monotone – I can get the meaning and I can manage an occasional different accent (most come out as deep Gloucestershire), but I really can’t do a different voice for everyone and I quite often forget that I’m supposed to be doing a voice. To the point where the other night she stopped me to give me reading tips. Apparently I need to read differently when I’m reading the description bits, to make it very clear that I am describing and not being someone talking. And maybe I could try some different voices for different characters, too. So Mr and Mrs Beaver now have Gloucestershire voices and I think I’m managing to make Lucy and Edmund sound a bit younger than Susan and Peter – and of course the children all speak with plummy BBC English accents. I’m not looking forward to meeting up with all the other animals soon, though. I have a horrible feeling I will get all muddled up.

And perhaps before we read the next one, I should read through it on my own and practise all the voices.

What are you reading to your children at the moment? Do you enjoy doing the voices or do you struggle with them like me? Have you enjoyed sharing your childhood favourites with your children or have they not liked them?

My Phonics Kit is a pack from Oxford University Press for parents to help their children with phonics and which ties into the new Year 1 Phonics Test (see last week’s Sunday Reading post for my concerns about the test).

My Phonics Kit contains three workbooks (Kipper’s Phonics Workbook, Chip’s Phonics Workbook and Biff’s Phonics Workbook), instructions and guidance for parents, a reward chart, stickers and a CD-ROM with eBooks and related activities. The pack costs £10, though it’s currently available on Amazon for £6.

My Phonics Kit is based on the, almost certainly very familiar, Oxford Reading Tree, that most schools use and so contains familiar characters and artwork. Each of the workbook has some words for your child to read to see if they’re at the right level for the workbook. (The kit is aimed at children reading at or above Level 5 of the Oxford Reading Tree.) There’s then a page with some tips and guidance for learning together with your child. There are then nine pages, each looking at a specific sound, and the different graphemes that can make that sound. (For example, in Biff’s Phonics Workbook there’s a page on the sound ‘k’ and it covers ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’ and ‘ch’.) There’s a section of words to read and then one or more ‘alien words’ to read (the alien words are indicated by a little picture of an alien and are clearly differentiated from the actual words by being in a different coloured and styled box, as well) that use some of the graphemes introduced on that page. And then there’s an activity for the child to do using the graphemes from that page. For example, there might be an activity to match sentences to pictures, to fill in gaps in sentences, to find sounds within sentences, and so on. Interspersed throughout these pages are whole-page activities, such as larger gap fills, colouring activities (find the words in the picture and then colour the picture) and matching captions to pictures. Each of the workbooks ends with a ‘Silly Ditty’ using lots of words and sounds from that workbook and then a final activity (a wordsearch in one, pairing words together in another and putting words together to make other words in the other workbook).

Throughout the workbooks, children can earn stickers to put in the workbooks and stickers for Floppy to go on the reward chart. The reward chart also has indications of where to read the eBooks on the CD-ROM, though you can actually use the kit in any order you want, including going through the workbooks in whatever order you want. There are six eBooks on the CD-ROM with activities to go with each. There’s also a section for grown-ups, where you can hear the different sounds and find out about the screening test and also read some tips and guidance about helping your children learn to read.

RoRo has tested out My Phonics Kit and really liked it. She enjoyed reading the book on the computer and the way the pages turned. She read the words at the start of the book with no problem (in fact, I was surprised how quickly and easily she read them). She enjoyed doing the activities and wanted to keep going, despite it being late and time to go to bed. She enjoyed finding the stickers and sticking them in the right places. She read the alien words fine, though she definitely struggled more with them than the real words (because, as I mentioned in last week’s post, she doesn’t just decode any more, but uses context and her knowledge of vocabulary to work out a word that she doesn’t already know – neither of which can be used for alien/nonsense words).

I was pleased, as well, that working through some of the pages in the workbook together, had RoRo talking to me about what they’d learnt at school in phonics and spelling – she does talk about school a lot more than she used to, but it’s still always nice to have something that prompts her to talk more about what she’s doing there.

I thought My Phonics Kit was excellent. Oxford University Press have integrated the alien words in an unobtrusive way that should introduce children to the idea of needing to read nonsense words without too much confusion and help them become familiar with the idea. It covers the sounds they should be familiar with at that age and will help them with reading words in isolation in addition to within stories and other texts. I think that My Phonics Kit would be a useful pack to use, regardless of the test, and will be very helpful in providing additional reading-related activities for children to familiarise them with the different graphemes – both for reading and writing. I think there’s a strong chance I would have bought a copy of this and would certainly recommend it to others. The price is very good for what you get – we often buy workbooks from Wilkinsons or the Works which cost a couple of pounds each. They usually have a stickers and definitely more pages than these workbooks, but they don’t come with eBooks and activities on CD-ROM and I don’t think the activities themselves are as targeted as these ones. The familiarity that theOxford Reading Tree brings to the children as well, is an added bonus. I might be tempted to buy it in Reception, rather than Year 1, though, depending on the progress of the individual child. I’m sure LaLa will, at the very least, be reading the eBooks on the computer, as she loves Kipper and Floppy!

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of My Phonics Kit to review by Oxford University Press, but the opinions expressed are my own (and RoRo’s).

As you are probably aware, the government has introduced a new Phonics Screening Test which comes into play this June for all children in Year 1, after a one-year pilot. Children will have to read 40 words with their teacher, which will be a mix of real words and nonsense words that are made up of letters and sounds that are part of the phonics route of teaching reading. It is not compulsory to teach reading using synthetic phonics, though a lot of schools do.

I am not a teacher, but I do have a daughter in Year 1 and have seen the range of reading skills that her classmates show. They used phonics to teach reading in Reception and they still use phonics, along with other methods, to teach reading in Year 1. RoRo is reading books at Stage 5 in the Oxford Reading Tree (and the equivalent in other schemes). The vast majority of her reading is now recognising whole words that she knows already, in addition to this, she uses context to work out what words she doesn’t know say – sometimes she still decodes, but for the most part, she’ll do something like look at the first few letters of a word and the last few, look at the length of the word and look at the picture and the words around it, to work out what the word is – from meaning. Decoding now forms a miniscule part of her reading process. And, from what I’ve seen, this is the same for a lot of her classmates. There are, of course, still some who are using decoding the bulk of the time, but not very many. And there are others who are further ahead and almost never use decoding – recognising the majority of words, and working others out from context.

Phonics worked wonderfully as a teaching tool for most of RoRo’s classmates, but the teachers have always shown adaptability and have helped the children to use different methods. One of the most important things has been the use of story books and non-fiction books that engage the children and help them pick up words and reading in general because they want to know what is happening, or find out more about something. We love phonics and I have already started introducing some letters and sounds to Eleanor – very gently, of course, and with no pressure (I’m not a Tiger Mum!) But I would never, ever, ever, try to get them to read nonsense words to practise the letters and sounds. The point of phonics is to help children learn to read. The point of phonics is not to teach them to excel at reading a large number of letters and sounds but never be able to translate that into actual reading.

The government claims that the point of the Phonics Screening Test is to “identify the children who need extra help so they are given support by their school to improve their reading skills”. But… do you know what? That’s what teachers do already. Year 1 teachers and teaching assistants work with children according to their ability and needs in learning to read. They will do things like guided reading in groups, individual reading with teachers, teaching assistants and parent volunteers. And they will help those children who are struggling, using the most appropriate methods for them. They don’t need a 40-word check to tell them who needs help. What they could probably do with is some extra money to give those children who do need extra help a bit more one-to-one help.

What they definitely don’t need is a bunch of children getting stressed out about taking a test at the age of five or six. They don’t need a bunch of children getting thoroughly confused about having to read nonsense words when what they really want to do is read about Floppy and Kipper’s latest adventures with the magic key. They don’t need a week off timetable to fit in testing all their children themselves. And they don’t need the extra stress themselves of administering a test.

If we lived in Spain, then the Phonics Screening Test could well make sense, because Spanish is spelt phonetically. English is not spelt phonetically. Some of it is, yes, but most of it isn’t. There are plenty of letter groups that have different sounds in different words, there are plenty of sounds that are spelt in a huge variety of ways. You learn to read ‘bough’, you’d expect to then be able to read ‘tough’, but no that has a different sound and then again you have ‘through’. To, too and two sound the same but look very different.

In the one year pilot, only 32% of six-year-olds who took the test reached the expected level. Is this because they couldn’t read? No, it’s because most of them could read well and taking a step back to decoding nonsense words and reading a list of words instead of a story, is not at all helpful or indicative of actual reading levels. The government’s explanation was that “pilot schools were only given details of the content and structure of the screening check shortly before the check took place”. Which essentially translates as “they were actually testing they could read the words, when they should have been testing that they could do a test in a specific way and specific format”. If they’d had a whole year to teach these children how to decode nonsense words and read a list of words instead of a book, they’d have passed the test. They might not actually be able to read books to the level they would if they’d been learning to read, of course, but that’s OK, because the government will be able to tick a box, which is what matters, isn’t it?

Hopefully, the test (or ‘check’ as it’s been called) can be administered without too much disruption. Hopefully, it won’t give children a knock-back in their progress at learning to read (whether through insisting on testing recognition of phonics letter groups rather than actual words, or through making confident readers feel like failures because they can’t decode a nonsense word. And hopefully this test, which is as nonsensical as some of the ‘words’ it tests, will be scrapped very soon.

Edited to add: There’s an interesting response to the Phonics Test consultation from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (PDF).

If you’re worried about the test at all and would like to help your child prepare for it without adversely affecting their actual progress in learning to read, Oxford University Press has brought out My Phonics Kit, which is based on the Oxford Reading Tree and treats the nonsense words as ‘alien words’. We’ve received a copy to review, and we’ll be giving our verdict next Sunday (My Phonics Kit review is now live), but on a first quick flick through, it looks like they’ve done an excellent job at providing a comfortable introduction and practise for this test.

What do you think about the new Phonics Screening Test? Are your children going to be taking it this year? Do you think it will confuse them? Are you going to help prepare them for it at home, or let the school prepare them as they want to?

Lego is brilliant stuff, isn’t it? I went to a learning conference this week and there was a Lego stand and they had a huge table-full of Lego for delegates to build with – the idea was to build bits of the school of the future. Brilliant fun. I could have sat there fore ages, but I had to go and listen to some talks and visit some other stands, so I just made a little open-air classroom. Interestingly, there was no pink or purple or Lego Friends bits in among the bricks and figures. There was a fair bit of Star Wars bits, though – for the future theme, I suppose. The delegates building there were male and female – I overheard one woman enthusiastically talk about spending her whole weekends building Lego with her kids and how much she enjoys it – she’s obviously very experienced, too, as she built something far more imaginative than me, and in much less time.

We’re mostly about the Duplo still in this house, though we do have a couple of Lego games (Creationary and Shave a Sheep, both brilliant games) and a small Harry Potter set. (The shop in town that sells Lego and Duplo has the Hogwarts and Hogwarts Express sets and I just stand and stare at them for ten minutes whenever I’m stocking up on Duplo – one day… one day… I will have the Harry Potter Lego!)

For ages, we just had a basic Duplo set, which was fine, though fairly limited in scope. LaLa was getting really in to building very tall towers with it, so we and others gave her Duplo sets for Christmas – the Zoo and the Alphabet sets – and suddenly, both LaLa and RoRo exploded into little Lego construction engineers.

They’ve built zoos, houses, jails, parks, castles, schools, hospitals, space rockets and trees, with the range expanding considerably once we invested some of their Christmas money in some bases. (I have to say that you cannot fully appreciate the versatility of the stuff without some bases to keep your constructions together.) LaLa especially enjoys playing with the three Lego people we have (‘man’, ‘man’ and ‘lady’ as she has imaginatively christened them), while RoRo is getting the most out of coming up with new things to build and working out how to do so. She’ll do things like build walls with striped patterns, or make sure a tree has a yellow and brown trunk and green leaves and the sea has a blue and green base. And she’ll work out how to connect walls together and build stairs and roofs and turrets for castles.

So… why in the name of all that is holy, do we need pink and purple Lego with girly girly sets and interchangeable hair and fashion accessories for the characters? Why? Some of the sets in the Lego Friends range, actually look quite good – a tree house , a vet , an invention workshop , for example – but why do they have to be steeped in this whole Moxie-girlesque 21st century post-feminist girly backlash? Why not just have these sets as generic sets and throw some different coloured blocks into all sets? Differentiating between Lego sets for boys and Lego sets for girls is sad. It is taking away from a toy that has always been reassuring gender-neutral and bowing to the purveyors of pink peer pressure.

Girls have been playing with Lego for many years and have happily been able to build whatever they wanted – be it shops and castles and ironing boards, or rockets and dinosaurs and cannons. Are there really girls out there who refuse to build with Lego because it’s ‘for boys’ or ‘not pink enough’? If so, that’s surely a very worrying thing? A worrying attitude to be bringing up our girls (and our boys) with?

By all means, Lego, throw in some pink and purple blocks to the sets and introduce some new sets that are more wide-ranging in appeal, but please, please, please, leave the sexualisation and gender stereotyping to Barbie.

Other people have already written about this – Sally Whittle wrote about Why she used to love Lego, there’s a Huffington Post piece about the uproar this new range has been creating worldwide and Mum’s the Boss wrote about her anger at the new range as well – and there are plenty more out there (yes, I’m a bit late to the row, sorry).

If you need to move furniture around, then you should wait until all possible children are home and in the room. In fact, it would probably be advisable to arrange a couple of playdates, so that you really have maximum numbers of helpers. This works particularly well when moving the furniture will expose toys, mementos and dead spiders who have not been seen since, well, probably last Christmas. That way, when you’re cleaning out the space for the tree, you can have small children running between your legs and tripping over bits of Lego. It’s also particularly helpful if you try to move as much furniture as you can all by yourself. You never know, this might help you find a way to A&E in the run-up to Christmas.

If the children somehow manage to escape the lure of sparkly tinsel and baubles for the lure of the television, giving you far too much time to actualy clear the space and put the tree up, do make certain that you call them back before you put the lights up. Especially if you are likely to have any dead bulbs that need replacing. Because impatient children are really essential to the whole process.

If you’ve bought new decorations, do make sure they’re all still in their box, preferably secured to each other or the box by means of impenetrable wires. It’s a strong bonus if you have bought decorations that include some shaped like teeny tiny presents, because then you can have the fun of watching one child open one out of curiosity, while the rest copy the leader. You can then be sure to throw in that most Christmassy of Christmas traditions, threatening to send a small child to bed for opening a present too early – and you don’t even have to damage a real present in the process. Perfect.

Any old decorations should, of course, be as tangled up as possible, requiring hedge trimmers and Vaseline to extricate them and work out which two can actually be reused this year. By this point, you will probably have lost your child helpers and may well be left to finish clearing up the various messes all by yourself. If so, large doses of alcohol should be administered in order to mimic the effects of small children.

I come from a family who pretty much always makes their Christmas cards. Now and then we’d have to cheat (yes, that’s what it feels like) and buy some, because we were too late or someone was in hospital or something like that, but generally we would make them. When I was little, I would usually make them and my sister would make them when she was little. Once we had desktop computers and printers, there was a tendency to make one design and print it out. Some years have been more intricate and adventurous than others. One year I made triple-layered cards with cut-out windows in them and then individually coloured in pictures at the centre. That was, needless to say, before I had children.

Once you have children, though, making home-made cards takes on a whole new dimension. I had intended to get Rosemary to do a drawing of a Christmas tree or similar, scan it in, funk it up a bit in Photoshop and/or Illustrator and then print multiple copies. However, time was running out, toner was running out and I also thought it would be nice to do something that could involve Eleanor as well as Rosemary. My first idea was potato stamps. I cut out some Christmas tree and star shapes from some potatoes and Rosemary tried to print them onto cards. All we got was big blobs of paint. Not a success at all.

But the next idea worked out really well.

Cut and stick Christmas cards

You will need

• Different coloured (preferably bright) A4 card
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• Glitter shakers (optional)

I prepared the cards and shapes the night before, but if you have older children, you can get them to do that too. I made four cards out of each piece of A4 card – cut into four then folded in half. (I made a total of 28 – but obviously you can make however many you need.) And then I used a couple of pieces of each colour (with extra green) and cut out squares and triangles of different shapes. I made extra green triangles because they’re very useful for Christmas trees. (I did this while catching up on TV shows on Sky Go and drinking a glass of beer. Of course, you could watch or drink different things.)

I then presented the girls with blank cards, glue, shapes and glitter shakers and they made a bunch of cards, and had lots of fun doing it (which is important when you’re using your children to do your work, really). We made Christmas trees, stars and also some random patterns. And then sprinkled some of them with glitter. Eleanor did a few just with glitter, too.

Here are Rosemary’s cards (she got a little distracted and ended up creating pictures instead of cards in the end):

Here are Eleanor’s (she had a real production line going):

And these are mine (I had a great time, too):

You probably haven’t left it this late, but just in case, I believe it’s the last posting date for second class tomorrow, so you could prepare the materials tonight and get the kids on the job in the morning, if necessary!

We have quite a lot of left-over shapes, so maybe we’ll use them for Thank You cards, too. If we actually manage to be organised enough to write any, which is certainly not guaranteed!

Chris pointed out to me recently that I was sometimes having unrealistic expectations of Eleanor. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how I’ve forgotten a lot of what it was like to have a two-year-old and, even when I remember how Rosemary used to behave, that doesn’t really guarantee that Eleanor will react the same, or develop at the exact same rate. Then, too, there are the raised expectations because Eleanor picks up a lot of things (as, I believe, do many younger siblings) from her sister earlier than she probably would otherwise have done.

So I’ve been working on adjusting my expectations of Eleanor a little recently. This includes expecting her to have a meltdown a few times a day and, for the most part, ignoring them all. It includes, not getting uptight or telling her off about fairly minor things – if she tips all the Duplo out on the floor, leave it there; if she pours her drink on the table or the floor, take her cup away and give her a cloth to wipe it up; if she runs off when out, pick her up and carry her for a bit, or stop and kneel/sit on the floor and have a chat about the stones or the ants or something. Distraction, ignoring unwanted behaviour (unless it’s dangerous), using a simple ‘no’, rather than making a big fuss. These are all things I should know, but somehow I think I was expecting her to behave just like Rosemary (perhaps because she does copy her so much).

I’ve found it’s working pretty well. Today, she played with the Duplo by getting pieces out and putting them together, rather than just tipping them over the floor, and put them back when she’d finished with them. She didn’t pour any drinks anywhere. She walked slowly and calmly to nursery school, running in the places she’s allowed to run. OK, so she did then take an age to get to sleep and got up two or three times, but I didn’t have to deal with that, because I was walking Wesley.

Being reminded of the need to adjust our expectations of Eleanor has made me think about our expectations of Rosemary. As with Eleanor, I think I (we) tend to expect Rosemary to be a lot more mature than she is. Of course, as children get older, it is important to increase our expectations, but it’s also necessary to balance them and ensure they’re not too high. Too high expectations and the child will always fail to meet them; too low and they won’t push themselves at all. Trying to pick up when Rosemary is ready to move forward in some area, and help her to do so, while at the same time not pushing her to move too far is very tricky.

Take reading, for example. Rosemary tends to come to a point with reading where she doesn’t want to do it much – where she’ll have been reading whole books in a night, she’ll suddenly refuse to read more than a page, or she’ll read half a book, wriggle and moan and act silly and make it take a huge amount of time. This usually comes at a point when she’s getting ready to move on a stage, but sometimes I jump in too soon and it will have the opposite effect and mean she refuses to read entirely for a while. The teachers are usually pretty on the ball about when to move her forward, at least they have been so far, and I’ve stepped back in pushing for her to move up a stage without at least checking with them first.

But there are other things that can be done. This week, Rosemary’s been reading her school books in her head and I’ve been asking her questions about them – she reads a page and I ask her about that page. She asks for help with any words that she’s not sure about. We’ve also done some reading in her head and then reading aloud with expression – she did a brilliant rendition of ‘Dad looks so silly.’ said Wilma last night. I suggested these because it seems like she’s really wanting to start reading to herself and I thought this would be a step in the right direction. But then I jumped too far ahead this evening, when I suggested that she might have a go at reading the first Jack and Annie book to herself. She threw herself on the floor and acted like – well, like her little sister.

So I’m now determined to work on reassessing my expectations of both children on a more regular basis. We don’t need to do this as much with the adults in our lives, as we’ve worked out what our expectations should be of them and and know they’re not going to change much (for example, Chris is rarely going to put the tea towels back on the oven door and I’m rarely going to put my shoes in the shoe box; these are things that we each have to live with). But children – especially young ones, I think – are changing and growing and developing at such a rate that we really do need to adjust our expectations of them regularly.

One of the most commonest phrases you’ll hear me and Chris uttering to Rosemary (not quite as common as ‘Just sit still for a few minutes!’) is ‘Remember you’re a role model to Eleanor.’

Eleanor copies pretty much everything Rosemary does, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s funny or dangerous, whether it’s thoughtful or careless. Eleanor loves her big sister and idolises her.

We are frequently telling Rosemary off for Eleanor’s actions:

• Rosemary gets down from the table after one forkful of dinner; Eleanor follows, despite having been shovelling her dinner in; ‘Rosemary! That was your fault!’
• Rosemary runs out of the bathroom with her toothbrush in her mouth; Eleanor follows; ‘Rosemary! Don’t teach your sister to run with things in her mouth!’
• Rosemary asks for a treat; Eleanor asks for a treat; Rosemary accepts the ‘No, not today’; Eleanor lies down on the floor, kicking and screaming ‘I want a treat! I need a treat! I need a treat now!’; ‘Rosemary! That was your fault!’

The other day, it suddenly struck me how often we do this. Not that it’s not true that Eleanor copies Rosemary’s unwanted behaviour, because she really does. But is it fair to put all this responsibility on Rosemary? In fact, she did complain about it recently, bemoaning the fact that she has to try to behave so well and think about how her actions affect Eleanor before she does them. Surely other children of her age, without younger siblings have a bit more freedom to muck about.

When it struck me how much we do this, I sat down and apologised to her. I told her all the fantastic things she does for Eleanor and teaches Eleanor. I told her how well Eleanor is brushing her own teeth, after having spent a week with just Rosemary taking her in for bedtime tooth-brushing. I told her how good Eleanor is at role-playing because she has a big sister who will play with her and be patient with her for hours at a time. I told her Eleanor is getting better at drawing and holding her pen the right way, because she watches Rosemary do it. I told her how lucky Eleanor is to have a big sister to sit with her and help her play her new Wonderpets DS game, explaining what to do and helping with the bits she can’t manage. I told her how lucky Eleanor is to have a big sister who will help her get dressed and even wipe her bum for her.

I told her that she is a brilliant role model for her little sister and that we forget that fact far too much.

And, then, this evening, I went and told her off for running around too fast with Eleanor and causing Eleanor to hurt herself. I really do forget how good a role model Rosemary is far, far too often. We are the adults, and we need to take some of that responsibility back off our five-year-old daughter! Not that we are wrong to remind her to set a good example, of course, but we could do it in a less critical manner, I think.

We had been considering going away for half-term. Actually, we went through a number of possibilities, from me and Rosemary going off to Barcelona or Valencia for a few days, to us all going to Menorca. In the end, though, we decided that a holiday at home, but a proper one, would be best. It seemed quite possible that we could end up stuck in some hotel room or holiday apartment, watching endless DVDs while we waited for the rain to stop long enough to go and play on the swings.

Usually, in the school holidays, my mum looks after both the girls while we work, and we’ll try to fit in one or two family day trips (depending on the length of the holiday). And during term-time there are lots of activities and play dates all week long and at the weekend. The only day we don’t have to be out of the house by 8.30 is Sunday, but we usually still go the leisure centre for a family swim – in the afternoon, which means fitting in doing things with the girls can be a bit difficult. Sometimes, we do revert to calling up iPlayer on the netbook and letting them watch an hour or so of CBeebies programmes. So, a whole week and a bit (there are two inset days at the start of next week, as well) to relax and do things together at leisure seemed like a good idea. Of course, it was Chris’s idea – I wanted to do the planes and hotels thing and was a little dubious at first.

But he was right. It has been a wonderful week. We’ve done lots of things that the girls love doing but don’t get to do enough (and things they’ve wanted to do, but have yet to try), like swimming and going to Go Bananas (soft play centre). We’ve been to the park, for a walking adventure, for a meal out and for hot chocolate in Costa. We’ve watched films, played with play dough, and built dens. We’ve had lots and lots of lazy mornings, even managing to spend one whole day in our pyjamas (except for Chris, who drew the short straw and had to go to the shop).

Rosemary has done loads of writing and drawing. Eleanor and Rosemary have played together a lot – playing doctors, schools, hide and seek, and sleeping (beds appear all over the ground floor, in front of the front door, behind the fridge, under the table). They’ve made play dough cakes and ‘cupcakes’ out of banana, melted chocolate and squirty cream. And, yes, there’s also been a fair bit of CBeebies watched – Justin’s House and Octonauts have been the most popular.

We had been planning to take the week off work completely, too, and to have relaxing evenings together, like we might do on ‘proper’ holiday – maybe answer a few emails and send some things out to freelancers. However, there was some unexpected work that came through and had to be done for Friday. So, we lost most of our evenings, but we did manage to get the work done without impacting on the girls’ half-term – though it did involve two past-midnight nights for me and a couple of 5am nights for Chris. The bonus is that next week should be quite quiet workwise, and we should get to have some evenings to relax and not be completely wiped out from running around with children all day!

It has definitely been a great success, and I would recommend it, especially if you normally struggle to find enough quality time with your children. And it’s not over yet. Tomorrow we’re off to Cheltenham to do a bit of shopping, have ice-cream sundaes and go visit my oldest friend and her husband and daughter for lunch. Sunday’s my birthday and there will be tea and cake, a trip to the cinema (for me and my sister) and dinner out with Chris (while my sister babysits) (OK, yes, Sunday’s going to mostly be about me). Monday we don’t have big plans, but I think it might well be another quiet day. And Tuesday, Eleanor starts nursery school and Rosemary is very excited that she’ll get to walk her there and pick her up (it’s the nursery school Rosemary used to go to), because she has an inset day.

I’m sure Chris and I will be ready to sit back down at our desks on Wednesday, but we’ll also miss the fun we’ve had with the girls. We might not be able to manage to take every school holiday off work, but I think we’ll aim to take a few more days off to just be together at home and in Stroud, rather than only for the big trips to zoos and aquariums and science centres.

What did you do at half-term? Have you enjoyed the extra time with the children or have they been driving you nuts? Are you looking forward to the return to school, or investigating the possibilities of home-education?

I’ve always been quite proud and not a little shocked that we’ve never had to rush Rosemary to the hospital for broken limbs, dangerous fevers or anything else worrying.

It’s not like she sits quietly at the table with her head in a book all the time. It’s not as though she assesses risks in the play park of the play ground and keeps to particularly sensible games and activities. No, she climbs everything she can, runs about, jumps all over the place and is constantly covered in bruises, scrapes and grazes. She might cry for a bit after a fall, but she’ll be more excited about the prospect of a plaster and will be up and about running again within a few moments. How we’ve avoided broken bones for five whole years, I really don’t know.

Today, Rosemary had her first gymnastics lesson. So she could go, her activity schedule has had to be turned upside down, with classes switching days and having to miss a couple of weeks of swimming while waiting for a new allocation on a different day. It’s a bit of a rush to get there, as it’s at 4pm and school finishes at 3.20pm. We made it fine, as she ran most of the way there. She went in and I went and sat outside (in the ridiculously hot sun) and had a nice little chat with a couple of mums from school (both there for different reasons).

She came out very happy, showed me some of the things she’d done and told me about some others and then went and got an ice cream. She skipped down the hill, put her ice cream stick in the bin and then promptly collapsed to the ground moaning and crying that her tummy hurt and she couldn’t walk. I’m afraid my immediate reaction was to think she was trying it on and just seeing if I’d give in and carry her home. So I insisted that she walk on. She begged to go and sit down, but I wouldn’t let her because there was a big swan looking angry. We crossed the road and then she collapsed to the ground again. This time, she lay on the floor, curled in a foetal position and I began to wonder if perhaps she wasn’t putting it on. I carried her up the hill a bit until we got to a wall, where I put her down and sat next to her.

I asked her a bunch of questions and what I got was that her tummy and chest hurt her and that it hurt her to breathe. It hurt all the time, but was a lot worse when she tried to walk. She then told me that she’d done a jump at gymnastics and landed where there wasn’t a mat, on her stomach and on a very hard ‘stone’ floor. At this point, after asking her to try walking again, unsuccessfully, I called Chris to see what he thought. He talked to me and to Rosemary and said that, yes, we should go to the hospital. So I called my aunt, who came along in the car with Rosemary’s cousin, in the car shortly after and drove us to the hospital. They stayed with us. At first Rosemary wasn’t very communicative, but in the end she enjoyed having her cousin with her and he cheered her up a fair bit.

We had a bit of a wait and then were seen by the triage nurse. By this point I thought Rosemary seemed a fair bit better, but she still seemed very pale. The triage nurse asked a lot of questions and it then came out that Rosemary’s tummy had been hurting since last night, on and off and that it just got worse when she did the jump in gymnastics. The nurse asked if Rosemary would be able to give her a urine sample, so I carried her to the loo and she managed fine. She then, after washing her hands, opened the door and ran out over to her cousin to tell him that she had to wee in a pot; then she ran off to tell the triage nurse. And then ran off to play in the playroom (excellent play room in Stroud A&E, by the way) with her cousin.

Her sudden change in temperament and pain level (though she still said it hurt when asked) worried me that she had, in fact, been putting it on. But then the triage nurse came back and said the urine had indicated an infection and that she was going to transfer us to the out of hours doctor for a check.By the time we got to see the doctor, Rosemary was totally full of beans. At first she was shy of the doctor, but after her tummy was prodded (eliciting a couple of very clear yelps of pain) she was running and jumping and climbing round the doctor’s office, with me telling her every thirty seconds or so to be quiet and sit still and not touch this and that, while at the same time listening to what the doctor was saying.

The symptoms were all fairly clearly resulting from the infection, apparently, with the bad pains being normal if it had been a while since she’d gone to the loo, while the sudden change coming from her going to the loo was also quite normal. It would probably clear up on its own in time, but it would be a good idea to have some antibiotics to help it along. And keep hydrated and go to the loo lots. When I asked if she would be OK to go to school, the doctor glanced at Rosemary trying to climb from a chair onto a shelf and said ‘If she’s in this state in the morning, then I think you can safely say she will be absolutely fine to send to school!’

We had to go to Tesco to get the prescription filled, so I got Rosemary a Krispy Kreme doughnut to have after dinner as a treat. We didn’t get home until almost 8pm and Rosemary and her cousin both have school tomorrow. I’m very glad my aunt was able to help us out by driving us to the hospital and chemist and waiting with us.

I’m very glad she’s OK and doesn’t have any broken bones and should be completely fine within a few days. And a teeny bit glad there was actually something wrong and that she wasn’t trying it on after all. And I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t make it another year or two before our first trip to A&E.