Are you impressed??

With my first attempt at knitting - the fabulous dishcloth!!


Probably not!! But I am quite impressed with myself. Off to get some wool tomorrow and will attempt some stripy arm warmers next.

Bit of a stressful day today, just one of those days where I seriously doubt myself.

A wanted a music lesson, which I was quite happy to go along with, thinking it would be lovely - she is very interested in music and already seems to have a good idea of what she's doing. Well, it ended with her in tears and me walking out of the room saying 'we need to get a proper music teacher for you because I'm obviously no good'.

We did discuss things once we'd both calmed down, and continued a bit with what we'd been looking at, but I'm really at a loss as to why we cant seem to work together on this subject. Maybe its my attitude, I did study music for several years as a child/teenager, so maybe I make assumptions about how easy or difficult things are, but we don't seem to have that problem with other subjects.

Maybe its just A's resistance to learning the theoretical side of music, even though she says she wants to. She spends a lot of time on her keyboard, but is used to making up tunes herself, and playing by ear. Having to sit down and read music is not as much fun - and doesn't feel so creative I suppose. I think I'll have to have a look around for some teaching resources that are more fun and interesting to help us. I really want to encourage her in this area as I think she is naturally quite musically talented, and learning the 'mechanics' of music could be very helpful in the longrun, but today just felt like I was doing it all wrong and putting her off.

Maths and English coming along nicely though. She seems to like the Letts workbooks (we're using the age 8-9 at the moment). Maths is more of a struggle, but she gets there in the end. I'm very impressed with her English, we did a dictation test the other day - I just took a passage out of one of our books - and her spelling and handwriting were really good. Her lack of enthusiasm about reading books obviously isn't holding her back.