We have been easing back into a routine this week, somewhat hampered by various appointments. However, yesterday there was nothing to trip us up and we went for it 
Having the visual timetable saved me from having to dog her every step to be sure she was doing everything she needs to (the periodic sound of ripping velcro as she moved stuff from the to be done to the completed side was very reassuring!) Part of her new daily routine is to tend to the bunnies. So here, especially for Helen, are a couple of bunny shots!
Fudge really hasn’t properly shed his winter coat all year, if I give him a good brushing you can see more of his fudgy brown summer colour but then it gets a bit chilly again and back comes the lovely snuggly Arctic Bunny style really long white fluff. He’s quite difficult to photograph with my little camera as all that drifting fluff doesn’t give it anything definite to focus on!
Flopsy seems to have been a bit braver about shedding her winter coat and is sporting a rather rich brown summer number. This is easier for my little camera – it really never did manage to focus on her when she was all black! This probably says more about cheap cameras than about the photogenicity of bunnies
We did some music theory, with many thanks to Helen Harricot for recomending a workbook that has really hit the spot! I can see us working through this one and the other two in the series pretty quickly but Aprilia likes to take new information in at a simple level to start with and I’d rather her rattle through these than get stressed over something that is aimed more at her age group! Also they are cheap so she’s not stressed about “ruining” an expensive workbook….. no idea where she’s got that one from, I write all over my OU text books and they would cost a fortune if I had to buy them!
We also did some maths for which, this year, we are using Math Mammoth. This is not phenominally cheap, I’m sure that things like Singapore and Galore Park are cheaper but what with thisl thing she has about not writing in expensive-looking books in case it’s wrong, MM being a download means I can re-print any pages she’s got all dumbfounded over so she’s much happier (and there’s no price tag printed on the back page so she has no idea how much it cost anyway.) We managed quite a bit of the first chapter which was all addition revision but with bigger numbers than she’s allowed herself to try before. There was also some mental addition which she did remarkably well at, working out her own ways of manipulating the numbers along the lines of “if I give 3 to that number that takes that up to the next 10 and then take 2 off that one to take it down to the next 10….” which I’m assuming she’s seen on some schools TV thing as it’s not something I particularly do!
She also spent quite some time playing on Bin Weevils and Moshi Monsters which I decided to count as English and General Knowlege.
Then she decided she wanted to do something out of the River Cottage Family Cookbook which she has decided is to be the text book for our cookery “lessons” for the year. We had already done bread so the next thing was pasta. I’ve only ever used the hard dry shop bought pasta before, never even tried the more expensive chill cabinet fresh egg pasta, so I had no idea how this would taste, feel or anything. This is probably a good thing as I therefore cannot say that ours was not the same as anything else I’ve tried! Making egg pasta dough is easy. Rolling it out without the aid of a pasta machine is really not easy! I suspect that using SmartPrice flour also added to the challenge as I’ve noticed in the past that it’s harder than the more expensive flours (my tortillas are always a bit crisp rather than the lovely flexible ones you buy….) but it was all we had so it had to do! Inevitably this meant that we didn’t roll it thin enough. Then Aprilia decided that she wanted to make shapes rather than ribbons so she chose a cookie cutter and went to it. Thus we had pasta teddies for tea!
They were a bit chewy but had such a good flavour. Really incomparable to the cheap dry stuff. We are putting a pasta roller onto our Christmas list!