The curriculum has arrived! (Yay!) Cass promptly retired into a cornor with the origami paper & instructions; her mother started reading the books! There is something wrong with this picture. Hm. Eventually I surfaced long enough to investigate the instruction manual. (As my mother would always say while rolling her eyes at those of us for whom the instructions were a last resort; when all else fails, read the instructions!) Manual MUCH easier than I had been lead to believe. Cass will struggle with the grammar but its about time she got a handle on this so mother is smirking & the books are lovely. I am sooo happy & pleased I made the change. I am going to go ahead & order our history this way too. It will work much, much better for us. Unfortunately that will have to wait until I have sorted out science & math. I can't believe Cass cleaned up the math in just 3 weeks but I guess it means we can afford to concentrate on something else for a while. This is being a really scrappy term for everthing except music. I do so wish people would recognise music is an intelligence too & it requires even more discipline & perseverance than straightforward academics does. We are upping practise times ready for next year & I am doing the pre~preparation for music exams. I know nothing about any of this & am shaking in my boots but Cass isn't batting an eyelash. Why would she? She has unbounded confidence in herself.

Meanwhile we have the state testing to deal with. This means two wasted days up at the primary school & I have no idea how much of the state curriculum we have actually covered ~ & care less. I just hope Cass isn't having one of her 'off with the fairies' days on test days. Can't think where she gets that from.

And I have been preparing Daniel in the Lion's Den for adults. How this ever got to be a children's story I do not know. Well, I do, but you have to dilute it so much it's a tad scarey. I am feeling a tad fraught. Can you tell? I work hard on my preparation if I am preaching but I am not a retired pensioner with oodles of time at my disposal There I was trying to explain Israleli history at the time of the Babylonian exile with a child alternately bleating on about plankton, nekton & blenthos or singing the nonsence words from Sarah Hopkins' music. I wrote some interesting sentences & a heavy edit was required.