Week 27

I forgot to mention the new regular early start.

One of J’s extra German lessons has been moved to early on Wednesday, so he now has to be in school by 07.25 one day a week.

Yuk.

Well, at least I finally managed to find him a little alarm clock that works, so he can help to take responsibility for getting himself up in time.

But leaving for school at 07.15 – that’s the middle of the night, isn’t it ? Praise be that the clocks have gone forward.

Sozialarbeit

Secondly, there have been some problems at school ever since they started this rap project – with differing groups wanting the limelight and arguing about which group of boys was going to deliver particular lines of the rap they had written together as a class. These problems were spilling over into the playground with fights breaking out at regular intervals. Thankfully J has the good sense to stay well clear of all this – as most of his classmates are about twice his size, and despite being small and feisty, I fear he would stand no chance in a punch up.

So, the Sozialarbeit people (social workers - I assume) have been into J’s class to talk about behaviour and how to get along with each other – and this appears to be working. I suspect that growing boys and testosterone has a great deal to do with it. Much as I suspect that testosterone and alpha male behaviour is the root of many of the world’s problems, but that’s a whole different blog.

We also seem to be getting about one letter a week abut this “incident” that happened recently at the secondary school, but still haven’t got the details, other than what our neighbours told us after a great deal of red wine enjoyed together in the garden on the Friday night - which was that the “auslanders” had been continuously wound up by some very provocative Swiss children, and that it was no surprise that there had been a problem. And that the neighbours’ children had always steered well clear of any of that, and hadn’t had any problems with anyone. At least, I think that’s what they said :-)

Grade 2 maths

C’s maths work (grade 2) has suddenly gone up a notch in terms of difficulty, but that’s OK, he seems to be coping with it now. It’s a very step-by-step approach, which is giving him a lot of confidence, and you can almost see him making the connections mentally now. So we are onto the 8x table, and his homework this week includes addition and subtraction before the actual multiplication and then the answer being a key to a word – and then some colouring. He works through it methodically but understands the concept. Phew. I still feel relief every time he understands something new and a little more complicated without my intervention.