Rachel, Owen and Kathryn

Please let it be the end of term soon - we are all exhausted. Last week saw a joint end-of-term concert by Katy's pre-instrumental 'lilac' group at RNCM and the 'yellow' group above her. We know she's been doing really well, but on the night she was literally all over the place, couldn't keep still and too tired to concentrate on anything. We were really impressed with the young string players, however, and we're excited to think that next year Katy will be learning instrumental skills and ensemble playing from some really excellent teachers at the College. It was a very different story on Sunday morning, when the whole family was involved in all-age worship at Quakers. The children read a semi-dramatised narrative I had concocted from various online versions of the Babushka / Bafana story, and although she was the youngest participant, Katy had quite a lot of lines to read, and she delivered them with such expression in her voice that she got lots of la

Random seems to be a very popular and overused word at the moment. All the more gratifying to discover our 5-year-old daughter can use it properly. She was trying to explain her phonics 'sound train' poster that they use to learn the sounds of English phonemes one by one each day, starting with the most frequently used sounds and progressing to less common ones, each phoneme being shown in a box and linked like the carriages of a long train. Not surprisingly she couldn't quite remember the correct order, "so I'll just do it randomly".