It's All Snow, Snow, Snow!

What have we done in the past week?.......

Well, it's mostly been snowy so theres been LOTS of messing around in it - sleding, skidding, throwing, building. We all got completely exhausted today having spent 6 HOURS out in the snow!
Alex and I have been sorting out his bedroom, he gets his room into a HUGE mess and then can't cope with it, so I got some more tubs and drawers and we went through all of his things and put them in order. He helped  decide what was going  in the tubs and drawers, and this evening I helped him tidy all of things things away again. He really wants order in his room at the moment but doesn't know how to do it, so hopefully, after he's seen what to do a few times, he'll be able to do it himself. I was having a bit of a wobble (another one...) the other day, thinking that he wasn't learning anything - probably due to the fact we were supposed to have our local Elective Home Education officer coming round (I don't have to have her round, but she's a really lovely lady and it was either have a chat for half hour or spend days trying to write my own report..) But I have realised that with Alex it's not going to be about how good he is at reading (he's getting much better by the way but still has no interest in it) or writing, or how well he's doing at maths etc - not yet - for him it's all about being able to look after himself, being able to deal with his emotions and the everyday things that he finds difficult, and it's also about him finding out about himself, building his self-confidence. I'm so glad I'm not pushing him to read or write because that would be a sure fire way to put him off completey. As it is, Alex can write when he wants to, read when he wants to, on his terms, he doesn't feel like its something that he's constantly failing at, theres no emphasis on it.
We also played 'shop' to get his pocket money. I made some price tags which when all added up came to a bit more than his pocket money, he went and found some things to 'sell' and put the price tags on them, and me, my partner and Jamie all took it in turns to buy things, at least 2 items at a time, with a load of change. I also gave Alex some coins so he had some change t give us back. It did take quite a bit of explaining that we weren't REALLY going to be taking his things away, and that it was just pretend, but the money he COULD keep - Alex doesn't really get 'pretend', but he soon understood, and I reminded him about doing long addition, and he added the items up on paper, and worked out the correct change. It all worked really well, I wish I could give him pocket money everyday! I bet Alex wished that too!!
Jamie has been learning to read music! she found the recorder that I bought from a charity shop a while ago, and started trying to play it, so I dug out the 'easy recorder songs' book - that I also got at a charity shop :) - and she took them into her room, and within half an hour, she called me up and had learnt the first song reading the sheet music! I was really impressed, but not as impressed as she was at herself! Jamie has been making videos of her 'littlest Petshop' toys, she made a news programme, its actually really funny, I'll have to see if I can stick it on here!
So thats some of what we fitted in, in between lots of snow play, most of which I didn't take photos of, partly because we were having too much fun, and partly because i keep forgetting to charge my phone up!!

Here's some pics I did manage to take :)

Jamie said I could show this too! :)

'Littlest PetShop News!'