Puff The Magic Dragon II

My kids have been reading and singing Puff the Magic Dragon more enthusiastically than expected, even Umayr. Yesterday, while the children played at the playground, I copied the illustrations of the dragon and made dragon cutouts. At home, the children wrote their favourite part of the song on one part and why they love Puff on the other. I put them up on a piece of vanguard sheet and bluetacked it onto a wall. The kids would pass it by from their room and read their work. After that, we watched Bill Nye's "Forests" and Ihsan did his work on the Yanomamis, with a lot of whining as he did not want to do the KWL work before reading the book. Umayr practiced his clockwork, skip counting and animals and their young while Sofiyya did her penmanship. In the evening, Ihsan asked for test papers, so I printed one from a local website and gave Umayr a paper that a friend passed to me. Umayr grumbled ( and grunted) at parts he didn't understand but persevered but Ihsan got overwhelmed and had to be persuaded from giving up. I tried to show him that the questions aren't impossible if he'd only calm down and think them through. He's an anxious boy who only wants to do something he can excel in. They of course kept asking me questions and talked despite being told not to. From this experience, I think it's good that the kids get regular exposure. I benefit too from being aware of the vast difference in test and exam papers compared to what they practice in workbooks especially for Math. We started before six for the papers and finished at eight. I was actually excited at being able to solve a P5 ratio problem, some of these questions can baffle me most of the time.