Monday began with a global breakfast - this week we tried Japanese cuisine. This led to a couple of hours looking at how miso is produced on youtube and exploring all the different processing methods for the humble soya bean. It was especially interesting for M as his dairy free diet means that Soya is often offered as the alternative.
We also began this MOOC https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/science-experiments and thoroughly enjoyed the first experiment. Marking his points on a graph for his experiment has sparked Marc's interest in a maths topic he found rather tricky last year with Briteschool. We'll use some of our non-time tabled hours over the coming weeks to continue this line of study I think. Strike while the iron is hot!
On Monday evening M took his new puppy to his first training class. M is acting as the puppy's handler. Valuable social interaction is a key reason for attending these classes. M can work on improving his ability to follow complex instructions, and the very unpredictability of puppies means that the class is a way of helping him to extend his flexibility of thinking in a fun, yet challenging way. It's also far easier for M to make friends at groups based on common shared interests.
I have to praise the staff at Swansea Dog Training Club. They were so patient with Marc as he struggled with his left and right, & a pup that had been very travel sick in the taxi enroute to the venue. The class is very, very busy - I counted about 35 dogs. As these are all pups and most handlers have either kids or partners with them, this can be considered the most challenging environment Marc has coped with for a long time. It was great to see M coming out of his shell and chatting to other children while awaiting his own turn. It was also fantastic to see him applying all the active listening skills he's learnt over the last year with the help of Briteschool to a busy, unpredictable, real world situation. We caught the bus home, and M stayed far calmer than usual.
Briteschool geography homework involved taking photographs of the clouds at dawn, so on Tuesday M was up and dressed by 5 am, ready to go out into the field behind our house to take his photographs. Sadly, it was a misty morning so we didn't see interesting cloud formations. However we did get to appreciate living in such a beautiful location before the usual morning routine of walking the whippet, and seeing to the cat and chickens.
On Saturday we got our first ever egg laid by one of the bantam cuckoo marans we hatched from an incubator at Easter. M ran around the garden squealing in excitement and it was truly one of those parenting moments that I'll remember into my dotage. He was over the moon, and considered his first egg to be a just reward for the months of care he has put into looking after his 3 little bantams. The first egg laid was tiny, so for fun M is going to plot the weight of his eggs on a graph against time. This will allow him to reuse the scientific method he learnt this week on his future learn science course, and embed the knowledge. He considers it maths revision, and fun combined.
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| The bantam egg is held next to a supermarket egg so you can see just how tiny it is. |
The first vegetable patch was created in the garden, ready for enrichment with the compost Marc has been creating all summer with the aid of his chickens. Creating a reasonably sized growing area is going be a major task, as the garden hasn't been cultivated in anyway for at least 16 years prior to our arrival. However the heavy work involved is excellent OT style therapy for M, as it helps him to regulate his sensory responses a little better.
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