Getting ready for Back to School

It’s the end of half term so I’m busy getting ready for the boys going back to school tomorrow.  Son1 was supposed to be going to the hospital tomorrow to start the maintenance phase of his chemotherapy, but he had his blood counts checked at Brighton hospital on Friday whilst we were on holiday there and his counts were too low.  So maintenance has been postponed for a week.

Not too much to get ready for son2.  I had to take his blazer to the dry cleaner at the start of half term as it was dreadfully dirty, so that had been collected.  Luckily son1’s blazer is washable.  Son2 is really keen on reading, so he had already read his 5 books that school sent home.  The only extra thing we had to do today besides the usual spelling and recorder practice was to prepare a feely shoebox to send in tomorrow.

However son1 was another story.  He came home with lots of half-term homework, so we took some of it to do whilst we were on holiday.  And I think we are mostly there, except he still needs to learn some verses for a couple of the songs for the Autumn Concert, but not too bad, as that isn’t until Nov 22nd.

So he’s done the following…
Read for about 15 mins most days.
Learnt a poem, including expression and actions.
Almost finished learning 5 songs. He knows 3 of them fully and parts of the other 2.
Prepared a computer graphics / photography entry for Nursery Rhyme competition. He chose This Little Piggy.
Chose and printed several photos to decorate his creative writing book. Choosing them took him ages.
Covered and filled a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child with help from me.

Does anyone agree this is a lot of homework?

And now I’m doing the usual Sunday evening tasks. Checking all uniform is ready and sports kits and school bags are packed. Only one item I can’t find – son1’s library book, so pretty good going. I’ve labelled son2’s new shoes and trainers, as he had gone up a size, when we went for shoe measurement yesterday.

I do love being involved with Operation Christmas Child.  It gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling knowing that we are preparing a gift for a child who otherwise wouldn’t get a Christmas present. I try to squeeze as much as possible into the box.  Before we did them via school, I used to do one on my own for several years taking it to a local collection point.

Son1 with his Operation Christmas Child shoebox