School's out for Summer!

The girls have now been on school holidays for a week and we've got used to our new routine. They celebrated their last day at school last Tuesday by having a water party - went to school dressed in their swimming costumes and had what sounds like a two-hour water fight! After school we sang the Alice Cooper classic "School's out for Summer" as I always used to sing that song when I had school holidays. Later on that evening the equivalent of the PTA put on a bit of a party with bouncy castles, soft drinks, crisps and music which was a bit of fun for them and a way of saying goodbye to friends they won't see much over the summer.

Now I'm with the girls all morning until 3-4pm when Mónica madre comes back from work. Mónica and Jose have composed, typed a printed a set of instructions for me to follow to make sure I do everything exactly how they want. I now have to wake the girls up at 10am and do the usual morning routine - breakfast, make sure they get dressed, brush teeth, brush hair, make beds etc. After this I then do a couple of pages from Mónica's Trinity English book with her, spend half an hour on her school's blog which has loads of games, videos etc. for learning English or go on starfall.com - a website with games for children to help them learn to read English. With Carlota we translate a story a day from English to Spanish, made easier by the fact that they've got a couple of bilingual story books with exercises at the back to check the comprehension of new words and expressions in the story. At about 12 we go down to the pool where I sometimes give them swimming lessons (in Spanish as it's a more dangerous environment with the chance of drowning) before drying off in the sunshine playing various games in English. We go back upstairs at 2:15pm for lunch and watch TV at 3pm, it's banned any time before that. I think the girls have enjoyed it so far and I have too, I only wish I'd made more use of my free mornings whilst they were at school! 

Tomorrow we're off to Santander for a long weekend by the beach which everyone's quite excited about. Mónica and Jose have booked Thursday and Friday off work so that we can go and stay in Mónica's brother's house up there for a few days. The plan is to leave at about 4pm tomorrow when the parents are back from work as it's a 4-hour drive up to the north coast from here. Yesterday I was chatting to Mónica madre who asked me if I actually wanted to go with them as before they'd just assumed I did. Apparently they'd thought that I might fancy staying in Madrid to go to intercambios, go out at night, be fully independent and use the WiFi (there isn't any internet at the house in Santander), but of course I said that I wanted to go with them having never been to that part of Spain before. This may mean that there won't be another blog post for a while unless I go to an internet cafe or something! I'll probably post about my time in Santander when we get back though.

Hasta luego!