Big kids watched several episodes of Backyard Science and consolidated some stuff from previous Scitech lessons and conversational learning. Ru has started adding bicarb to her cordial to make it fizzy.
Maths bookwork was a complete write-off partly due to Cub being rather whiney-clingy all week and partly due to the big kids' quiet refusal (mostly by way of procrastination, Tao pointedly ignored me and remained glued to Minecraft videos while I was calling him, Ru eventually came but every time she encountered something she couldn't do, her attention would wander quite obviously whenever I was trying to explain it to her, and nothing was going in). Tried tackling it the following morning and failed miserably. I told them they weren't getting paid for it and told them to go sort out their money into what was staying in their wallets for casual spending, what was being saved up in money boxes for slightly bigger purchases and what was going into the bank for saving, and to find out how much they had while they were about it.
Reading Eggs went a hell of a lot better with Ru completing two exercises and gaining two new critters, passing the quiz and moving onto Map 9. Reading Eggs is apparently too boring for Tao so he did Reading Eggspress and read his first chapter book independently (aside from where I helped him with hard words, it was 5 chapters and I believe it was called "The World's Longest Toenail" or something to that effect, didn't catch the author) and then answered 10 comprehension questions at the end.
They got a couple of days off while I got their Minecraft map playable and then we had a marathon first session partially because I always seem to run marathon first sessions and partially because I was debugging. They were quite amped to play and after I'd set the village up I told them that they could go in and hang out in the village and familiarise with it and explore the surrounds while I put the finishing touches on the home keep. When I finally let them join me the first thing they had to do was read the two books I'd (very hastily) written. We were supposed to communicate in text, though I'd fallen into game mode and was automatically typing in character. We cheated a bit and talked, and I made a mental note to remember to use much shorter sentences in text. The first problem they had to solve was one of housing. I gave each of the kids 46 blocks which was enough for them to make shelters big enough for a bed and a chest. They decided they wanted bigger rooms so of course the first problem was they didn't have enough blocks. There was a period where they were nagging for me to just give them more resources as I was dipping in and out of creative mode (depending on what needed doing), we eventually sorted things out and they went looking for more trees to make more wood so they were able to make rooms of the size they wanted, and then Tao went down to the beach to collect sand and made some glass for windows. I'm not sure what he was after specifically when he decided to try out one of the ideas he'd seen on a Youtube video, but he took one of the buckets to a nearby lava pool, collected some lava (don't ask, it's Minecraft) and poured it onto one of the sand tiles near the water. This resulted in a lavafall (the lava and water tiles last forever), lava colliding with water makes stone apparently, so he'd ensured us a neverending supply of cobblestone without having to dig out the entire mountain.
They also did a bunch of "keep chores" to earn 1 bronze coin per day (which I keep calling "copper" even though it says bronze) each day. Ru complained the chores were boring as it was the same thing over and over, I pointed out this is what chores were, things that might not be terribly exciting or particularly desirable to do but that needed to be done to keep things running smoothly (kind of like in real life...). It was originally three jobs for a coin but I cut it down to one after being reminded a Minecraft day is 20mins long.
We'd settled into xp grinding and resource gathering and searching for mage towers for spell scrolls (found a critical problem with the Ars Magica mod, can't left shift + right click on the spell book to open it with a trackpad, it just bounces the thing between the quick pick and the rest of the inventory) when we broke for dinner. After dinner I got the kids to write up the session. Ruan wrote and wrote and wrote and Tao was fine once he got going, though not without the usual whinging and me repeating ad nauseum that the only way he's actually going to get any better is to keep practising. Got some acceptable narrative recounting out of them and I'm sure we might cover a few styles on the way through as they've been told they have to have the writeup from the last session done before we'll play another one. It looks like it's going to be an almost daily thing (and I need to think up quests aaargh) so hopefully we'll see some rapid improvement with not as many epic meltdowns over it.
After the writeup, he decided to research the Ars Magica mod and started hunting Youtube videos about it. He came in not long afterwards banging on about levers and needing a dedicated magic workshop. It's going to be a long game.