Ballet Girl has finished her second book! Over 70,000 words and a year of dedication. She is now editing and looking for a publisher. I am so incredibly proud.
Panda Girl scattered this beautiful idea across the rose bed in our garden.
Anatomy of a bee. Panda Girl (The Boy has been wiped out with bad chicken pox this week) looked at this cool picture and we discussed all its parts.
We dissected a dead honey bee to see if we could locate all the parts in the picture.
We found the honey sac straight away - really incredible to see something so tiny which is actually such a significant part of our lives. Honey bees can visit 10,000 flowers a day yet only make enough honey in their entire lives to fill a teaspoon!
Even my poorly Boy wanted a look.
And big sister Monkey Girl was called from her studies to inspect.
We also found the brain,
the wing,
the proboscis,
and the hair on its legs which capture pollen.
We did manage to slice open the stomach but that was a bit too gross to look at for long under the microscope apparently...
Panda Girl made a tiny display of her dissected bee.
And then, in contrast, made an enormous picture of the anatomy of a bee.
She's so great at drawing (!) and this really helped solidify what she had seen.
Continuing our honey theme from last week she made honey milkshakes...
...topped with hob-nob crumbs.
Making hexagonal honey bee cells from a hive.
The cells contain honey, pollen, bee eggs or baby bees.
With the last of our honey, Panda Girl made a honey cake.
We invited over our elderly neighbour and had a fun afternoon tea.
Learning how orb spiders weave their webs. After the spiders abandon their webs they become cobwebs. Cob comes from an obsolete English words for spider.
Frame and spokes first.
Then a spiral from the middle.
Not all spiders weave spiral webs. Panda Girl went on a web hunt and found a house spider's sticky web.
We read some amazing spider facts but we think these two are our favourite:
"Spider webs are not passive traps. Instead, because of electrically conducive glue spread across their surface, webs spring towards their prey. Scientists also found that the glue spirals on the web distort Earth’s electric field within a few millimetres of the web."
"The silk in a spider’s web is five times stronger than a strand of steel that is the same thickness. A web made of strands of spider silk as thick as a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 jumbo jet in flight. Scientists still cannot replicate the strength and elasticity of a spider’s silk.
And also that spiders' legs use hydraulic pressure to move!
Panda Girl drew a forget-me-not by looking at it through a microscope.
The Boy started to feel better so he joined us for a mini-beast identification day.
Nanny sent over her egg identification book. Thank you, Nanny!
We went into the garden together to pick dandelions to make dandelion tea and the children found a whole bunch of four leaf clovers! Everybody is very happy. :)
Anyway, we needed fresh dandelion leaves and roots for our tea.
I loved it! The children - not so much. Tut!
Raft design and construction.
They're both brilliant!
Our garden time rolled into a beautiful weekend. Everybody, except maybe the baby, spent the entire day on Saturday weeding and chopping and sawing and trimming and mowing and carrying and ta daa! The garden is ready for Summer!
Even the guinea pigs had a spring clean :)
We celebrated our hard work with a bonfire and drinks.
The children started back at the lake with cadets this week in time for boating season. They have courses and competitions coming up.
Monkey Girl had her Intermediate Ballet Exam on Wednesday with the Royal Academy of Dance. Results in a month or so.
The Boy managed to be well enough for his guitar lesson later in the week but he missed Taekwondo, freestyle gym and his last rugby training of the season so he's a little gutted.
Panda Girl and The Boy continue with their workbooks in the afternoons.
My two big girls are ploughing through their American High School Diploma. Some subjects are taking longer than others but they are keeping their heads down. Keep going, girls. I'm very proud of you. You can do this.
