A Birthday Week

Half term.  

In the garden.

My darling Ballet Girl turned 11.  She's a fabulous cook, historian and dancer amongst other things and we love her so much.  Happy Birthday Poppet.  xxx

 She spent her half term week on no less than 6 sleepovers, including a Birthday one at ours with a few friends.  (Midnight-5am was sum-total of sleep they achieved I do believe,,,)

We partied it up in the sunshine...

...and only realised we'd forgotten the cake after everybody went home.  Oops.

Monkey Girl cared for an injured butterfly.

And we caught tadpoles at our local forest centre.

We hung out with uncles, aunties and cousins in St. Albans

Chores - bless my Boy

...and spent time with best friends.

After paying a sad visit to Grandad's grave, who died unexpectedly six weeks ago, we cheered ourselves a little with an Italian/Maltese lunch.

...which then inspired hours of cafe role-playing in the garden.

The Boy spent two crazy happy hours on the zip-wire at a local English Heritage site

Stone painting

...and we rounded off our half term break with a Sunday evening pic-nic.

Maths

Fun with Maths

We enjoyed our maths unit, more than we all expected, I think!  We do maths 3 times per week but this put the fun back in it for us.  It was all very hands on and the children enjoyed choosing which avenue they pursued.  We'll do this again! :) 

Practical Maths

I finally have a new printer so I might not need to spend hours making my own worksheets!  But these were kind of fun :)

Sorting.  This has passed down between all four children and each have highly enjoyed/benefited from it.  An awesome gift from Nanny about nine years ago :)

This Boy loves to cook

Online maths

Taking a break from the maths and decorating socks...

Matching numbers.  The Boy has mastered his numbers 1 - 10.  Good job Pumpkin!

This is a brilliant book, demonstrating the size of 10, 100, 1000 and 1,000,000,  The fold out poster has a million stars on it and the children were fascinated by how much a million really is!

Pouring salt.

I always know The Boy's experimenting is getting serious when he pulls out the goggles.

The children have had a lot of fun working through various maths puzzles, following instructions, working with calculators, protractors, measuring tape, scales, nets of shapes, rulers etc.  It's been such a refreshing change from workbooks.  We've been outside and hopping around the house, at desks, on the floor, on the computer, team-working at the table and using objects from around the home.

The Boy was instructed to build a tower taller than himself (with a little help from Mummy).

Learning about grocery shopping and budgeting.

Origami.  The children do enjoy this as Papa is an origami-wonder.  This week they've made pigs, a boat and a bird.

Stealing ideas from these fabulous books.

Our weekly library trips where we are notorious for taking out 50-60 books a week.

Measuring the length of a 27 metre diplodocus.

Maths!  My dreaded subject!  How do I make the kiddies enjoy it?  I've pondered this one for a while now, having spent years just ploughing through workbooks with the kiddies and often asking Papa for his expert help.  More recently I decided that we should may be attempt to love it so we're doing a whole thematic unit on it.  I thought: games, hands on, activities, interactive, books, drawing, team-work etc and may be we'll grasp some new concepts and even have fun while we're at it.

Here's how it went today :)

All ready for the morning:

Snakes and Ladders for breakfast.  Three kiddies were playing this in their dressing gowns this morning.

Books to explore

These have been invaluable over the years.  A gift from a good friend, and well used.

I made a few worksheets for the boy.

 Learning about the history of numbers.

Weighing and balancing

The Boy did so well today.  He conquered writing the number 4 AND the concept of adding.  He was thrilled.

Maths games

Ballet Girl did a mini-study on planning pathways and flowcharts, and the other two did some shape work.  We also did some poetry work, where this term, the two eldest are breaking down the poems and looking at rhyme schemes, narrative and lyrical and re-telling or point/moral-based poetry.  Ballet Girl completed her map-work book; Monkey Girl continued with hers, and Panda Girl did pages and pages in her literacy and numeracy book :)  The two eldest both finished their Spanish books while the two youngest took a break before all four went to their trampolining lessons. A constructive day :)

Spring

Our Spring project was cut short after my father died unexpectedly and traumatically a few weeks ago.  The children have spent the past two weeks enjoying time with Papa while I have attempted to get my head 'round things.  We did, at least, have a colourful notice board to look at everyday :)

Panda Girl's cute life-cycles.