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.