You don't ask - you don't get!

Quite a while ago, whilst at Wollaton Hall, I noticed a small sign up in the minerals room from the East Midlands Geological Society with their contact details saying that they would give boxes of rocks to any school for free.  So later that day I decided that I'd give it a go on behalf of the resource library that we have at Fun Club and wrote them a polite email saying that I realised they probably wouldn't be able to make this available for each home educating family, but that home education families would love to have access to such a resource and could we have one?  They replied a couple of days later in the affirmative, but that they had something of a backlog and it would take some time.  On Friday evening and strange man came to the door asking for me and this is what he gave us.  It came with a number of stapled sheets, identifying and telling us a bit about the different types of rock, minerals and fossils and with some suggestions of follow up activities (and for those that like to follow the national curriculum it's got a sheet referencing that too).


Box of rocks!



So we spent half an hour or so looking at the rocks and talking about igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock types and how they come about.  And also drawing on the slate with the chalk!  We haven't gone into much detail yet, but I'm hoping that interest has been sparked enough that we'll go back to it before we take the box to Fun Club next month.

Other than that maths has cropped up again (over and above the usual everyday maths that is unavoidable!).  I gave K 4 pink and 8 white marshmallows for her hot chocolate and told her that I'd given her 12 and that she had twice as many white as pink.  Between them K & M worked out how many of each she had (before M went out on her bike to the park with A ) and K & I continued our conversation which lead on to the idea of simultaneous equations in particular and algebra in general.  When presented with the sum of 64 + a = 81 (where 64 is the price of a Curly Wurly, a is an apple and 81 the total paid for the two items), K was able to get the right answer.  She used a calculator and was a bit puzzled that she got what she thought was the answer of 17 hundred (or so) thousands, before I pointed out that there was a decimal point after the 7!  We talked about equations and doing the same thing to each side to try to find out an unknown.  This lead to K asking me to read her the funny answers from children that are at the beginning of the chapters of Maths for Mums and Dads.  One of the questions with funny answers in there is:  Sam has £1 in his pocket and apples cost 30p each.  How many apples can Sam buy?  Show how you got your answer.  Answer: 3.  Nickie told me.  I really wanted to use this to encourage K to tell me how she works out her answers, as although she usually gets things right, she's very reluctant (or to put it another way, she point-blank refuses!) to explain how she gets there, so when she doesn't I find it hard firstly to know if she does know how to get to the right answer and just made a mistake in getting there or if she doesn't know how to get to the answer and if the latter how to help her with that.  I explained about how in the future she might decide to do exams for qualifications and that you get marks for showing your working out in subjects like maths and even if you get the wrong answer you will get most of the marks if you show you know what you are doing and just make a little mistake.  After this she was happy to try to explain how she got the same answer as Nickie did!
Another of the questions is:  What is the difference between 9 and 4? And the answer given by a child:  'The 9 is curvy and the 4 is all strate lines'.  I asked my girls a similar question when I first bought the book, probably a couple of years ago now.  I love the answer that M gave me with a questioning intonation:  One's odd and the other one's even?