A trip and a "home" day.

Yesterday we went, along with a number of other families, to The Space Centre.  It's somewhere we've been meaning to go for ages and indeed got as far as going with some schooly friends a while back, but found it shut when we got there, not having thought to check it was open first - don't go on a Monday!

We had a good look around and K & M were unanimous that the best bit was the SIM ride in the Tranquility Base section.  As we were on a education group ticket the SIM cost an extra pound, which I paid for the first time, but K & M both liked it so much that they paid for a second go themselves.  We mostly enjoyed the Planetarium show, although K shut her eyes and blocked her ears for the part about the many different ways going into space can kill you!  One of the interactive screens had multiple choice questions about how things react differently in space, including one which tied in nicely with the video we watched earlier this week about wringing out a wet flannel in zero gravity.

M & Christopher (her dog).

K in a mock up of an early manned space capsule.

We all liked 'Baked Bean Challenge', trying to left a can of baked beans as they would be on different planets (and the sun!) and therefore with different gravitational pull acting on them.

K in particular was very interested in finding out that most of the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters.  Altogether we spent about 5 hours there, which we all felt was plenty!

Today was rather different, I say it was a "home" day, but we were actually out for most of the morning, although only locally with nothing planned on.  After a trip to the dentist, we went to the library and had just settled down in the children's section when a big school party of 4-5 year olds arrived.  M had settled into a comfy spot with a book, so she stayed there to read, while K & I took our work upstairs where it was quieter.  I had mentioned to K that the writing she'd done for the Harry Potter sale on Monday was very accurate in terms of the spelling, but she hadn't used any punctuation and I'd wondered if we could have a look at some.  She seemed willing, so last night I decided to make a worksheet using something that I knew would engage her interest: Harry Potter!  I picked a straight forward short paragraph from The Chamber of Secrets and took out all of the capital letters and punctuation.  We talked about the point of punctuation and without any prompting she remembered the example, Let's eat Granny! compared to Let's eat, Granny!  Then I read her the paragraph as I was written on the sheet I'd done, with no punctuation.  I let her know that it was three sentences in the book and asked her where she thought each sentence started and ended, which she identified pretty quickly and she added the full stops.  Then we talked about capitals, so she added those to the beginning of the sentences and found the proper nouns.  Next we moved on to apostrophes and used Punctuation - The Write Stuff, which we both found entertaining and it clearly explained the differences between the contraction and possession apostrophes.  She found the missing apostrophe (a possession one) and added that.  Finally we moved on to commas, looking first at The Comma Crew chapter of the book, talking about lists, clauses and more.  K identified some places to add them to the paragraph and finished it off.  When we got home I checked it against the original and apart from one extra comma that we had added it matched perfectly.  There is another paragraph to do on the sheet, but that one was plenty for one sitting.

It's a very recent development that K has consented to do this sort of thing with me.  Any previous attempts, particularly if I have pushed her to do 'sit down learny stuff' as we call it, have resulted in upset all round.  Now she seems ready for it, she's grasping things really quickly and is willing to have a go, probably because she sees the point!

After the library we went to the park for a while and bumped into friends that we'd seen yesterday at the Space Centre.  Then we had a relaxed afternoon, unusually for a Thursday, as gymnastics wasn't on as L, the teacher, is on holiday.  So K & M watched the Just William dvd one last time before we posted it back to lovefilm.  Swimming was on, so they had half an hour of that to go with the running, jumping, swinging and climbing at the park as their exercise for the day.  They finished off with some 'foxing' (a particularly type of bedtime activity they have with Daddy involving Mr Fox, a puppet who takes on many different roles in their playing including Dr Fox and Captain Fox among many others).  Today he has started yet another job, French Teacher Fox and set them some homework, A informed me, of finding out the French for fox.  As I was a modern language teacher BC (before children), they have a very easy option, but I'll present them with a French/English dictionary and see if they go for that first.  K has been using a dictionary quite a lot lately, today it was to look up 'brig' as Captain Fox had used it to mean a prison on a boat and I had expressed doubts that this was the right word and she wanted to check.