For most of the morning and a while after lunch, K & M and, for some of the time, A (who doesn't go back to work until Tuesday) along with a number of soft toys were being a pride of lions. I think this was inspired at least in part by our trip to a zoo on holiday. K got one of our non-fiction books on Big Cats out to find out more about them. This involved building a den with chairs, cushions and blankets in the front room, which I don't think is entirely true to life, but then catching a friendly zebra who agrees to help the cubs learn how to hunt is particularly likely either! But as I've just been talking about with A, although much of what they were up to seemed like nonsense and 'just playing', the flights of fantasy they went off one were all based on reality and the conversations they were having showed clearly that they'd taken in the social structures of a pride, that the lions and lionesses have very different roles within the group and the methods they use in hunting.
This afternoon we headed off to the library and while there M started writing another space themed story. This one involved a trip to the planet Dismal, to visit the aliens who live there who are all very happy! Meanwhile K and I continued with the maths book we'd started before our holiday. Following on from fractions, we moved on to decimal fractions. We started with the fact that 1/2 is the same as 0.5 and that you can get from the first to the second by doing a division sum on a calculator. I gave her a number that was over a thousand with three decimal places afterwards and asked her to read it out, which she did with a reminder that the digits after the decimal point are read individually. Then we talked about what each of the digits in the number represented and K identified the thousands, hundreds, tens, units, tenths, hundredths and thousandths and I labelled them. Then she correctly put some decimal fractions in order of size. She matched up some simple fractions with their decimal equivalent, with some support. When we looked back at the number we'd labelled and I asked what the 6 in the tenths column meant and she realised that it meant 6/10, it seemed to click. Finally we looked around rounding numbers, in this case to two decimal places. I drew a number line with 0.33, 0.34 & 0.35 on it and we took a couple of numbers either side of 0.34 and look where it would fall on the number line and therefore whether you would round up or not, and then K used a calculator to convert some fractions to decimals and rounded them to two decimal places. Phew!
Then, after they tidied up the lions' den, K & M watched the start of Part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (they watched Part 1 yesterday, as after a night on the ferry, the morning in the car to get home for two hours of gymnastics they weren't really up to much else!). Then while K had ballet, M & I did some planning for her birthday party which is just over a week away. She's decided on a Wild Animal theme and we have been planning games and activities and she also typed some of the invitation to give to her friends, which I then finished off to add the details. M now has quite a few things that she needs to prepare ready for the party, which she was itching to get started with but it was getting quite late by this point and she and K both wanted to watch the end of the Harry Potter dvd, so she agreed to wait until tomorrow.
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