Mostly about two different trips out.

M's birthday is pretty much over now, but lingers on in a couple of ways.  She is writing her thank yous, on what are actually little present tag cards that we found in the scrap store, but they do the job nicely.  She was happy to write on them because there's small so she doesn't have to write much, I suggested it to encourage her to write a bit smaller and more neatly!  She is also enjoying using or playing with a number of her presents, such as the origami kit and her Lego among others.

Elephant's head and swan, made from one of M's presents.

On Friday it was a glorious day, so after some playing in the garden, when I was allowed to take some photos of a rare occurence, both of my girls in a dress/skirt!  We took a packed lunch and headed into Nottingham on the bus, with some of M's birthday money in my pocket.

 

First we headed for Market Square and joined quite a few other folks to have a bit of splash in the fountain. 

 

M had received one present which we already had (a really good choice, the card game Boggle Slam!), so we headed to Waterstones to see if we could swap it and since it had one of their stickers on they were happy to do so and we came away with Pit instead.  We haven't had a go yet, but have lots of other cards games in this series, so I'm anticipating we'll enjoy it.

The Victoria Centre was next and eventually, after much deliberation, M decided on some more Lego rather than more Playmobil, this Lego Creator Log Cabin.  She's already built and taken it apart a few times and seems very happy with her choice.  We headed back for more splashing about in Market Square, before heading home, via Hotel Chocolat (they usually have tasting and they didn't disappoint).

This morning, M and I went to deliver H's thank you to her at ballet and then to the farmers' market where we stopped for a chat with Barry and bought some chocolates for A for Father's Day next week (any excuse, Barry's chocolates are amazing).  K had decided not to come with us, because she was busy constructing a pregnancy pelvis, from a kit I'd bought at The Works in town yesterday.  A friend, E, had tipped me off that they had some good ones, but sadly they only had the pregnancy one left.  I have also ordered the other two that they had left online though.

K busy assembling body parts.

A 2 or 3 years ago we went to the British Geological Survey's Open Day and really enjoyed it, and when I asked the girls if they'd like to go to this year's, they were both quite happy to do so.  We got there at about 1.30pm and had a go at various activities.

Setting off party poppers by adding weights to the string.

This one is to demonstrate that although geologists know about the stresses and conditions that cause earthquakes and can predict that they are likely to occur soon, they can't know exactly when.  When we took part in this activitiy the results for how many weights it took to set off the party popper varied between 8 and 23.

M walking like a dinosaur.

Discussing the results.

The spaces between the footprints can help determine the height of the hip joint of dinosaurs and how fast they could move.  M was a pretty nippy Deinonychus, apparently.

We did a Treasure Hunt, which led you round some of the site and told us about various things, including the British Geological Survey itself, different types of rock, weathering and fossils and ended with chocolate and a couple of little pieces of polished minerals to take home.  We also looked at different types of rock, sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic and put some drops of vinegar on some of them to see if they would dissolve.

After this we went to the Fossil Fun section, where they had some very impressive specimens.  When I pointed out the different periods, M pointed out that they weren't in the right order, as the Permian and Jurassic sections had the Cretaceous in between them.  The man there agreed, and said that he hadn't thought about putting the tables in order and that perhaps he should have done.

A Permian fossil.

On the Cretaceous table, there were some fossils to handle and use a little eye magnifier to look at more closely.  K said that she thought the first one she looked at looked like a bee or wasp and wasn't far off, since it was a beetle.  When M picked up a different one, the man said that that one was very tricky and only one person so far had correctly identified it.  M had a look and said that it looked like a cricket to her, and he was very impressed, as it was, indeed, a cricket.  At this point, K said that she hadn't heard what M had said and had a look herself and said that she thought it looked like a grasshopper or a cricket.

M identifying a fossil.

And K's turn.

We had a quick look at a few more things and M had a go at panning for (fool's) gold, we've got the result drying out on a window sill, although there's still quite a lot of sand there too.

It shut promptly at 4 o'clock, so we went to see A playing cricket, arriving at tea.  We stopped for a while before heading home, where K did some of a worksheet I'd made for her on Units (continuing to work through the different characters in this Maths book).  So far, with a bit of talking through things, she's been filling in a table of different things we might measure (length, volume, time, temperature & weight), with examples (height, liquid in baking, a race, our temperature when ill, ourselves), examples of units (cm, litres, seconds, degrees centigrade and grams) and tools or equipment we might use to measure these things (ruler, measuring jug, stopwatch, thermometer, scales).  M wrote another thank you, this time to Christopher, her cuddly toy dog, who had given her a bouncy ball, which oddly he had wrapped in three layers before making a gift bag to put it in to give to M for her birthday.