Who needs to get dressed to learn stuff?!

It ties in quite nicely with a cartoon I saw on Facebook recently, that K didn't get dressed until about 4pm today, and she may not have done so then if it hadn't been for the fact that we had swimming lessons today!

At the scrapstore we're members of, they have a really good supply of exercise books in a variety of sizes and recently I picked up a few small 'homework diaries'.  I suggested that I could write things that K & M need to or have agreed to do in them, along with things that we've got on for the next day.  K has reacted really well to this idea and told me that if it's in the book, she *has* to do it (her idea not mine!) and this morning disappeared to do some piano practice without me suggesting it, because I had written it in the book.  M has told me she doesn't like it, so instead of bullet points of things, for her I've written a little note tonight, so we'll see if she prefers that.

The third of the body models that I'd bought online arrived a couple of days ago, but we only got round to opening it today.  It was a 'cranial nerve skull', which K has decided is called Fred.  The construction of Fred led to discussions about the brain, we also talked quite a lot about blood.  We looked at magnified images of blood and talked about how blood needs to clot (haemophilia) but not too much (strokes, heart attacks and DVT)!

K feeling how heavy an adult brain is - a nearly full bag of flour (around 1.4kg)

Fred's brain (rather less than 1.4kg!)

M had a go with the models too.  K has named them after members of the Weasley family.

Fred, Ron (the baby is a boy) and George.

After lunch, K & I started on subtraction.  Having done some reading on the subject in Maths for Mums & Dads, I had decided to do things a bit differently this time and got a big piece of paper and we explored the idea together.  K decided that we should set the sum out similarly to how we'd done the addition, and that the bigger number should go at the top.  We used four digit numbers (at K's request) and broke it down into separate sums for the thousands, hundreds, tens and units.  I think this made it much clearer when we looked at the 'borrowing' method and K seemed to grasp the idea easily.

We also talked about how there a number of different ways of phrasing questions that need subtraction to work them out.  For example, the difference between two numbers and how many more one person has of something than another, as well as x take away/minus y.  And finally we talked about how sometimes we can do sums in our head more easily than writing them down, for example: If a child is born in 1998, how old would they be in 2003?  Although this is a subtraction, it's much easier to count on that do the sum like this:
  2003
-1998

After the maths with K, M and I had a few games of Monopoly Millionaire Deal, which is pretty good and involves adding up in multiples of 50 000.

I haven't mentioned what we've been up to regarding books lately.  We're still going with the first Charlie Bone book and are about 3/4 of the way through and I imagine will have finished by the weekend.  As well as this, K found a CD audio book of Pegasus and the Flame, which K & M listened to over the course of a couple of days and enjoyed.  I'm wondering whether they will want to explore Greek myths as a result and will suggest we have a look if they've got anything in the library about them next time we're there.