Rain and rats.

Last night we had the most fantastic storm and today we've had plenty more rain along with rumbles of thunder for much of the day.  This has been something of a relief as it's also cooler, but it has also provided opportunity for going out and splashing in puddles!  On the way back from piano lessons, which are in the morning rather than afternoon over the summer, in the rain, M's very sharp eyes spotted something, so we stopped to have a look.

Tiny froglets!

It's not far from the canal, so they probably came from there.  There was at least five that we spotted and both girls had a closer look.  Then we went through the park, splashing in puddles on the way, to get a few bits and pieces from the shops and K & M went to the library before heading home.

This afternoon, I continued reading Charlie Bone, we started book five today.  Both girls wanted to do some work on their projects about rats.  Although we've got some books out of the library and K found some information on the internet, we hadn't really got any further than that.  So I spent some time with each of the individually.  M has started work on a lapbook, she's done the front cover and two sections, one with some facts abouts rats and one with some photos of different sorts of rats we found on the internet and printed off and M labelled them.  I encouraged her not to write in a random mixture of upper and lower case letters, so she's written in completely capital letters, but I was pleasantly surprised at how neat and small her writing was.  K has got an exercise book for her project, in which she has numbered the pages (she had actually already started one, and written a bit about why she wanted a pet, but she couldn't find it, so she's starting again).  We started off by talking about different ways of finding information (books, internet, people) and how you can read or talk to people about a subject generally and then pick things from it that you find interesting or you can look for specific information within a text or ask someone particular questions that you want to find out the answers to.  We also talked about different ways you can present the information, such as paragraphs of writing, bullet points, tables or diagrams.  Then we had a bit of a brainstorm of all the things she might want to include in her project, which she wrote down in the form of a mindmap.  Then she had a look at some of the websites that she'd found and that had been given in one of the library books we've got about rats and printed out some information, which I suggested she might like to read through with a highlighter pen in hand to mark some of the most interesting or useful parts, which she was very enthusiastic about.

We continued with our tidying of the front room, which is now looking much less of a mess than it did a couple of days ago.  There are a couple more areas left to do before we move on to the kitchen.  The playroom is a complete tip, as I suspect that much of the stuff that has been ejected from the front room has been dumped in there, but ho hum, we'll get there eventually.