Blue Peter badges.

Following a FB conversation with a HE mum friend (thank you L!), in which she told me about how these days Blue Peter badges are not quite such the rare and coveted commodity they were in my day (at uni I lived with a girl who had one having been on Blue Peter because her dad had trained all the Blue Peter dogs from Goldie onwards and I was rather envious even then!), and also that being in possession of one allows free entry into over 200 attractions (including Shakespeare's Birthplace!) I suggested that K & M might like to see if they could do something in order to procure one of these for themselves. 

Although they were aware of the cultural icon that is Blue Peter from conversations about children's television, it's not actually something that they watch, so we thought perhaps we should do something about this.  To this end we watched the two programmes that are currently available on BBC iplayer, which happened to be the programme about the first ever selection of a new presenter that included a public vote and a compilation programme about various World Record attempts that Blue Peter has been involved with.  They enjoyed both of them and really liked the new presenter, although were sad that Helen Skelton is leaving and have decided that they would quite like to start watching it.  As a result I think it is perfectly reasonable (although given the money saving aspect I would have thought it reasonable anyway!), for them to try to earn themselves a Blue Peter badge.

As I said things have changed somewhat since I were a lass.  Now there are a variety of different coloured badges awarded for different things and it seems that as long as a reasonable effort is made, when you apply for a badge, which means telling them what you have done to earn one in at least 50 words, you will be awarded one.  K & M agreed that it would be a good thing to have one of these badges and both of the decided they'd like a blue one.  M already had something that she thought would be a good thing to send in, since poems are specifically mentioned as something that can earn you a blue badge, which was the poem she had written about her favourite cuddly toy Christopher.  So she wrote them an email with the poem and then (as it wasn't entirely clear at first glance that you could apply for the badge by email too) wrote a letter to apply for the badge.


The letter ready to send with the subject of the poem

M originally wrote the poem for a Puffin Post competition, but Puffin Post sadly closed between the advertising of the competition and the closing date and we never found out whether the competition continued despite a couple of phone calls and an email to try to find out, so I think it's good that something that she is rightly proud of can be used for this.  K is also planning to send something, but it has yet to be decided what.

This afternoon we had friends come round to play and almost as soon as they'd walked through the door the girls had decided that they wanted to continue the dressing up game that they had started shortly before we left their house at our last meet up a couple of weeks ago.  This necessitated dressing up clothes from their house, which fortunately is literally just across the road, so after suggestions to play something else for a while, J agreed to go and get them after she'd had a cuppa.  They do have some great costumes from when J did dance and gymnastics shows, which her mum had kept and the four girls all had a lovely afternoon dressing up and role playing.

In other news, that I forgot to mention, K & M have both decided that they want to learn the recorder, so yesterday I gave each of them their first lesson.  They can both read music already, from their piano lessons, so it was mostly about holding the recorder properly, how to blow it and the note B.  Given the book we happen to have, since they can read the music they could probably teach themselves if they wanted to, particularly now we've talked about and practised the blowing technique and how to make a good sound rather than a screechy one, so we'll see how it goes.