Disappointment and disagreements.

Still hot, still grumpy here.  In fact it was at times a horribly grumpy, shouty house, there were fortunately some good bits too, so we'll focus on them!

M had her French horn lesson, having done some practice this morning.  She's still making good progress and enjoying it. 

We read quite a bit of Ruby Redfort and watched a Springwatch special programme about otters, that we recorded a while back (last year I think!) and while I popped to the shops K & M watched a David Attenborough dvd about meat eaters from his series on mammals.

This afternoon we were quite excited to try out out bubble mixture, that we'd prepared on Monday.  Sadly it was pretty rubbish, the technique suggested of using string tied to a stick, with a washer (or cleaner as M insisted on calling it) to weigh it down in the middle, didn't work at all.  So we tried using our hands with finger and thumb making a circle, I managed to get one really good bubble, but that was it.  No idea if it will help, but we've added some more washing up liquid to the mixture and will give it another try tomorrow.

That may not have worked, but we also had a go at the 'science in seconds' experiment on the same page in the book, which not only worked, but also cheered us up after a signficant grump.  Some milk, with a small amount of food colouring gently poured on to it.

The milk plus food colouring.

Then (it says with a cotton bud, but we've run out, so we used a finger), touch the surface of the liquid with liquid soap and watch what happens.

Milk, food colouring plus liquid soap!

We then looked at the explanation about how the soap weakens the surface tension and causes the colours to whizz around making very pretty patterns.

The instructions and explanation.

We also spotted that M's bee hotel seems to have some occupants.

 In other news K continued with her maths workbook and I looked at M's English one with her, that didn't go so well.  It involved sorting nouns into common and abstract, some of which I didn't have a clue about (darkness? height?), so we sneaked a look at the answers in the back, which was fine.  Then there was an exercise which involved writing a sentence for a number of abstract nouns, but they included things like comfort and despair, which are far more commonly used as verbs than nouns.  In addition M objected to writing sentences about sad things and with words like despair and sympathy that was tricky to put it mildly.  In the end M came up with sentences for some of the words with quite a lot of help and encouragement (and frustration on both our parts), but in the end we left it and went to do the experiment above.  M had made up her mind that she couldn't do it and wasn't really open to the idea of giving it a go.  It really did seem like a very tricky exercise to have on the very first page of a workbook aimed at her age though.