M's Codes

M has been coding and writing in code today in two different ways.  She has been on Khan Academy making picture using coding and she has been writing messages in runes because she's decided that as, unlike the Secret Seven or the children in Helen Moss's books, she never seems to stumble across a mystery to solve, she's going to come up with one herself.

She needed a bit of a reminder to get going with the coding, both from the videos and from me, about what the various numbers mean when writing code.  For example when drawing a rectangle: rect(50, 80, 20, 40); the first two numbers tell you how far across and down the field the top left hand corner of the rectangle is, the third number is how wide and the fourth how tall the rectangle is.  But with a triangle there are three pairs of number in the brackets, which tell you where each of the corners is, rather than telling you the size in the way that it does for rectangles.  It took a while for her to really get the hang of this, rather than trying out fairly random numbers and seeing what happened, but I think she got there in the end.  She didn't manage to finish what she wanted to do, because K had been waiting for a turn on the computer for quite some time, but we've saved where she got up to, so we can pick it up again at a later date.

Writing is one of those things that I used to get a bit stressed about, as neither K nor M is the sort to sit down and write a story, and I thought that writing was something that we 'should' be doing.  Occasionally they would voluntarily do a little bit and we have at times had phases when they've written a bit at least quite regularly, such as post Christmas and birthday thank yous, we had a month when all three of us sat down and wrote for 10 minutes every day and at other times we've written shared stories taking it in turns to add to the story.  On the whole though it's not something that either K or M is particularly keen on.  Lately though M in particular has been doing more of it.  For one thing she has recently acquired a penfriend, admittedly she's only written once so far, but she is keen, so that will be a fairly regular thing and now there is this mystery she's concocting.  So far she has written three or four letters which she has then translated into runes, using a sheet she got from Nottingham Uni's Mayfest earlier in the year.  She's occasionally asked me to spell a word, such as 'circus', but from what I've seen her spelling is pretty accurate. 

As for K, she's been doing some more of the maths worksheets that I've made for her based on Basher Maths, recently it's been Quadrilaterals and Polygons and she now has a 3D Shapes one waiting for her.

3D Shapes worksheet

In other news the girls had their first piano lesson of the new term today and went to korfball this evening.  M was not happy about not going, so decided to stay and 'help', which fortunately our friend K who coaches them was fine with.  I think M was a bit bored though, so it's fortunate that she's allowed to get back to doing all sports at the weekend.  I think it'll be a while before her wrist is back to full strength though.