Perseverence and concentration.

Something that has at times in the past been something that A has occasionally expressed concern about (although admittedly not for a while), is that the girls don't seem to concentrate on something for any length of time.  I haven't really been too worried by this, as sometimes games can be very involved and go on for ages.  Just lately though, K has shown that she really can concentrate when she's interested.

As I mentioned previously, she spent nearly 3 hours this week doing DragonBox, a game that teaches algebra, then returned to it and worked her way through all of the problems that she hadn't got all three stars until she'd got 100% completely correct. 

K has occasionally had a go at the sudokus that you sometimes find that are aimed at children.  Last night, however, she took the Saturday paper upstairs and managed to do one by herself, which I'm pretty sure took her over an hour to complete.

Over the last couple of days, she's been having a go at the balloon making kit that she was given for her birthday, I think it was last year.  It took quite a lot of burst balloons before she got the hang of it.

A bit of history and geography today

K & I were having a snuggle in bed this morning and we continued our talk about Irena Sendler, the woman who saved around 2500 babies and children from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during the Second World War (as I'd done a bit of research after the girls had gone to bed).

Today we received our first Postcrossing postcards!  They came from the US (North Carolina) and Finland (Turku).  I think I was a bit more excited than the girls, but we put them up on the wall with our world map and found where they from.  K & I also had a quick look at a photo of the Turku archipelago online.  Our next two postcards will be heading off to China and Belgium soon.

World map with our first two postcards

This morning K, M & I went to see our friend C, taking her very late birthday cards and presents and doing a bit of shopping for her on the way as she's not very well.  Once home, we continued our earlier conversation about the Second World War over lunch and then moved on to the death penalty.

This afternoon K and A put together her early birthday present, which arrived a couple of days ago, a new bike.  She put the pedals on and helped put the front wheel on.  K & M both went from a ride around the block and then to the library, although as usual I forgot that it shuts at 4pm on a Saturday (I always think it's 5 o'clock), so we didn't have much time there!

Painting and some problems.

This morning was a bit of a struggle to get up, as K & M had had rather a late night, but we had a lovely morning at an LLL Toddler meeting.  K decided, as she was still tired, to take a 'bed' with her, so took a fleece blanket, a cushion, her dressing gown, a cuddly toy and a book and snuggled down on the landing for most of the time!

Yesterday M had made a card for Granny, as it's her birthday soon, so this afternoon K made one too.  She decided that she was going to paint one.  M asked if we had any other birthdays coming up and painted two more cards, one that's very late and one for next month.

K's card for Granny

M's card for Granny

M's card for Nana - the space at the bottom is for the writing

M's card for C

We have a long-standing running joke that C really likes potatoes, and it is now a tradition (it's the second year) that we give her a home-grown potato for part of her birthday present.  M's card is a painting of a potato going for a walk in a wood.  She has also made her a potato ornament.

M's potato ornament for C

M has continued to do some more of DragonBox and K & I have put the algebra she learned on the app onto paper.  We worked through a simple equation together and then plotted it onto a graph.

Finally after a whoops at tea time which involved a broken bowl and tea all over the floor, we continued with Going Solo.  We came to the chapter when Dahl finally joined his squadron and engaged with Luftwaffe planes.  There are some quite graphic descriptions of the results of the bombing of an oil tanker among other things, which K in particular found really quite upsetting, but she did want me to continue reading.  We talked about how it's important to learn about our history even though it's upsetting and I told her about how in wartime there are some incredibly brave people working to save people admit the horrors, such as the woman who smuggled thousands of babies out of a Jewish ghetto.  K has always been adamant that she doesn't want to learn about anything to do with death or dying in history, so war has obviously been a no-no, but I think she might be open to finding out a bit more now, we'll see.

Cake and cuddles.

Today K finally got round to making the cake that she's been planning to make since the weekend.  She asked for a recipe and to be left to it, so I told her to weigh 3 eggs and add the same amount of flour, sugar and butter, then add a teaspoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of cocoa (because she wanted to make a chocolate one).  She hasn't made a big cake before rather than fairy cakes, so I showed her how to line one of the tins and she did the other.  I helped a bit with putting the mixture into the tins, but K did it pretty much all by herself. 

Baking

She also put the cakes in and took them out of the oven, which she hasn't been comfortable doing before.  Having decided that she wanted cream in the middle she went to the shop to get some and then returned because she'd forgotten that I had told her to check if we had enough icing sugar and to get some if we needed more.

For the decoration she took inspiration from a cake on The Great British Bake Off, which I'm sure you'll recognise if you watch it.  So here it is, her chocolate cake, with whipped cream and strawberry jam in the middle and chocolate icing on top.

It was very good!

We also had piano lessons today (they're usually on a Tuesday, but the lovely flexible teacher is fine with changing the day with notice).  K & M are both still getting on well and it's still lovely to have a little bit of one to one time with each of them, even if it is only half an hour.  M & I went to the park but on the way spotted some rather strange looking things on the leaves of a tree.  We stopped to talk to a lady who was just going into the house by the tree, who said it was a lime tree but that she didn't know what they were either.

Galls apparently.

When we got home, Facebook provided the answer, that they are galls (which makes me think of Asterix and Obelix, but it's not that sort).  A bit of googling found out that these particular ones are caused by a tiny mite that it about 0.2mm long, so we had a look on a ruler at just how small that is.

M and I had a bit of a chat too, as she seems to have been a bit 'down' lately, sometimes for obvious reasons, such as having a negative reply about the Blue Peter badge she'd applied for, but also just generally.  She told me she didn't really know why, but later she came back to the conversation and said she'd been missing Daddy.  It's a really tricky one, as he does work long hours and often travels, although rarely for longer than a night or two, but he's often late home from meetings in other parts of the country, but it's thanks to his job that we are in the very fortunate position of not having to make the big sacrifices that the vast majority of HEers do in order to have the option of this way of life.  We've been having lots of cuddles and happily A was home in order for us all to eat together tonight, which doesn't happen very often.  Now that K & M are getting more flexible with mealtimes, we'll be able to do that more frequently I hope.

K had decided to take a card game to play while M had her lesson and chose Phase 10.  It started off extremely one-sided with her winning all the hands, but by the time M had finished her lesson it had turned around completely and I was ahead.  We finished at home this evening, after I'd read another chapter of Going Solo, during which Roald Dahl had been given wrong directions for finding where to join his RAF squadron and consequently crashed when landing his plane, fractured his skull, (temporarily) lost his sight, taken 6 months to recover and returned to flying.

Despite the disappointment that M's poem has not been enough to win her a Blue Peter badge, she hasn't been put off thankfully and the girls watched another episode online.  Among other things on the programme there were ideas that children had to challenge themselves over the summer.  M was quite taken by one suggestion of playing the piano blindfold, so we did have a go at doing a video of her doing just that, rather successfully I might say.  We weren't completely happy with the result, but may well have another go in the next few days and try sending that in, in another attempt to get a badge.  K is also still keen, but has yet to come up with anything that she could make or do.

In other news, M has decided to give DragonBox another go and has worked through the first chapter, which is 20 problems.  She told me that she hasn't got three stars for all of them, but she's planning on doing what K did and go back once she's finished and do any that she didn't get all the stars for again until she does.

And finally, (arachnophobes you'd probably best stop reading now and there will be photos) K & M are really rather keen on spiders at the moment, specifically three particular spiders who live in our garden.  They have been named Simon, Sam and Oliver and K & M like to track there whereabouts.  One of them, I'm ashamed to say I don't know which, really endeared himself to me today though, when I saw him lunching on a wasp!

Lunchtime!

Not back to school!

Today felt a bit like our official start of the new 'not-school year', with our Not Back to School Picnic (thank you C for organising).  We all had a lovely time, me catching up with some folks I hadn't seen for a while, or in some cases a long time, and K & M playing with various friends.  We were very lucky with the weather, although we were disappointed that the rowing boats which are for hire to go on the lake during the summer had already finished for the season.  K & M played with a variety of friends from the age of about 3 to adult, including a rather strange game involving the commissioning of sock stealing by a criminal mastermind and ended with my arresting of the culprit! 

We had to dash off and cut the picnic shorter than we would have liked unfortunately because it was the first gymnastics lesson back after the summer break.  I think K & M were a little bit bored not to do a bit more challenging things, but it was understandable and necessary as they have a new coach now and she needs to get to know the ability of the children before she can do an appropriate level of work with them and I do think that the girls appreciate that.

When we got home K went back on the computer and worked her way through DragonBox, going through all the levels where she didn't get all three stars first time round.  She has now completed all 200 levels with three stars and while she was doing that I talked a bit about what she was doing meant in terms of the algebra.  Tomorrow we need to stay in for a delivery, so I'm planning on trying to translate some of what she did to paper and going through it a bit more.

M and I read the last of the four Maths Quest books, The Museum of Mysteries, whic was about 'numbers'.  It covered prime numbers, square numbers, factors, multiples and more and, again, she did very well.

We finished the day by watching last week's episode of The Great British Bake-Off, which we all enjoy.  It's on a bit late, so I record it but wait to watch it with them.

Mostly maths

I have been hearing various folks talking about DragonBox in a very positive away for quite some time now, but it was only yesterday evening that I finally got around to having a closer look.  I decided to take the plunge and bought the DragonBox algebra 5+.  I installed it this morning and M had a look, solving the first few problems easily, but it didn't really grab her.  I gave a little mental sigh, thinking that I had just wasted some (admittedly not much, as it's only $5.99, which was £4) money.  Then K sat down and had a go and she didn't stop until she had completed all 200 problems a few hours later!  I sat with her for the first few dozen, but then left her to it.  She is very keen for me to buy the 12+ version, but it isn't available for PC yet, so I've suggested she go back over the problems where she didn't get all three stars and we transfer what she's learned to paper problems while we're waiting and she seems really keen.  For each problem, you have to solve it to move on and get one star for doing so, but you also get a star for doing so without using any extra 'cards' (which you can add/multiply/divide to each side of the equation to get there) or extra moves.  It's very clever in the way that it moves from using pictures, gradually through to numbers and letters to become a recognisable algebraic equation.

While K was busy with that, M & I read another of the Maths Quest books, The Planet of Puzzles, which problems about data handling to solve, including reading various types of graph and diagram among other things.  She did really well, making only one mistake, although I got the feeling that most of the time she saw it as common sense and really quite obvious what the answers were, rather than having to work things out.

Apart from that, M has been out on her (newly handed down from K) bike today.  She rode round the block a couple of times and then came out with me when I popped to the Co-op and stayed riding in the park while I did the shopping. 

We continued with Going Solo, after a few days break, which dealt with the beginning of World War Two and Dahl's journey from Dar es Salaam, to Nairobi to enlist with the RAF and then on to Cairo and then Iraq for training and we kept jumping up to follow his progress on our world map.  And speaking of our world map, we had a message to say that our first postcrossing postcard had a arrived, so hopefully it won't be long before we've got a postcard of our own to put up there!

Well I wasn't expecting that!

Yesterday my flabber was well and truely gasted.  At the beginning of last year we started something new regarding pocket money and instead of us paying for treats, giving spending money on holiday and giving money for birthday and Christmas presents for our 'little' family (i.e. the four of us), we decided to give the girls £5 per month but no longer pay for any of the above.  In order to get this they have to properly tidy and clean (wipe surfaces & hoover) their bedrooms by the end of the month.  To start with for K in particular the money seemed to burn a hole in their pockets and we did wonder whether it had a been a good idea, but now they save up most of their money, rather than frittering it away.  It has generally been something of a struggle to get M in particular to tidy her room, which manages to get to the point that you can barely see the floor after a few days each time.  I have been encouraging both girls to do a bit at a time over the last few days to make it a bit of a more manageable job on the last day of the month, which K had been doing, but M hadn't promising me that she wasn't going to moan and strop when it came to doing it.  I was rather sceptical to say the least!  However, yesterday afternoon K & M disappeared upstairs, only popping downstairs occasionally to put things in the recycling or the bin and to tell me that they'd found a way to make tidying fun!  Apparently they'd turned an arrow into a fairy wand and one of their toy dogs was using it to make them tidy things, they took it in turns to work together in each of their bedrooms and did a really pretty decent job without any help and without any moaning.  Long may it continue!

While the girls were busy tidying their rooms, I baked a cake for A's cricket club's President's day bake off, and this morning almost the first thing M said was to ask if she could bake one as well.  I wasn't sure we'd have time, as we had already planned to go to have a look at the archery at Wollaton Hall but heading to A's cricket club, but she clearly really, really wanted to, so we managed to squeeze in baking it before we went and she quickly decorated it between Wollaton and the cricket club.

The archery was really interesting, we were all surprised and impressed at how small the target are that they are shooting at and for the little bit that we watched nobody scored lower than an 8 and it was mostly 9s and 10s. 

The archers...

...and how they got on.

K, M & I all had a go ourselves, which we enjoyed, the targets were about four times the size and we were about 20 times closer though! 

Having a go

K's and my targets

K & M did like it, but they are very clear that they prefer 'Tudor archery'.  I also chatted to a man there who was telling me about different types of archery, including one I hadn't heard of, field archery, which is basically a walk in the country with your bow and arrow and targets to shoot at as you go along. 

It was a nice relaxed atmosphere at the cricket club, there were several short games, from their junior teams and one from the seniors which A was playing in.  M has decided that she'd like to try cricket and she had a bit of a go with a couple of boys, including a bit of help how to bowl.  A asked what would be the best thing to do for her to have a proper go and so we're going to look into that for her and living pretty close to Trent Bridge there should be something!

As for the bake off, it seemed to be rather a last minute idea and consequently there were only three entries, two of which came from our family!

My 1st place chocolate cake

M's 2nd place Hogwart's crest decorated sponge cake

The girls and I spent some time at the cricket club, but the girls' babysitter had popped over before we left, to ask if they could help with her school art project this afternoon, which they were keen to do.  So we came home and they went to see her and eat things so she could take photos of them doing so to use in her project.  Then we went back so we could buy some of our cake back to eat!