Things we have been doing.

Having had rather a slow period as regards things that obviously look like education, it's been rather busy round these parts.

K has continued with writing her 'bloggy' and finished the post about our trip to the Natural History Museum.  Once she's finished it, we looked through it together and corrected some mistakes.  There were a couple of errors she was making consistently, such as writing 'witch' instead of 'which' and 'were' instead of 'where', so I've asked her to make sure that she checks for those things when she does writing.  We also talked about punctuation and using it to help make meaning clear and avoid ridiculously long sentences.  K told me that she has also picked up a grammar workbook that she started ages ago and has been continuing with.  She tells me that she will show me when she's finished the book.  When I asked her if she was getting on okay with it and understanding it, she said that she was and on further questioning she said that she thought she might be able to use some of the things that she's done exercises on when she does her own writing.

Having made a start on the maths workbook, M has been picking it up regularly and has been working through it well.  We have now covered sequences, which she really likes, to the point that she asked me to rub out all her answers so that she could do the exercises again.  She also said she'd like some more around the level of the ones in the book or a bit more difficult and I also found her some more to do online here.  She was doing really well with them until she had to continue one which was something like 4/15, 1/3, 2/5, 7/15....  Then she decided that it was too diffcult, which given it was aimed at a school Year 8 (so approximately 12 year olds - she's 9), was understandable.  However, we had a look at it together and she did have a go at the next sequence, which was similar but with fourteenths, so a bit easier, and managed it fine before deciding that she'd had enough.  By that point she had done about 15 minutes of them though, so it was fair enough and she'd finished on a good note.  Other topics that we've done, usually snuggled up either on the sofa or in my bed, once before I'd even had breakfast, include addition and subtraction, multiplication of two digit by one digit numbers, angles (acute, right and obtuse) and pyramids and prisms.  M decided that she would rather skip the division one and come back to it, although there is only measuring left apart from the recap at the end of the book, so we will be addressing that one soon. 

Both girls have also done baking recently too.  M has made flapjacks and chocolate brownies (although these were somewhat overbaked, but that was my fault) and this morning K used two different recipes from her cupcake book to make marbled chocolate and vanilla cupcakes ready to decorate with friends who came round this afternoon.  They had eaten the best ones before I managed to take a photo, but here are some of K & M's.

When it comes to decorating cakes, more is definitely more!

We also played a game that the friends (they're K, M & A, so rather confusing for the purposes of my blog!) brought with them.  It's called Qwitsh and it's rather good, depending on the role of a die, you have to get rid of your cards, which each have a number from 1 to 8 and a letter from A to H, with either a number or letter that is one less, one above or the same as either the number or letter on the card showing the pile, as quickly as possible.

Mid-game of Qwitsh.

Finally, it's nearly a fortnight since the last Asfordby, but I forgot to blog about that session, which was on the theme of the Chinese New Year.  As well as the activities that various parents had brought along for the children to do, one of the mums who grew up in Taiwan, I think it was, brought along some Chinese cakes for the children too try as well as a writing set.  She did a little 'show and tell', about the language and the writing, as well as about some of her memories of living there.  Some things that stuck in my mind, were how the written language is not phonetic, and also how what would sound like the same word to us can mean four very different things depending on the tone of how it's said, for example a rising or falling tone.

C, S, M & K dancing with the Chinese dragon the children had helped decorate.

M did some tangrams

Some of the celebration cakes we tried.

Aren't libraries great!

In my catch up post, I completely forgot about one of the highlights of the week!  Last Saturday, due to 'popular demand' according to the posters, (we're pretty sure this is my friend Ka and I filling in the event feedback cards last time) Imagination Gaming were at the library for the day.  Therefore we were there pretty much all day too.  We popped home for a quick bite to eat at lunchtime and K had her ballet lesson, but apart from that we were there from when they were setting up until the end.

We tried Pinnochio first (rather bizarrely, I can't find it anywhere online).  This was never going to be one for my girls, because it involves bluffing/lying and they are very reluctant to do so.  The idea is to decide if someone is telling the truth or not about something to do with one of four categories on a card, then depending how many people believe them, they and those that were wrong about whether they were lying or not have to build up Pinocchio's nose until it falls down.

His nose got rather long!

At the girls' request, we had a go at one of the games that we played at the last session back in the autumn; Anomia.  This involves looking out for matching symbols between yourself and other players and then coming up with something in the category on the other player's card before they come up with something on yours.  Does that make sense?  It's a tricky one to describe and quite tricky to play, but a good one.

Anomia

Cloud 9 was one that we all enjoyed.  It's a really simple idea, where you have to weigh up the likelihood of someone being able to match the colours thrown on the dice with the cards in their hand.  You get many more points if you decide they can and they do, but lose all the points if they can't.

Cloud 9

M and her friend A had a few goes of Chickyboom, which, while for younger children, has loads of potential for use in exploring levers with slightly older ones.  To play you take it in turn to remove an item from the seesaw.  The items are different weights with corresponding different values and you get points for each item you remove until the seesaw falls off.

M & A playing Chickyboom.

One that I played, first with Chris from Imagination Gaming who was running the session (in a quieter moment), and later once each with a couple of the girls' friends, was Stratopolis.  I really liked this one.  It's a two player game, where your largest unbroken  surface area of colour gives you points by multiplying the number of tiles (from above) by the number of tiles in the stack at the highest point in that area.  You each have your own L-shaped tiles and have one, two or three squares of your colour and the rest of the three squares are either black or (one) red.  You can put the tiles on top of others, but not red on top of green or vice versa, thereby increasing your own area or sometimes blocking your opponents.

I won!

The tiles of Battle Sheep are fantastic and it's another really good game.  It's a game of strategy, where you try to spread your sheep out as much as possible over the field of play whilst trying to block other people from doing so.

Battle Sheep!

This is another one that I can't find online.  There are two sets of cards, one with letters and the other with categories.  The letters are set out around the pile of category cards and as soon as the category card is turned over and read out, players call out a word that fits the category.  The first person who does so takes all the letter cards that are in that word, then the next player does the same until everyone has had a go.  The gaps left are filled in with new letter cards and a new category card is turned over.

Fast Words

M watched another M play this one with a friend of his, before playing against him herself.  To be honest, I didn't entirely follow, but they seemed to enjoy it and it was very strategic.  This explains Brave Rats far better than any attempt I could make!  To start with my M lost every round, but then something suddenly clicked and after that she won several rounds in a row before moving on to something else.

The game.

Playing it.

We all made a point of giving lots of positive feedback to the library, so we're hoping that it won't be too long before they're back again.  Apart from us and two other families who are friends of ours and were also there for a big chunk if not all of the session, there were probably another half a dozen families or more who dropped in for a while and seemed to enjoy themselves too.

In other library news, a book that we borrowed from there, Ruby Redfort Feel the Fear, got us talking about base 3, since there's a morse code type code in the book but it uses indented and protruding dots as well as no dots in a pattern, so is ternary rather than binary (dots or no dots) like morse code.  We also talked about the decimal system that we use as well as binary code that is the basis of computing.

Having finished Ruby Redfort, we have moved on to another library book, The Star of Kazan, which is by Eva Ibbotson, who wrote a number of other books that we have really enjoyed.

Other things last week and into this one.

A final post to catch up with a really rather busy week.  Both girls have at various times been a bit off colour and it's been rather chilly, so I have been reading to them quite a bit.  Yesterday I finished reading the latest Ruby Redfort book Feel the Fear, which we ordered from the library before it was published several months ago (along with two other friends, so we all got calls from the library and each collected a brand new copy of the book on the same day!).  As usual with the Ruby Redfort there are various things that we can follow up, particularly regarding the codes used in the book.

In other news, K has started a blog.  It's just for her, although I am going to be allowed to look at some of the posts, so that we can use it to help her improve her written English.  The impetus was that last week was such a good week, with something on almost every day that she was particularly looking forward to, so I suggested she might like to write things down as a way of remembering them.  She thought it was a good idea and decided on a blog rather than handwritten in a diary and has been doing quite a lot on it.  Although I'm not allowed to look, she has told me what the private post is about.  She has been doing a number profiles, in the first person, of various characters she has come up with including information about them and their likes and dislikes.  From what she has shared with me, it sounds as though it's done in a quite wordy way, with sentences rather than single words for categories such as favourite food.  It's not out of the question, that I might be allowed to see one day!

On my suggestion, M dug out a workbook to have a go at.  It's a Letts one: Mythical Maths.  She whizzed through the number sequences pages and those about number place and value in 4 digit numbers.  Her mental maths is pretty good, but we very rarely do much written down and so it's perhaps not surprising that doing addition and subtraction in columns was a bit of a stumbling block.  Both K & M are usually quite keen (aka stubborn) to do things *their* way, even though in many cases the conventional way of doing things makes things either much simpler or less easy to lose track of working.  M consented to give the conventional way of carrying and borrowing in addition and subtraction and having got the hang of it very quickly, went back to the sums in the workbook and managed them easily.  We had an interesting talk about borrowing in subtraction and came up with the following alternative way of doing it, although I think we'll stick to the usual way.

 Also today, M issued me with an egg box challenge.  We each had an egg box and had to decorate it with just the things she had got out on the table in a rather short amount of time.  Here are the results.

Mine's on the left, M's is on the right.

This afternoon we had friends round for tea, play and to meet the rats of course, before the four of them went off to korfball.

Finally, we have been listening to When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr on iplayer, although we've now caught up and need to wait for the next episodes to be broadcast.

Maths and Magic.

On Tuesday, it was a little bit of a struggle to get up and across town for Fun Club, but we managed it despite the long day the day before.  It was a bring and share maths session, which was a first on this subject for Fun Club and it worked really well.  There were various board games, a shop, polyhedra and their nets, symmetry and measuring among other things.

Matching polyhedra and nets.

Symmetrical colouring.

A week last Thursday, M came with me to pick K up from Scouts, when K came out very happy because they had been told that the following Scouts was going to be a Harry Potter session.  Both K and M are very big Harry Potter fans, so K's excitement was matched by M's upset, although she managed to hold it in until we got home.  On Wednesday she finally got around to sending an email to the Scout leader, saying that she wanted to come to Scouts as soon as she's old enough and really likes Harry Potter and was wondering if she might be able to come.  While we were out at swimming, A had a phone call asking how old she was and when told that she will be 10 in June, Skip said that she was welcome to come along as a taster session. 

Thursday was Harry Potter Book Night, both at Scouts, but also at the library, where there was an event from 4-5pm.  The girls wore their Hogwarts robes, which I had made for them probably about a year after agreeing to do so.  It was so long that the material I had bought to make them each a robe, was only enough to make one for K, so I had to get some more!  I started on Saturday, spending a large chunk of the weekend on them and then finished them off on Tuesday and Wednesday.

K relaxing....

....and M ready for action.

The library event was okay, although a bit on the young side for K & M.  They really enjoyed the Scout session, which was a 'Triwizard Tournament'.  As well as a Harry Potter quiz (which M was very useful in for her team), they had other challenges including solving this puzzle, with the Scouts playing the parts of the man, boat and things the man had to take across the river. 

A trip to London.

On Monday we had an early start to get to Leicester to catch a coach at 9 o'clock for a day trip to London, organised by the lovely I.  We set off in what should have been plenty time at 7.45am, but traffic and roadworks in Leicester and a mile that took 20 minutes, meant that we unfortunately delayed the start a bit. 

The coach dropped us off at the Natural History Museum at just gone 11.30am and was due to leave from the same place at 6pm.  Some people went elsewhere for some or all of the time, but others, like us were happy to spend the whole day at the NHM. 

K, M and I started off with the dinosaurs along with E, L & J.  The first time we visited the NHM, when K was 5 or 6 at the time and M was about 4, K was so terrified of the moving model raptors that I had to take her elsewhere, while M and A continued to see the model T-Rex.  This time K decided that one of the raptors was called Geoffrey and named the others too (the T-Rex is apparently called Bob).  We enjoyed looking at the dinosaurs as we worked our way along the walkway.

Two juvenile hypsilophodon

An iguanodon

A gallimimus.

At the end of the walkway, we arrived at the home of a dinosaur that M has long considered a friend of hers.

 

Bob!

The section after Bob, focuses less on individual dinosaurs and more on things like habitat, hunting, how dinosaurs moved for example and has more interactive things to do with all of the children enjoyed.

We then met back up with other friends and after we'd had our packed lunch in the basement picnic area, E took L & J to the Science Museum and we spent most of the rest of the day with C and S and her dad and granny.  First we went in search of the museum's latest acquisition, the most complete skeleton found to date of a stegosaurus.

No need to name this dinosaur, as she's already been called Sophie!

We then headed up into the red zone of the museum.  It varied how much time we spent looking at the various exhibits, but the earthquake and volcanoes section caught the girls' interest and they particularly liked the earthquake simulation.  K and I then looked at the different types of earthquakes and also where the biggest ones are most likely to occur, since there had been one with the epicentre not very far away recently that was strong enough to be felt (although none of us did).

Map showing the tectonic plates and the direction they are moving.

K was particularly keen to see the 'pretty, shiny, sparkly things' (said with tongue in cheek I think!).  She is particularly keen on opals, which are her birthstone.

Stone with opal in.

Later we went to 'The Vault' to see some more.

Opals in The Vault.

And an opal necklace.

The girls were keen to visit the mammals section too, so that was our next port of call.  K & M have a favourite in there, a very small deer, the dikdik.

The dikdik.

We spent quite a while in this section too, before meeting back up with other folks.  The children wanted to have a look in the shop too and most of them spent some (or all!) of the money they had brought with them.  K bought some bookmarks to add to her collection and M bought a wind-up torch. 

K, M & I upstairs to the minerals area and visited The Vault, as I mentioned.  We also had a look at the cross-section of the giant sequoia, which was felled when it was around 1,300 years old.

Just a few of the events during the life of the tree.

Finally, we stumbled across a relatively new gallery: Treasures, in which we read more about various of the particularly significant exhibits that this gallery holds, particularly William Smith's ammonites.  By this time it was nearly time to head back to the coach and everyone was pretty tired.  Everybody was back on the coach, so that we actually left London a few minutes early, which is absolutely unheard of in my experience!  We arrived back in Leicester to a light covering of snow and got back home to Nottingham about 9.15pm.

Lots of new things.

It's been an eventful and exciting start to the year with lots of new things.  For a start it's a new decade for me, although my change-hating girls have determined that I am now thirty-ten, as they don't want me to leave my thirties.  I had some lovely presents including this cushion that K modified specially for me.

It's Mr Happy!

Another first was a trip to Leicester to Orchestra Unwrapped, organised by a lovely HE mum, J.  It's a 'schools' event, that also welcomes home edders, aimed at 7-11 years to introduce them to orchestral music.  There were a number of pieces to listen to and a specially written audience participation piece, which you get a cd and booklet to prepare for.  We all really enjoyed it and K & M are keen to go again next year.

The really big (although rather small) new things, however, are Beatrice and Bob.  Shortly before Christmas, some friends discovered that one of their two newly acquired young rats had arrived with them already pregnant.  We have been talking about the girls having rats as pets for over two years and indeed had agreed to them having them for Christmas just over 12 months ago, but they decided that they needed to do more research about looking after them first.  The subject had been broached again though and when we were invited to go and meet the babies when they were just a couple of weeks old, K & M were very keen.  The babies were incredibly cute and one thing lead to another and 10 days ago we brought Beatrice and Bob home.

M and Bob.

Bob!

Beatrice.

Not everyone's cup of tea, I know, but they really are great pets.  They come out of the cage for exercise and exploration every day and K & M are doing pretty well with looking after them and helping to clean the cage (they couldn't manage it by themselves yet, as it's really big and takes some doing).

In other news, thank you letters are all finished (just), even the unnecessary ones (to each other, us and people they saw and thanked at the time) although for the first time they have decided to send a joint thank you for presents that were for both of them.  We have also finished reading Piratica and are now well on the way to finishing the first Molly Moon book, which the girls were given for Christmas by their occasionally childsitter (I'm not allowed to call it babysitting), who is a lovely teenager who lives just across the road and occasionally plays with them just because.  And finally, K has agreed somewhat reluctantly to write a review for me for a book she borrowed from the library, Precious and the Monkeys by Alexander McCall Smith, and I'm looking forward to seeing what she has to say about it.

A game-filled Christmas and New Year!

We have been given several fantastic games and played even more, so I thought they deserved a blog post of their own.

We received four games for Christmas, one of which was one we already have, one was a suggestion I came up with when asked what we would like, another was one some of us had played before and the final one was completely new to us.

The one we already had (and in fact K was given it for her birthday in October as well!), was Forbidden Island.  K, M and I first encountered it when we went to the board game cafe in Oxford when we visited Uncle S and Aunty P a while back and indeed I spent some birthday money on the game as a result.  The girls and I all really like this game, which is a cooperative one, although A thinks it's okay but finds it gets a bit samey if played too often.

The game that I suggested, was one that we had come across at one of the Imagination Gaming sessions at our local library, Take it Easy.  It involves places hexagonal tiles on a board to try to make coloured pipes reach from one side to the other unbroken, which gives points according to colour and length of pipe.  It's particularly good because it can be played solo as well as in groups of up to six and it involves a bit of maths at the end.

Part of our marathon Boxing Day games session.

Concept was the one that some of us had played before, again at a session at the library with Imagination Gaming.  It is very clever (if somewhat frustrating at times!).  We haven't played it competitively, but I don't think it's necessary to do so to get plenty out of it.  You place the markers by the icons on the board to get across the word, name or phrase on the card (there is a choice of nine options with varying difficulty).  This was one of A's turns in which he used just three counters - the main counter is on literature/writing/book, and the other two on woman/female/wife/feminine and small/lower/below.  Answer hidden below the picture - highlight to reveal!

Little Women

The final game which was, as I said, completely new to all of us, is a card game called Sleeping Queens and it was another hit.  It's fairly quick and reasonably straightforward and can be played with 2 to 5 players (although it's much quicker with 2).

We played all of these on Boxing Day, along with a game of Monopoly.  K & M do not employ classic tactics when playing this and generally decide to be 'nice' to each other and either A or me, depending on who out of the two of us does something that they don't approve of (which is usually buying either one of their favourite properties, Old Kent Road for K, The Angel Islington for M, or a property of a colour that someone already has, thus 'scuppering' them from being able to build houses).  Being nice generally consists of attempting to ignore when the approved person lands on their property.  They are also far more concerned by securing their favourite property than trying to make money.

Boxing Day Monopoly.

The day after Boxing Day we spent a lovely few days with my parents, seeing various family and friends.  K & M were particularly excited to meet their new cousin, Treacle, who is a rescue greyhound that Uncle M had got just a week earlier.

On the way home on New Year's Eve, we visited friends for lunch and more games!  There we encountered two more new games including Mexican Train, a domino game (but the dominoes go up to double twelve), which we all enjoyed, and Sequence, which can be played individually with two or three players or with teams (in multiples of 2 or 3) as we did.  The girls also had a game of The Game of Life Zapped, which they really like and we finished off with a classic game of Pictionary.

Today was yet more games and lunch with more friends, who had requested we take over some of our new ones that I had mentioned on Facebook.  So as well as Sleeping Queens, Concept, Take it Easy and the delightfully bonkers Big Fat Tomato Game (which we have had for a while), all of which we took with us, we were introduced to Moustache Smash.  There were eight of us all together, so we couldn't all play all of the games and K also played (and won!) The Settlers of Catan, which we have borrowed previously having been introduced to it by them.


In other news, both my girls, but M in particular, have decided that I over-share, so although they are still okay with me blogging, it'll be a bit less personal to respect their feelings on the matter.