Grumpy week!!!

Most of this week has been not too good. We all seemed to be a bit grumpy and the kids were hard to motivate. K and B went to play with friends on Tuesday afternoon which gave me a good two hour break to do abit of work on my Ellesfuntimes web site, but I couldn't believe how fast the time flew by and I'd only done one new page! I find I get side-tracked by all the fun graphics and things that I can use to boost the pages and this slows me down big time. Anyway, more socialising on Wednesday afternoon - we met the same family in the park for an hour or so of fun and chat. Thursday we went off with some others from the group to view a couple of potential new venues, mainly for our winter sessions. Thought the visits would be a dead loss, but in fact once inside the buildings we were very surprised by their sizes and the lovely outdoor play areas. We are hoping to view one more next week which has a good indoor fun area - ideal for wet days. One of the families who came along popped back to our home for a quick play and cuppa, so we've certainly been building on the social skills this week!

Maths this week has been mainly about the growth of towns between 1500 and 1600 with some simple subtraction to work out the actual growth and then turning this into fractions (for K) with some help. We've also looked at a 1560 map of London and compared it with an 1811 map that I had in the loft to spot the huge amount of differences between the two. B was interested in all the boat activity and the fact that there was only one bridge in 1560, K was interested in the spellings of some of the popular places and how these had changed.

We didn't get to see the Trooping of the Colour on TV at the weekend, but we did have a quick look at this web site about the Queen and her family through the decades which is really lovely to browse through if you have a spare moment (yer, like when!). B sent the Queen a birthday message! K found a site which featured the crown jewels which fascinated both of them (trip to Tower of London on its way then) and her new love of gem stones kicked in so she also found this lovely detailed site all about gem stones. They wrote funny little rhyming poems about the Queen's birthday using this rhyming dictionary to help them and then they drew their ideal crown and what stones they'd use to decorate them as I read some AA Milne poems like "Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace"!

Made little toy Medieval soldiers. I got the idea from a picture in one of our topic books (apparently kids from this time used to have wooden toy fighting knights) - the kids were able to make them "fight" by pulling the strings on the sword and shield. Here's a piccie.





During our trip to the park, there was lots of talk of rollercoasters and how they'd like to build one that was really, really fast and brilliant. Found this web site where you can do just that!

Today seemed to be the most productive day of the week, more Tudor work, made pretty craft cards for my Mum's birthday and discussed structures and how skyscrapers are built. I heard from a blog, or forum, I believe, that this week is architecture week. We had wanted to go off around town looking at a variety of buildings, new and old, to talk about architecture, but it didn't happen. This web site is all about it and had a fun idea of building a structure using food. Did this today, here's the pics. Started out using marshmallows (as suggested) to hold dry spaghetti to make the structure, but we found cubes of jelly were fantastic and really made a stable base. B used celery and a grape too in his design (which I had to help him with a little bit). Both "buildings" were strong when finished. B's needed crossbars, which we talked about, for added strength. K's is still standing, B's is now a heep!





So, I thought we'd had a bad week work wise, but now I see that's not so true, so it was really just a grumpy week!