week ending 21st July

Work has wound right down to more or less a halt this week due to the hot weather. It's drained us all of energy. Anyway, here's some of the things we've been doing this week.

As it was National Ice Cream day last Sunday, we made some delicious strawberry ice cream ourselves using juicy strawberries and double cream - so rich but very moreish. We also found about about St. Swithin (his day was last Saturday - read about it here) and have been waiting to see if the traditional rhyme will be true or not. Not it seems as it rained this morning! Never mind, K and B copied out the rhyme to practise their handwriting. This is something new that we're trying, they seem to find it OK.

For maths and geography we had a look at the road map to find where we live and places that we'd recently visited. Using wool, a ruler and the scale of the map, the children worked out the distances of these places. K and I also touched on how to work out the time it may take us to reach these places if travelling at a steady speed.

We got a underwater book out from the library and had a thumb through it, looking at the different fish, reading about the legends of the sea, lost cities and lost planes over the Bermuda Triangle (and I gave them an interesting burst of the Barry Manilow song sporting this title!). We've also been looking at shadows - B struck up this interest last week, asking about the length of his shadow and why it changes. Found a good bit about all this on the BBC site here and B did the quick test afterwards and demonstrated that he understood it all! 100 Science Experiments from, once again, Usborne, have a fun shadow show project which we shall do. Another book from Usborne that K's been reading is called Castles. Do love these Usborne books, may just have to buy some for ourselves. B's also asked, and we've found out about, who invested televisions and how telephones work.

B has been playing with mini spinning discs, exerpimenting with forces, seeing what happens when the discs collide. He found these in a box of junk in the loft which has been packed up for ages ready for a car boot sale. We decided to do a yard sale this week to sell some of the old kiddies toys etc. Thought we'd do really well as our home is between a nursery and infant school. We chose Wednesday, the supposedly hottest day of the year, and made some refreshing home-made lemonade to sell too. So are we now rich - nope - we sold one thing (to our neighbour) for £1.50. The kids had made bunting and posters to give people plenty of notice and still parents said they'd forgotten their purses! Even the children, who I thought would sidle up to the table full of enticing goodies, didn't even look in our direction! The kindly lollypop lady had a free cup of lemonade and suggested we did a boot fair instead, "they're good for junk" she said! Great, I didn't think this was junk, but it guess it is to others!

Someone posted this amusing site on the EO forum - B found it very funny. Lucky chap getting to dance in all those wonderful places.

Have been playing card games in the good outdoors and B has been practising and seriously improving his backhand when playing swingball. Elsie Mo's new hood arrived this week (yippee, not more huge puddles in the back of the Landie) and K thoroughly enjoyed playing in the box!




Did a quick ice cube experiment to demonstrate how colour can affect temperature. By placing and ice cube in a dark bag and a white bag and placing them in the sun to see which will melt the quickest (the one in the dark bag) confirmed that dark colours absorb the light more easily and turn it into heat while the white back reflects the light and bounces it off the surface. Had lots of fun putting ice cubes down the backs of our t-shirts after this!

Have been looking at the early Tudor clothing and found this lovely site with dressing up dolls for Henry VIII and his six wives. K and B each chose a queen and outfit to copy and label correctly all the items of clothing the ladies of the court used in those times. We used this site to help us work out the order of dressing. Poor ladies, must have boiled in hot weather!

M-i-l's birthday yesterday (she doesn't want anyone to know her age, but it's between 69 and 71!). We're having a family meal tomorrow to celebrate.