Remembering Opa

K has been busy Hama beading today. She's been making mini winners prizes for a model horse show and they all look really lovely - different colour horse heads, a Champion banner and numbers 1, 2 and 3 for different winning places.

For maths today we did some dessert making. B made a chocolate cake and I left him to get on with all the weighing this time - he did really well and is getting on well at working out his fractions (we use the pounds/ounces on my electronic scales, so they show fractions) and turned out a very yummy cake! K did some liquid measuring to produce a strawberry blancmange.

Having read all about lapbooks on the Wellyboots blog (on left hand bar, scroll down to lapbooks) and thinking what a fun and interesting way to record learning, we've started our first lapbook on the topic of "Around with World in 80 Days". The first section is on Italy, Michael Palin's first proper stop on his lengthy tour of the world. Had fun with understanding the beautiful Italian language learning numbers, colours and simple words through this site. We also had a bash at the sentences, but found they spoke too fast for us to pick them up correctly! It is such a lovely language - I'm trying to persuade the kids to think about learning this rather than Spanish, although I'm sure that's just as lovely a language to learn as any. Anyway, this section we've looked at and painted mini masks (check out the "techniche" section for mini movie on making the masks) for the Italian Carnevale, B's done a few notes on Vespas, we've found out the capital city and which continent Italy is in and we've drawn the flag. K also had a go at a Leonardo da Vinci game on the same website. Must admit I didn't really take it in, but she followed it through to learn about him and his work.

B has done some more to his Star Wars project. It's looking good but I'm getting the feeling he's losing interest in it. This happens a lot with B, and I'm trying to encourage him to return to his previous enthusiasm! Luckily a trip to the library later in the day helped as he found a fabulous book on Star Wars which prompted him to want to write about the light sabers. He also picked up a book on special effects in films - looks very interesting (it has a rather gruesome picture of a gorilla on the cover, half gorilla, half mechanical). The library seems to be mucking us around abit at the moment. A couple of weeks ago I'd returned a couple of books which later showed up as unreturned on their system. I found one of them on their shelves and they didn't even apologise for the mistake. When we went in today I mentioned that there was still one book that I'd returned etc., etc., and they just took it off the system and said "not to worry". After checking out all our new books, a new message popped up to say a book which we'd returned way back in August was also missing! Luckily we had a decent person behind the counter, she took my word that that book had also been returned and deleted that message off the system too! Seems like their computers are full of problems - a bit awkward really as it's my word against theirs!

We also bought some much needed new felt tip pens. Ours never seem to last long, but this set of 50 for £2.99 from Smiths are lovely, according to B, who used them to colour in a dragon.

Watched a bit of Narnia later in the evening and did a bit more storyboard for "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", so quite a bit done today.

P is in Holland at the moment attending his grandfather's (Opa) funeral. Opa reached the age of 95 and he'll be missed by us all. (btw it's not a typo, February in dutch is februari!)