A crafty week

I'll start with the events we covered this week taken from various interactive calendars. We learnt about Howard Carter, the first person to enter the ancient tomb of King Tutankhman on 26th November, 1922. K and B made small 3D open out pyramids, decorated inside the tomb with a mummy and any interesting artifacts the King may have wanted to take with him to the afterlife. We put the finished pyramids into their lapbooks. We looked at the anniversary of the birth of C.S. Lewis on 29th November and played a couple of fun Narnia games before adding this wonderful author to our time line. Finally, we read about St. Andrew to celebrate his day on Thursday 30th.

The children continue to enjoy learning about the countries Palin visited during his trip around the world. We've been looking at China this week and have been fascinated by the abacus which, apparently, they still frequently use. This website helped us learn all about it and has an interactive abacus too so the children had a fiddle to help them understand how it all works! They had a go at copying the Chinese writing for given names on this site, and have found out about their Chinese Zodiac on this site.

Club Penguin still rules in this house and K will soon become a member too! B is continuing with his mini project on penguins and is doing really well at reading about them and writing his version on his small poster. Since joining this funny little on-line world, B has started reading things on the PC screen rather than me having to read them to him - a big step.

K typed and typed to produce her story for NaNoWriMo, but unfortunately she didn't make it to her lowered target of 8,000. Like so many others I'm sure, time just wasn't on her side especially as we were on holiday for a week at the beginning of the month. Nevermind, she's determined to try again next year. How did all you other NaNo writers get on?


We've continued to look at electricity, finally getting round to making our little electric bugs that required something metal to complete their circuit. Lots of encouragement needed to get an interest in this as we'd tried before and it turned out a bit of a hit and miss as to whether the bulb would shine or not. It worked well this time and the kids seemed to enjoy finding additional metal instruments to "feed" their bugs.


Lots of crafts have been happening this week. The children have done glass painting, stone painting, paper making (which was brilliant - K's now making more for Christmas gift tags with added crushed cloves for perfume) and learning to draw people. B helped make some fresh playdough at the beginning of the week, and we've been using it to help with fractions. Here's a few impressive piccies of the crafts and electric bugs used for the experiment.

B's action men

K's action ladies

Want to say a big thanks to T and M for letting me browse through the piles of unwanted books they had. Still sorting them out, still reading through some, and the kids are loving the ones I picked up for them. My favourites are the Around the World Palin book as it's perfect for our topic (obviously), a book on "training" the young Elizabeth before she became Queen and the beautiful silver fairy book, which we got J to sign for us before K starts reading it.

Finally, couldn't resist these cute pics of Allie and Jasper doing what they do best ... sleep!

Allie slobbing once ...

and twice ....

A healthier looking Jasper.

And finally, finally, don't forget to check out the interactive Advent Calendar on this website. We looked at it last year and loved it - they haven't changed it but it still seems fresh to us.