After the groans from K and B about doing more maths posters I brought out the maths workbooks for them this week to hear yet many more groans and grumpy faces! They've asked to do the angles poster next week now! Actually, B did very well with his maths this week. We are following an old CGP Year Three Book which is brilliant and B picked up the fractions section really easily (to add to Ks grumpiness - she was doing fractions too and still has a mental block with them). We'll get there eventually, she's good at lots of other areas of maths and has a logical mind when she puts her mind to it.

We have started our study of Galileo in preparation for a visit to the museum with the local HE group to "meet" him and also to learn more on light and optics. We've done more experiments for energy, dropping balls of mixed weight and size from the bedroom window and also dropping stones of mixed weight and size, tied together loosely with string, to see the outcome. Very surprising actually, we all thought the smaller stone would just trail behind when tied like that, but when you actually think about it (which is was Galileo did alot), it shouldn't do that at all, and didn't. Anyway, lots of writing and some very impressive work from them both, especially B. Although it sounds like I'm praising B more than K at the moment, I'm not taking sides. These last few weeks he's really changed his attitude to work and is listening and understanding so much more and therefore producing a lot more of his own work rather than me having to keep reading details out to him over and over until it's fully sunk in (which makes the work become rather tedious and uninteresting).

Other learning that they're doing really well and thoroughly enjoying is the cursive writing. B has finished all his lower case letters and K is nearly there. They've both been putting this beautiful style of letter formation into practise when producing their new books on the months of the year. We've looked at February, reading about folklores and history of the month from this site, and they've written bits of information of interest to them in their books with illustrations. We also came across these lovely poems for the months.

K has done some more to her horses lapbook; B has designed a poster all about the computer game he'd like to write. He's also done a bit more BASIC learning "goto", "if" and "then".

We seem to have been in the car alot this week too. Lots of visiting friends (K went for a sleepover and B has a friend over tonight to sleep), picking up valuable free stuff from our local recycle store, swimming, horse riding, group session, etc., etc. The kids find it a good opportunity to ask questions during this time, although I can't remember what they were typically - one was on steam trains, another on power stations I believe.

On Wednesday, K started her level 2 in swimming and, for the first time ever, she came out and told me how proud she was of herself. So she should be, I was really proud of her too. You'd think she'd been in that level for the extra 5 weeks, like the other children. The teacher worked them really hard during the 25 mins. and K's confidence in the water is just building and building.

Today we had a group HE session on recycling which was really well thought out. K enjoyed making stables from junk modelling and B particularly enjoyed making a grass seed "head" using old tights, sawdust and grass seeds (with eyes etc.) There was lots of information on recycling (and it was interesting to find out that different counties use their coloured bins for different types of rubbish - just to confuse everbody!) and some quizzes for the children to do at home to help complete the RSBP Action Awards that we're all working towards.

A lovely social week really.