It's been a noisy week as the diggers and dumper trucks (very interesting to watch) have been right outside our kitchen window all week. I won't go on about it, but the ground is now flattened and we've discovered new neighbours from the next street along!

The end result

B's into his Hot Wheels at the mo and has made a garage for four of them decorating the lift up garage doors with car drawings. His enthusiasm has lead to to start a lapbook on the subject researching the history of the toy and taking arty shorts of his favourite cars and altering them on the PC. K continues to produce her lovely woolly ponies and has written make-believe stories about them which is sweet telling us about all their different characters!

We've started our science topic on light and have found this site and this site to be really helpful. We've also been reading from the Horrible Science "Frightening Light" book and using experiments from our old faithful Usborne 100 Science Experiments. So far we've looked at what light is (and how important it is to us and every living thing on the planet), who Sir Isaac Newton was and what he discovered about light, using our own prism to discover his secrets for ourselves. We've also made rather cool, easy to make, kaleidosopes ready for our next section about how light travels.

Have recapped two more of our maths posters and have started a new one on, simply, numbers. Place value (from thousand to hundreths) and decimal points mainly for B and then finding out the largest number and who decided on the name for it!

Spring seems to have really taken hold here (although I hear snow is on the agenda for next week!) and we've spent some time out of doors not just to enjoy the weather but to escape the rumble of rubble. Went to the local park for a picnic lunch, kick around and play in the sand. We were amazed how many other people were there, mainly from the college - sure it wasn't like that last year. Having been inspired by the beautiful daffodils in the park and the buds on the trees we've begun our March section in our months of the year book using this site to find out interesting snippets of information.

On Friday we packed another picnic and headed for Burghley House to visit the Sculpture Garden which is free to enter until the summer months. It was so peaceful (although there were diggers there too!) and a joy to spend three hours wondering through leavy pathways looking at the old and the new sculptures. The best bit was the waterfall and mini stream which instantly attracted K and B. Wearing their wellies (and seeing as how no one else was around) I let them carefully wade through the water and later they climbed to the top of the waterfall (holding on to me for support). It was a lovely afternoon out.

We named this "Freedom"


An old favourite - it's huge

Zonked - K and B certainly slept well that evening

Other things: B thumbed through the science book and chose an experiment to turn milk into plastic. By adding vinegar to warmed milk and then straining it (through the toe section of some clean fine tights) he altered the casein in the milk to form lumps of plastic which he molded into a star shape. After, he played this game on the internet to discover other forms of plastic. We watched an interesting program on the history of trees on BBC2 7pm on Monday (seems there's a book all about the series). K finished her lovely story on the PC which she titled "Dreams Come True" and both had a go at doing stories on this BBC Raw site which was posted on Lucy's blog recently. K has updated her website with renewed vigour.

On the house front: things seem to be moving along quite nicely now! We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (I'll keep you posted).