This week we have managed to complete the maths poster on angles and the children have learnt all about right, acute and obtuse angles, total degrees of a circle, half circle, quarter circle and line as well as measuring angles and calculating missing angles. They enjoyed using this website to manoeuvre and correctly use a protractor (doing this while the surveyor was here and thoroughly impressing her (I hope)), and had some giggles laying on the floor making various types of angles with their outstretched arms for photographs! Will have to take a break from the posters for a while as we've run out of display room in the kitchen, although I could start putting them on the wall up the stairs I guess.

We have done some work on oceans this week for our "Around the World" lapbook as Palin and Philleas Fogg travelled an awful lot by boat during their 80 day trips. We have used, and will continue to use Enchanted Learning for this, it's such an easy, child friendly site to follow and learn from. K and B have coloured and labelled the oceans of the world and noted some important facts. We've also discovered why oceans remain salty and where the salt comes from, done some research on the huge Blue Whale (for Quiet Day last Sunday) - actually a very noisy creature, and research on Polar Bears (for Polar Bear Day last Tuesday).

K and Bs travelling Flats arrived home from Canada and the USA this week. They were thrilled with all the information, postcards, leaflets and goodies they'd received as well as new stamps in the passports. K has been sent a bundle of information on the Kentucky Horse Farm with colouring book and information on jockey silks. She's started to design her own silk for her horses lapbook.

B did a day of science using his "Lego Crazy Action Contraptions" pack which he got at Christmas. He followed the instructions and built each experiment himself asking for help to make a small parachute and carefully place some experiments on a stretched length of string. Here's some photos, but he used his time to make and learn about balancing, forces (using a balloon to power a car and making a launcher to shoot a paper triangle over a goal post) and parachutes. He also made a rather fun domino run and some inventive marble runs too.

"aim and fire"

"balancing act"

K has had a busy craft week this week trying out her quilling set and designing some lovely things (see photo). They are both into their dolls houses at the moment and K has been making various things from Fimo for hers - here's her latest - a PC. Continuing with crafts, they've both done mini indoor gardens as examples for our nature/art session for the HE group next week, adding mini Fimo vegetables to brighten them up while they wait for the grass seeds to sprout.

Fimo and Quilling

Cursive writing practise is coming on nicely, although a little time consuming! It takes K a good 15/20 minutes to write a couple of lines of poetry beautifully, but it's worth it, it looks fabulous and she's chuffed with herself afterwards.

Finally, we finished our small project on Galileo this week ready for our HE group visit to the museum to meet him (a rather fun young man who responded so well to the kids and was rather pleasing on the eyes of the adults!). I was pretty impressed with how much information K and B had taken in during this project as they weren't really keen on doing it. We recapped the learning on our walk to the museum and they were firing off dates and inventions and names of Jupiter's moons with enthusiasm. I was pleased to hear them respond to Galileo's questions during the session, although I didn't think they would and it took a while for them to pluck up the courage! The light/optics session at the museum was very well presented too and the children all seemed to enjoy the morning's educational visit. May well go back there to look again at the 12 light experiments set up to tinker with once we've done some additional work on light at home.

Galileo papers from K and B

B found this site amusing this week: http://kopykat.com/sand.html and the children have added their decorated home ed hands here.