Map making

We had a nice creative morning today. I had a lot of cooking and housework to get on with so Caden and Miles drew maps in the kitchen. Miles maps were all about the blue squiggles! Cute though! Caden asked for some help to make a treasure map. He started with the X and lots of circles to represent coins in the top left corner. Then he drew a line around the treasure island which is the route to the treasure. Then I suggested one or two things he could draw around on his island. He drew a lagoon with rocks and a resident shark. A land jellyfish and a forest with grass. Then he drew the volcano which of course is spewing lava everywhere. The green thing to the right of the volcano is the deadly swamp! 

Caden also created a number of suns for me and numbered them (at my suggestion), then he asked me which I would choose. I chose number 1 so he wrote my name next to my sun for me along with a love heart :) 

We cleaned the house together (they tidied a little, I hoovered etc)

Then Caden got on with some maths. We are doing Year 1 addition today. No problems at all there. Its adding from 20 by counting on and finding number patterns in addition that add to 10. Also we have moved onto adding up more than 2 numbers in a sum. We did 4 numbers in a sum today for the first time actually! Nice to do some new maths stuff !

Miles watches his 'Your baby can read' program. We were cuddling up together (before I took the photo) and saying the words and doing the actions together... Arms up, Arms down, Clap your hands, touch your nose etc. Miles is unwell still. They are both quite tired today. They have spent four consecutive nights at their Dad's house (to accommodate a lecture I had to attend this week), they usually come back quite tired.

Their friends Arthur and Alex came over today and they played with various toys for a couple of hours. I read a book to them and they danced to kids' music CDs in their room. They also did some puzzles today. Played with their Furby, castles and toys. They also had their usual picnic dinner on the floor (red picnic rug) and I made some chocolate muffins for them to eat for their movie time. They watched an exciting adventure film together and really enjoyed it. Then when it finished Miles got onto the iPad, he loves Monkey Maths and a sea creatures programme where you make a fish find friends (then the app gives kids information about the creatures - bit of natural history for them). 

Caden decided to develop his spider's web idea from the other day. This time we used gardening twine and experimented with what happened if we wound it between two places. We found that it didn't end up looking much like a spider's web, more like a bunch of parallel lines between the chairs. I think we will get some sticks and make a star soon and then wind string around in a spiral to see how a spider makes its web, we can also look for mathematical patterns in nature then too. Someone also suggested spraying a web on a morning (sans spider) with paper behind it. You get a web pattern on the paper apparently!