Science and Art

This morning we started off with some activities I had organised and laid out for them last night. They decorated two left over choc-chip muffins (from the ones I baked for their movie night yesterday). Miles especially loved painting different colours, sprinkling (and eating all the ones that didn't make it onto his muffin! Then they ate them for their mid-morning snack! 

Then it was time to begin our science project. Cress egg-heads! I had prepared egg shells earlier and got the materials handy for their experiment. 

First we scrunched kitchen roll into pieces and stuffed into the shell, pouring a little water on to pat it down. Taking care also not to break the egg shell as Caden discovered happens when you don't listen to the instructions. It's all good learning!

Then we drew faces on our eggs. 

Then we put seeds into our egg heads on top of the paper and wet the seeds. They are now going into a dark cupboard for a few days until the seeds make shoots. The reason they go into the dark is to fool the seeds into thinking they are underground so they will sprout. The plan is to measure our findings every day and draw graphs each once we get shoots to see whose egg produces the longest cress by the end. Then we will eat our cress of course :) 

The boys had a lot of fun at lunch time wrestling, playing horsey rides with each other and dancing to the tambourine together. Miles really loves to move in time to faster and slower rhythms, he has good musical sense. Caden too I think, rhythm seems to come naturally to them. They love dancing. 

Then we visited our friend on the house boat as we had a walk in the rain planned. We played a little game of knock the stacked cans down with a bean bag. 

Then they played with little wind up bugs on the floor of the boat together, making them fly about all over the place. 

We went for our walk together. We talked about all the wasted apples in the orchard and I have made a mental note to bring them here in the Autumn and next Winter for much scrumping and making a variety of things with apples. Juicing too of course! It is such a shame to see this wasted fruit! 

The boys and their friends went off running together. 

Miles showing a daisy he found and picked!

Miles up to his ankles in puddles. 

Then we said goodbye to our friends and went on our visit to a local art/sculpture gallery. 

The following recycled and welded pipe sculpture was representing a thinking man. Caden and I talked about whether we could see the man in the shape and how he was posed. 

We found a rabbit sculpture, no information about this one nearby. 

We found the sunshine sculpture. We are looking forward to the sunshine :)

Caden loved this and pointed his sword to his favourite leaf. We will probably try to recreate this leaf at home using mosaic/collage sometime soon. 

The red sculpture was two people kissing and the one near Caden (he read me the sign when I got to him) was about the girl next door. 

This was very interesting, the information told us some of the background of the artist and Caden liked hearing that he was from Zimbabwe because he has been interested in looking at Africa on the map recently. There was a photo of the artist with his hammer and chisel and we looked at and felt the chisel marks on the sculpture itself. It was a great piece of art to talk about. 

Miles liked this one!

We found a maze with more sculptures in. 

This was a very interesting Dali-esque piece of work. No information again sadly. 

We saw a stone? head coming out of the hill on the other side of the small beck. 

I liked this, it was called 'Grief' - the man has a hole in the middle of him - I thought it was beautiful. We talked about what grieving is and how the art shows us that emotion really well. 

Spring is coming, here are some early daffodil shoots. We also saw crocuses on our walk and lots of buds on trees. We think it will snow still though and that it is a shame for the early plants who think it's Spring because it has been so mild. 

Miles loved the musical frogs. He wanted to be the one that played the drums. 

Some art on a shed wall that reminds me of Michelangelo!

We identified a Christmas rose together.

This was the place we were at. 

They absolutely LOVED the Spiderman themed Triceratops and we called it the 'Spideysaurus'. 

Finally here is a picture of Caden identifying worm casts in the grass. 

Then they went home and Caden read two pages from The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, to me and they watched a short film for pre-schoolers about racing cars. 

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! 

A clutch of eggs

This was Caden at Woodcraft folk yesterday evening. We were a bit late arriving and his friends weren't with him this time. He strongly didn't want to be there and Miles was ill and had fallen asleep on my back. I did my best to get him involved. It was a slow start! 

The task was making birds nests with melted chocolate, shredded wheat and mini eggs (Yum!). I explained what all of the ingredients were for. It helped that we were still on the same theme of birds, we have been talking about birds and ornithologists this week. He said he would like to work with birds when he is older. We also have identified lots of birds around us when we have been out and about - I particularly remember a flock of starlings that Caden identified from their spotty backs. 

Once Caden warmed up to the workshop, he made this. (Green plate)  

We learned that this was a nest with a 'clutch' of eggs. 

Then we were set a challenge. We were told to get into teams and choose a name for ourselves (I tried really hard to stay in the background). This was the 'Adventure Time Team' with 4 kids in. 

The challenge was to invent a device that would protect an uncooked egg from breaking when dropped from 2m high. The materials the children were given were 6 sheets of newspaper, string and sellotape. The children decided they were going to wrap the egg in layers and layers of newspaper tying it with string and sealing it with tape. 

All the children had a go at wrapping the egg. Caden had the task of wrapping the parcel in string (he loves to tie string around things) so he was happy about that. 

The reward was 5 points for an egg that didnt crack at all

3 points if the egg didnt break but had a crack

0 points if the egg broke

This was the moment that Fern, the leader dropped Adventure Time Team's parcel with the whole egg inside. 

There was a big thud...... we held our breaths....

The egg didn't break, the team got the whole 5 points. This is the moment they all realised they had got the whole points, they were so excited! Caden is on stage jumping with joy! 

The last activity the children did together was to pass a football between their legs and try to walk with it. This was to imitate a penguin with it's egg. Caden answered the question correctly when the children were asked how a penguin stores it's eggs. This is Caden (he was the last in the queue because he mucked about a lot when the queue was forming) with his egg between his legs.