Blokeys birthday, fossils, maths, planets.

The boys had a lovely time with my parents , they came home on Sunday and Monday we are working at getting them back into their routine...such as it is.

We start with Maths and Sam gets stuck in.

Owen worked well too and it was great to see him feeling pleased with his progress. 370 points is a wicked score and he made sure I took a photo.

Sam and Blokey decided to watch Life with David Attenborough. They both thoroughly enjoyed it. Whilst they did that, Owen and I looked at another Infinity School lesson, today fossils. 

We researched how we can prove dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago. 

Then at how fossils are made and finally made salt dough fossils of our own. Owen really enjoyed this activity..he was so enthusiastic to make the dough and then found items to press in the dough to form his 'fossils'.

In the afternoon Blokeys parents called in with his birthday present and I took part in a telephone interview with the wonderful Charity Cerebra. I made steak pies which Sam wolfed down then we went for another walk, whilst Owen and Blokey enjoyed a bit of time together.

Sam and I out walking in the now daily fog. We were chuckling about the fun we could have making these trees into a catapult.

The next day I couldn't run because there was ice everywhere. The sun actually came out late morning , so we went off exploring after the boys had finished their maths sessions. It was a busy start to the day as we had various deliveries to deal with and as usual the boys found this both disruptive and anxiety inducing....therefore I did too. It's catching!

The pond in the play area was frozen and the boys enjoyed playing with the ice and measuring it's thickness in various places.

All the plants looked like they were furry and fluffy.

We had a play in the equipment, then walked into the main part of the village before getting home for some lunch.

In the afternoon the children played with their friends and went to jujitsu. They were tired because they had been up very early, to make sure they could give Blokey the birthday presents they had bought him.

The next day Sam worked on his maths, then requested we look at 'space'. He chose the Solar System

He needed to find the eight planets, but his excited brain was jumping everywhere. I know, it's so unlike him *chuckles*.He managed most but got side tracked frequently but that was ok because he was exploring other theories as he did so. 

We talked about Pluto now being a dwarf planet ( highly controversial ), then compared Sam's list of planets with the official versions.

He got most of them, but as you can see, there were extras. It's hard to tell if some were real or it was just that Sam believed they were ...I would have researched them but he was moving along so fast I didn't get chance. 

We found information on research into a ninth planet, so read up on that.

Sam then put his planets in order, he started with the nearest to the sun and worked to the farthest. He was pretty sketchy on that , so we checked his facts as we went.

We then read about the temperatures of the planets and Sam chose to write these next to some of the planet names he already had on his list. (See above) .

He practiced his letters as he went along too.

Owen and Sam both regularly forget about number places, so Owen chose to do a some work on what the places mean and writing numbers in columns. It also makes him understand the importance of making his figures legible.

We took it in turns to write numbers and equations out.

Afterwards we played Horrible Histories Top Trumps.

Owen enjoyed Infinity maths so much yesterday, he wanted to do more lessons today.

He started by attempting to write his times tables out. He was doing really well but misinterpreted the instructions slightly and felt he had messed up his work. 

I jollied him along and wrote some of the next set out for him and he supplied the answers, sometimes writing them in, other times reading them out to me.

We had three full sheets and talked bout the number patterns...he likes patterns.

Next we drew up a time table grid. We have attempted this before but he struggled to grasp it. So he did look apprehensive initially, but this time saw the number patterns quickly and really enjoyed telling me what to fill in the squares with.

We them practiced using the grid and he was really pleased with the he finished work. He's done quite a bit of pen work this week , and as he tired I stepped in to enable him to finish any work and to prevent him feeling dejected. He seems to be building on his skills slowly but surely but it's incredibly hard for him.

Sam slept late and then sat and worked on The RM app. He's becoming very independent with this programme now. It was nice to be asked to explain something to him on this day, as he hasn't needed any input from me for a couple of weeks. Once I explained the question, he understood what to do and flew through it all so fast, I barely had time to read the questions.

After maths I showed Sam and app that plots the stars and planets, we talked some more about yesterday's topic and I was able to expand on some of the stars he had asked about. We are lucky to have home ed friends with interests in this field , so I had picked their brains the previous evening about some of the stars Sam had mentioned the day before. When prompted he remembered it was the Vega star, not the vagus star...it's the first one you can see in the evening.

We then all played UNO , which is always fun.

Owen listened to his music whilst he played.

When activities were finished they children went off to play upstairs in their rooms together.

There was much excitement because we were going to Flipout by our friends. Sadly, I became ill and had to go to the doctors at short notice. Our lovely friends kindly offered to collect the boys and take them whilst Blokey ran me to the GP for an emergency appointment. I was covered in Shingles. 

The boys had a lovely time and it helped them destress from watching their mother gradually turn red and itchy. 

The next day was spent quietly doing our own thing, I was feeling pretty wiped out , so we all took it easy.

Owen took himself off for a shower:

Sam played Wordfued and chess with his dad.

Owen laced online with one of his home ed friends and Sam did a bit of playing in the rain.