Wipeout..!!

The show Total Wipeout (http://www.totalwipeout.co.uk) is very popular in this house... Especially the 'big red balls' and 'sucker punch'.

Being Christmas we decided to take a little break from structured learning and instead turn our energies into creative pursuits.... In layman's terms - we played Lego :)

This is our attempt at recreating the total wipeout zone, with participating contestants from the world of Star Wars (of course):

Actually quite a challenge for J, as he has such a defined sense of how things should look 'exactly' like the real thing, it was hard work for him to accept that it was okay if it wasn't a precise replica... 

We're going to be doing quite a bit of work on that in the new year, looking at examples where it's okay to not always follow rules and experimenting with different ideas...

Salt dough and penguins...

December brings winter... And so our activities have taken a frosty Christmas theme. Now if anyone can give me good salt dough recipe that doesn't make the colours go all yucky When baked I would be grateful :)

These are our glittery salt dough ornaments before the oven mutilated them...

We've also started a small Antartica project, mostly penguin related ... One very cool thing we found (no pun intended) was a stack of penguin ID cards that we sorted various ways : by size, weight and our personal preferences.

One of our less successful projects involved trying to make an igloo from sugar cubes... Unfortunately I had forgotten that by using glue we would dissolve the sugar...! Needless to say, the igloo looked a bit 'rustic' after a couple of hours...

Quite entertaining though.. And we managed to salvage a bit of 'science' education from it - why things dissolve :)

Looking after the animals...

Our nature challenge this week was to do something nice for some wild animals now winter is coming.. So we made bird feeders.

All we used was an old food pot, some string, a bag of mixed fruit and nuts and some lard to bind it all together.  So far no birds.... although as a small person correctly pointed out we do still have our scarecrow in the garden, so might well be sending a mixed message :)

Snowflakes...

It was time to decorate our noticeboard with some wintery themed decorations :)

Out go the orange and brown leaves, scarecrow and pumpkins... In comes the snowflakes and paper chains!

I was tasked with making some Star Wars one... Luckily I found some awesome templates via my pal google : how-to-make-diy-star-wars-snowflakes-free-templates

I'm sure there could be more detail, but they're fine for us.

Meanwhile, cup decorating has been going on, there's a definite love for penguins in this house...

Ice ball...!!

After two days in the freezer our ice ball was ready to hatch:

Hopefully if we get snow this winter we can make some more... they look really pretty, but need really cold weather to last any longer than a day or two.

We made this one with a balloon full of water and food colouring.  When it's frozen the balloon simply peels away from the ice.

Why does it rain...?

For our science experiment today we looked at why and how it rains.  This is quite a quick and easy experiment to do, but quite effective.

All you need is a glass vase, water, shaving foam and food colouring.  First fill the vase with water, then add a generous helping of foam.  Lastly add some food dye and watch as it seeps through the clouds and drips out into the water.

It was good fun adding the food dye... which is why this looks like a very bad storm has happened :)

We had a talk about water evaporation and the cycle of water too.  Along with looking at what causes thunder and lightening.

I've recently seen another experiment that shows evaporation quite clearly and think we'll have a go at this one too: http://www.weatherwizkids.com/experiments-make-rain.htm  In fact I can see us looking at quite a bit of that website over the next few weeks.

Meanwhile in our freezer is a balloon full of water waiting to (hopefully) produce a nice coloured ice ball.

A walk in the creepy forest

The nature challenge this week was a good one for using some of the woodland bits we have been collecting all Autumn.

The task was to make a mini woodland area, and then make a treasure map (with a key) to go with it.  The aim was to make one that we could give to someone else which they could follow.

You'll notice that the very useful cat litter tray is making another appearance :)

This is the corresponding map:

My favourite bit is the swamp with it's very own swamp monster.  The good news is that someone else was able to follow the map and found the treasure buried in 'Hot Mountains'.

Build it up....

This week has ended up being a bit about construction... and purely by chance!

On Monday, at science club, we had the challenge of making a tall tower from marshmallows and spaghetti.. not as easy as I thought it would be!  Firstly because you have to be careful not to snap the spaghetti (this happened a lot) and secondly because it's quite tough not to eat all the marshmallows..

After a while it becomes very obvious that the strongest structures are made from triangles.
We may have to do this one again and find some more 'real life' examples of structures that use this method.

I found this very therapeutic, in fact it's possible that I enjoyed this activity way more than any of the children did :)

Today we ended up on a surprise trip the the Milestones museum : http://www3.hants.gov.uk/milestones/

There's quite a lot there, but most importantly at this time of year: it's all sheltered :)  We found some foam blocks that need careful placement to build a viaduct, and after a few attempts made this:

All about Owls...

Our nature challenge this week was to make an owl, My original idea was to do something with leaves, but all the things we have attempted with leaves and glue have gone a bit disastrously wrong of late!  I think we must be using the wrong sort or something :D

Instead we made our own leaves and coloured them with crayons to get a slightly uneven/feather like appearance.  The feathers were all coloured separately and cut out, then overlapped onto the outline of the owl body.

A brilliant suggestion from J to mount it onto black card too:

Plus you might just be able to see where he has added the all important talons and a branch to perch on...

Italia Giorno! (or something like that)

Today was Italy day... We learned all about where Italy is and a few pieces of history too.

First up we made clay plates and decorated them in a Roman style with some simple tools:

Followed by a look at mosaics.  We've done paper mosaics a few times before, but this one was with coloured pasta... J chose to make a scene rather than a pattern - and plumped for a Star Wars battle scene (of course), with explosions and a crumbling building:

We did this at a local group, but I definitely think we can do this again at home: pick a country and learn bits about it for the day, even incorporating some of the language and food.  

Our project for this term has been all about Australia, which are are doing much more in-depth - choosing a different animal to look at each time, drawing it, finding out it's habits etc.. and later on we will be making boomerangs and some sort of montage of all things Oz...

Potions and lanterns....

We caught up on our nature challenges last week.  We usually do one every week, but missed one as we had done some many things the week before.

First up, we made a woodland potion.... We used up lots of ingredients from our nature table, with some 'forest water' (basically tap water with green food dye in it) and some glitter.

Here's how it ended up:

All mixed together with a stick and labelled up so that no-one mistakes it for a tasty drink :)

This potion is one that will help defeat the Sith.

Next up we made an autumn lantern.  Having tried lots of activities with leaves and glue, and failed at all of them... we decided to use autumn coloured tissue paper.  This was torn up and stuck with watered down glue to a jar.  We added a handle made of string, and a tea light:

I think we can experiment with making Star Wars lanterns at a later date - maybe with some figures made form black paper to give a cool silhouette effect...

Halloween... sort of....

We don't really 'do' Halloween in our house, for lots of reasons really...  But more recently it seems to be about the all the things that small person doesn't enjoy - the scary ghost stuff, face painting etc..

We did however indulge in a little pumpkin carving.  We got a small pumpkin and while I did all the actual carving the design itself is all down to J...

Best viewed after dark I think:

Up and over...

We've been meaning to do this for ages, and yesterday we finally found a bit of time...

 Four sticks for a frame, some string to use as sticky web and a couple of added accessories!

Quite a good exercise in coordination skills, we've been practising laces recently so this helps with the whole 'up and under' technique.... plus it looks kinds cool too!

Squares, circles and bubbles!

Science club today carried on the theme of looking at colours.  In particular using inspiration from Mondrian and Kadinsky.

You've probably seen Mondrian's work without knowing it :
http://lisathatcher.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/piet-mondrian-line-over-form/

It's not to everyone's taste (like all art),  but I like it, it's very striking and very easy for working with children as the concepts are easy to explain and replicate.

This was done as a piece of group work and each child painted one (or more in some cases) square each, I've not seen the finished outcome yet, but expecting it to look very cool.

The second artist we looked at was Kadinsky, specifically 'Circles within a circle'

I like this painting... a lot... I would happily sit this on my wall..

However, I like the following one more, because it's my boy's interpretation of it :)



Lastly we looked at bubbles - who doesn't like bubbles... It ended up by being a bit of a competition as to who could blow the biggest 'mound', and I confess I regressed right into this one :)
We did however get to look at all the shapes that pop in between the bubbles, we had some hexagons and pentagons, and although we tried very hard we didn't manage to make a cube - I suspect for that we need the 'bubble guy' that was on Paul Daniels about 30 years ago... I know I'm not the only person that remembers him: http://youtu.be/np4n5PPIa38 (jump to about 4 minutes in to see the cube)

Look out, it's a crocokat..!

We were investigating myths and legends today and spend some time looking at unicorns and what other animals they might look like and why.  I learned that many years ago people thought that hippos were magical because they 'sweat out blood', but of course now we know that this is just their natural skin protection from the sun... interesting stuff though.

We ended up by making our own mythical creatures.  All you need are two paper cubes joined together with a split pin (so you can twist them round) and then four animals, coloured and cut in half stuck to each side.
When you rotate the boxes you can make some cool combinations.  Our favourites were the crocokat and the crocopard

When I'm feeling adventurous I might suggest we try this again with three blocks...

What do spiders really think about conkers...?

Have you heard the one about spiders not liking the smell about conkers..?

Yes me too, so we decided to test the theory a little.

We found a place in the house that spiders seem to like, kept watch over two days, introduced a big bowl of conkers, and then kept watch for any changes..

Our conclusion: that our spiders don't really care about conkers at all... in fact there was no change, as you can see from the above checklist.

I suspect that the smell you need to deter them would need to be of a significantly high concentration. Perhaps we can invest in some 'essence of conker' to test that further, but for now we'll just use our stash to make more conkers worms...

Messy fingers..!!

Today, with the entire house feeling a little under the weather with grotty coughs and colds, we thought maybe a day of writing and reading was not a good plan..

Instead we discovered Hama beads... I've never really understood what they are about before and had no experience with them whatsoever, so a little learning curve for us both.  Actually it turned out to be quite a good exercise in concentration, since following the pattern wasn't that easy and the beads were quite small - especially hard as I had the board upside-down, who knew there was a 'top' to a circle.

It turns out they are quite clever and a simple process of ironing after the beads have been placed means you can create some interesting things...

This is our first attempt:

And of course with a few leftover beads you can also make lightsabers 

I've found a few Star Wars bead pattern online, so I think we might have another go at this. Check out the Storm Trooper: http://queverdestas.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/creatividad-hama-beads/enhanced-buzz-2807-1301930841-6/

We also made some finger print trees today.  Knowing that mucky hands is not something that sits well with little fingers I thought this might be expecting the impossible.  However, with a little coaxing, and by getting stuck in myself to show how it's done, we made these :

We drew the tree trunks yesterday and coloured them in felt pens, and then just mixed up a load of green paints slightly different shades for the leaves which we made today with finger tips.

Not a bad morning considering the house is all full of lemsip and tissues...

It's not Autumn until you've made a conker worm...

We've managed to find a good couple of horse chestnut trees this year that haven't been completely pillaged by the local children.

At the weekend I was passing on my conker playing skills - you remember the game: the one where you have a conker on a length of string and someone else tries to hit it with their conker (invariably soaked in vinegar or baked to make it harder) and you keep smashing them together until one breaks or someone's hand gets accidentally smashed...

To avoid all the usual *pitfalls (*injuries) we used small conkers and haven't artificially hardened them.  Actually it was a lot more difficult than I remember to even hit the thing!

Today we used up a load making conker worms... this is a thing it seems that ever one knew about but me.  So yesterday I spend a good part of the day smashing conkers with nails to make the holes, and then today we fed wire through them to make these :

I know worms don't normally have eyes, but it just looked like a string of conkers otherwise - call it artistic licence.

Also we have started an experiment to see if it's true that spiders don't like the smell of conkers... today is day one, I'll report back after day four is complete.

 

Wookie Cookies...

Today we made Wookie Cookies - what makes them Wookie Cookies..?  Well, aside from the rule that everything relates to Star Wars in some way, it's also true that Chewbacca can't resist a chocolate chip, and has been know to rip the arms and legs off people when he can't have them... I'm sure that's how it went in the film anyway...

The recipe is here http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/text/wookiee-ookies.htm for anyone that has a Wookie coming to tea...

Fungus... the return...

I thought it might fun today to do some follow up work on mini beasts that we started on Monday and a closer look at fungus after our brilliant finds last week...

We started off making our own mini beasts, my favourites being the spider with the cool santa hat on and the caterpillar, none of mine quite made the cut...

These were made from a great template we found on http://www.naturedetectives.org.uk which is our new best friend for anything nature related, there are so many free resources on there and the child membership for just £12 a year is an added bonus - it's going to keep us busy (and outdoors) all year round!

Then I thought it would be fun to use a book I borrowed from the library yesterday on Fungi to find out the names of the things we found last week.... little did I know that there are about a billion (ok not that many, but there are A LOT) and many of them look exactly the same to a complete novice like me.  We managed a few, but the rest will need an expert eye I think..

We moved onto looking at some of the silly names that fungi can be called and tried to work out some real ones from fake ones..  Some of my personal favourites : moon carrot rust and dingy twiglet, but all of them had us giggling for quite a bit of the day.

And because there is one that we can always identify, we made our own Fly Agaric, it's also one of my favourite looking and really brightens up the nature table:

Tomorrow we're going out to look for owl pellets, amongst other things, in the hope we find some animal bones, along with any animal tracks since we don't seem to have found any lately...  It's important for Jedi to have these tracker skills as you never know when a mission will take you to an unknown planet...

Shhh.... we don't talk about science club....

A couple of weeks ago we started working on the British Science CREST awards in a small group with other children.  It's a good opportunity for mixing, it builds on the skills used for problem solving using practical investigation and it's also loads of fun.

We usually do a few craft activities before the science stuff and this week we were looking at rainbows....

We started off by adding powdered paint to a wet piece of card (it's possible that the children found squirting water over the cards the most fun bit), and then applying another piece of wet card on top to make a sort of paint sandwich..

Not sure I have described that very well, but the effect is pretty cool - the water makes all the paint run into each other and you get some nice effects, I can see the basic outline of a tree in this one...

I think it looks very nice as it is, but also think this would be a great backdrop for some black silhouettes of things - we may well try that... assuming I can get a nice enough day outside to do it though - this is definitely not an activity to do indoors!

The second craft activity we did was to make a rainbow star, excellent folding skills went on with this one and again really pleased with how it turned out

Ignore the mess in the background... when the sun is really bright the colours through the paper look amazing.

The science bit this week was all about mini beasts, I was most impressed to have found a millipede while all the boys seemed to focus on finding spiders... 

Craft free week...

Not much crafting at all this past week, except for some pottery painting (photos to follow) we have been doing lots of outdoor things though.  One of our projects at the moment is Autumn, so there has been lots of foraging and looking out for mini beasts, wildlife, leaves, seeds and fungi.

Unfortunately in the woods where we were the ground wasn't any good for animal tracks, but we did find loads of fungi... Don't ask me to name them all as I have no idea..!  Hoping we can find some names to them all this week...

Today we ended up doing none of the things we had planned (including the homework I need to do for Tuesday!) Instead we went on a conker hunt, sorted out some plants in the garden and made a blackberry pie, which was delicious... The recipe is here: http://shows.stv.tv/this-morning/food/239145-phil-vickerys-fresh-blackberry-pie-recipe/

I do like Autumn :)

Camping in the Namib desert..

Continuing with our look at habitats, this week we decided to go camping (sort of).  The decision was made for this to be in the desert, so we set about looking at desert habitats - what they might be like, what we would need to survive, what animals there might be and so on...

We made a few critters to keep us company, he chose to make a dune ant, white lady spider, gecko and side winder snake.  Plus we added a few that we already had...

Luckily as the Namib desert is situated right inside our living room we didn't have to worry about jet lag.  Which meant we could get down to the important business of food: first up toasted marshmallows.

And since we were... err... roughing it and living off the land, we had a good old fashioned 'campfire' to cook our freshly caught main meal.. Not that easy with the wind and slight rain fall... coupled with the fact I'm not all that skilled at cooking over flames...

 

We did have to be careful of the local wild animals..

But we did have all the essentials for a (relatively) good night sleep.

Don't worry I moved the snake before we got in...

Not a bad night sleep considering, although I won't be sorry to be back in my own bed tonight..!

Next time it's been suggested we camp in the rainforest on hammocks - I have NO idea how I'm going to make that one happen...