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.