Rubens Barn doll giveaway

There's a giveaway over at a Patch of Puddles :) I like giveaways :)
Anyway, this one will only happen if they get 100 comments. At 200 and then 300 comments more dolls are added to the giveaway. The dolls look lovely. They are new to me but look like something both my 2 would like. We're very much a doll household here - The Girl loves them.
Fingers crossed! (And toes! ) ;)

Lego Creation Thursday

The Lego Club magazines arrived today which prompted a Lego building fest :) They built a city complete with playground. And seeing as how it is Thursday, I thought we'd post them as part of the Lego creation Thursday meme hosted here :)

This is a climbing frame in the playground. you can see the slide in the background :)

This is the street :) One of the houses even has a helipad on the roof of the garage :)

p.s I know it's technically not Thursday here anymore, but it was Thursday when they built them and I haven't gone to bed yet, so it's still Thursday to me :)

Chicken pox boy

Boykin has chicken pox. At last! And fortunately he's not too miserable or too itchy. He's had a few days on the sofa under a quilt listening to stories and watching films. Today it's Home Alone 3 [DVD] [1997] because the main character also has chicken pox :) I remember my eldest loving Home Alone when it first came out.... he booby-trapped the whole of the house!
Because he's not really ill with it, we've caught up on some reading :) For book group this month, we've all got to read a Roald Dahl book. Boykin chose Fantastic Mr Fox and The Girl chose Matilda. We finished Boykin's book ina few hours and he drew a lovely picture of Mr Fox to go on our group display board in the library where we meet. We've got half way through Matilda and have also started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I'm hoping to finish before the film comes out.
Boykin is suffering spottiness and the Girl had a bit of a sore throat. Nothing too serious so she's happily gone with friends to Tropical World for our local HE group trip.
Whilst her brother languishes on the settee, she's enjoyed listening to the stories and has done some reading of her own - Living Long Ago by Agnes Allen. As she's decided that she wants to get baptised, we've been reading What is Baptism? and looking at the Christianity section in The Usborne Encyclopedia of World Religions. I like this book as it gives an interesting and fairly full description of the world's major religions without bias. It also has internet links which eventually lead her to this site which contains loads of maths and english games which she enjoyed playing for about an hour or so. Best of all it's British so the spelling is right and the money is sterling :) They even have a page of games with a Christmas theme :)
It's been a nice gentle few days all cosied up at home in front of our newish open fire. But I have to admit, I'll be more than happy to leave the house again when the Boy is no longer contagious. Roll on Saturday!

Books in this post

Living Long Ago (Living in History S.)

Lego Unit

This was a more independent project for The Girl which she approached with enthusiasm. Obviously this is the way forward for her now :)
I downloaded this Digital Lego Unit from Walking by the Way blog. This was really fun and easy for her to do as all the links are included in the text of the file. In fact everything is provided including the lapbooking pieces :) It's a while since The Girl made a lapbook (Boykin is the one who's really into them) but she thoroughly enjoyed this project and cut out and constructed all the minibooks herself - something she usually asks me to do for her. She made the cover herself in Photoshop :)


She did pretty much all the activities except for the extra graphing and the digital designer as we couldn't get it to work on our computer :( She also built a car from the instructions in one of her own Lego sets as she didn't have the right pieces for the taxi. I knew this unit was a good thing for her when on day 3 she declared it was "really fun!". Yay!

Unfortunately, as is the case with lots of internet stuff, some of the links on the Lego website don't work but this doesn't stop it from being enjoyable. For Day 3, I found this site that gives an explanation of how Lego bricks stick together so that she could complete the minibook. I couldn't get the film of how Lego bricks are made to work but found a youtube video that did. There are other links to other videos showing some of the amazing things people make with Lego too. Our favourite one is this :)

Follow The Drinking Gourd

This week Boykin rowed Follow The Drinking Gourd. He has really enjoyed it. It's been really obvious how enthused he's been by it from the way he described it in great detail at bookgroup :) However, it's really obvious he hasn't got to grips with the idea of an analogy. Every time he describes the underground railroad (railway to us) he makes it quite obvious that he thinks the people were really under the ground. Bless!
We did most of the activities in the Five in a Row Manual through discussion. It has been lovely to see what he added himself - drawing a compass - and what he pre-empted in some of the lessons - looking at detail, counting and finding the clues from the song. One of the beauties of FIAR is that by reading the book five times in quick succession, you get a really good chance to look at the pictures and get familiar with them by the time the art stuff comes up (day 3).
The book itself has some ideas for activities and also has the music for the song in the back. Even without the FIAR manual, you could still cover quite a bit just from the book itself. We learned the song and sang it together when it came up in the story. It also had an extra appeal for Boykin because it is based on fact.
For fun, and to add to their knowledge of slavery (by this time the Girl had become interested in what we were doing), we watched this clip from "The King and I" to compare the two stories of escaping slaves. The play performed for the King is based on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe.




To look at time, I got all the time telling devices we had in the house and tried to guess when a minute as passed. This was a useful topic to look at with the Boy because he is forever asking how many nights until christmas/birthdays/easter etc. I also read a story from Two-Minute Kitten Tales, just to see if it was two minutes long.

For the cotton part of the science stuff, he did some sewing, filled a minibook with different types of cotton, tried his hand at 'spinning' cottonwool between his fingers and looked at the growing a pair of Jeans section in The Global Garden. (His idea) :) We also got out a a mini cotton bale that had been sent back with one of our Flat Travellers.

For the constellations bit, we made a mini planetarium from Simple Experiments with Time. We used a pringles tube, black paper, sellotape and some red paper to cover the outside of the tube. It's quite a simple idea but if I were to do it again for this story I would simplify it a little. The idea is that you mark out the constellation of The Plough and the Pole Star and Cassiopeia on the black paper so that it fits within the diameter of the pringles tube. (This is where I would simplify it and would not include Cassiopeia. It's not really relevent for this story and it just confused my Boy). Cut the bottom off the tube. Make holes in the paper where the stars are and tape the paper to one end the tube. We covered it in red paper at this point just to make it look nicer. Shine a torch through the tube and it projects the image onto the wall. We found that we had to hold the tube very close to the wall to get a clear image. It's actually much easier to point the tube at a lightsource and look through it like a telescope. All good fun :)

And then he put it all together in a lapbook :)

This is cute :) This is his version of one of the illustrations in the book where the runaway slaves hide under a barn floor. His hiding slaves are happy because they are playing with a bouncy ball so that they don't get bored :D

Useful links

NG Underground Railway game
HSS resources and lapbook
cotton worksheets
Alphabet song (youtube)
Paul Robeson singing Go Down Moses (youtube)
Johnny Cash singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot (youtube)


Books we used

The Seasons (Finding Out About Science)
The Stars and Their Legends (Ladybird books)
Cotton (Giraffe Books)

Blackpool

Today we went to Blackpool :)
My mum suggested we took the kids to Blackpool for the illuminations before they finish this weekend and it made sense to go up the tower as autumn is well and truly on its way into winter.
We went up the Eiffel Tower last year so I was looking forward to taking my two up the British just-over-half-size version. Unfortunately, it was grey and windy when we arrived so we never got to go up the top :(

The kids still enjoyed it though and it's not bad value for money at £12 for adults and £10 for kids. (Would've been better if we could've gone all the way up - I wanted to send my eldest a postcard from the top which would get it's special postmark.)
There's an aquarium.


A dinosaur animatronics walk with 3D 10 minute cinema.


A circus - which we weren't allowed to take any photos of :/ It was a 2 hour show with chinese acrobats. The best bit was when they lowered the floor of the ring and it filled up with water and had a fountain in the middle.
Jungle Jim's play gym - where Boykin and The Girl had great fun and we had a well-needed cup of tea.

And of course, the famous Tower Ballroom which they very much loved, surprisingly.



After all that, we did what must be done at the seaside and went for fish and chips in the cheapest chippy possible.


Then we braved the wind and rain to find a tram to see the lights.


Well, my two have never seen them before nor ridden on a tram before so they were most impressed and very happy and excited. Success!