Conservation conversations!
I wish it would rain. We need a really good thunderstorm to clear the air, it’s sweltering here still. Nevertheless, we got quite a bit done this morning (hopefully makes up for doing pretty much nothing this afternoon).
We were going to continue with a project we’re doing on Who Owns the Sun which is a Five in a Row book about slavery. But while I was sorting L out I asked M to get out his package from the Woodland Trust that arrived while we were away and looking through that sent us off on a completely different tack.
We read through the info about the signs of Autumn to look out for as part of Nature Detectives and M put the posters up on the dining room wall. They sent some lovely booklets, stickers and posters. We got sent an extra set so if anyone hasn’t registered and wants the spare ones let me know. I think we’ll have to go out for more of a local look around and see if there are any brambles close by to watch and see where our nearest horse chestnut trees and so on are.
In with the autumn pack was a flyer for Stop Climate Chaos so we read through that and went to look at the website. Then we got involved in filling in the thing to petition Tony Blair about climate change. This led on to a long discussion which covered global warming, monitoring spring and autumn events to see how they are changing, greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, what makes carbon dioxide and what reduces it, photosynthesis, how a greenhouse works, transferring heat energy through conduction, convection and radiation, the electromagnetic spectrum, fossil fuels and alternative energy (though we didn’t get on to nuclear energy), expecting other nations to implement changes if we aren’t prepared to change things ourselves, reducing energy consumption. We talked about doing the “save it” section for his silver Wildlife Action award but M didn’t get as far as actually starting it. (Ooh, I see RSPB have a new Climate Action award now - might see about sending off for the info for that.)
M also did 3 pages of fractions and is slowly getting the hang of them, I think. Today he was estimating fractions with length, volume and mass. He also surprised me by pulling out his Wizard Whimstaff science book and doing the section on how plants grow.
L went for a nap and A came home and made lunch which was lovely. In the afternoon M pestered me to try and get a computer game working that my mum had passed on to him because it wouldn’t run on her laptop. She might have told me it was in German!! First thing in the morning I had fiddled about on the PC in M’s bedroom to make enough disk space to install it, went through the installation navigating wierd errors with school German and got it running. But the sound doesn’t work properly on that PC and crackles horribly and all the instructions were in spoken German so M wasn’t getting anywhere. I said after lunch I’d try it on the main PC but after alot of fiddling we worked out it just won’t run on XP. So M was really upset and didn’t want to do anything.
We wnet out into the garden for 45 mins and M filled up the paddling pool with the hose. He invented a game with the hose and watering can, making a fountain, and L joined in. They had fun doing that for a while but then L got cold and M got bored and we came back inside.
M watched some Star Wars and L figured out how to climb on his rocking Tigger to look out of the front window - aarghh!! I had to video the process, so this photo is blurry because I’ve taken it from video.
They played for a bit and I looked online for energy saving light bulbs that are a similar size to normal ones, because we’ve tried getting them before and they don’t fit in the uplighter shades we have. Found some on the Green Shop website that look small and seem reasonable for cost and postage, so I’ve ordered one to try.
M went round to play in next door’s paddling pool and L and I went for a cool bath together as we were both hot, sticky and covered in thunderbugs. When A came home we went out to Tesco and the library and M signed up for the Reading Mission even though in Norfolk the librarians are not supposed to sign you up for it until “official launch day” tomorrow when school finishes for the summer. We’ve agreed he’s going to read some chapter books for his 6 books so it’s a slight challenge - otherwise he’d probably pick 6 Asterix books and finish them in a couple of days. He’s chosen some random ghost teachers (?) book and a book of Just William stories (we’ve been listening to Just William from Audible this week).
