Cakes, Trains and Chinese Lanterns

It rained a lot today.

When it rains, the boys just want to stay at home and I must say it was a little tempting as we've just moved house and we are still settling in. But I know that, although we generally have a really good, active learning time over breakfast, it's more difficult to be motivated if we stay at home all day.

So after an hour or so of counting in 5s (as you do) we did what we often do when it rains: visit Derby Museum.

When I was little, I used to groan at the thought of being dragged around museums and art galleries. But nowadays, museums like Derby are so kid friendly and have loads of things to do and read and play with, my boys think that going to a museum is a massive treat.

First we joined in with some Chinese Lantern making in celebration of the Year of the Pig (we had watched a few videos about Chinese New Year that morning).

tl clockwise: using a ruler; cutting along the lines,
teamwork cutting sellotape; more cutting

Then we played 'find an animal that... climbs trees / lives in a burrow / eats fish etc'. This involves me standing at one end of the gallery and saying one of the above, and Ferdy and Gil race around the gallery looking for an animal fitting the description. It's quite a noisy game.

'Find an animal that lives underground..'

Next we went to our new favourite gallery, Objects of Love, Hope and Fear: A World Collection. This is a new gallery and is crammed full of objects from every corner of the globe, and in a week where parents have been challenging a school in Birmingham for its open minded attitude to teaching about LGBT lessons, it felt appropriate to read books like 'It's OK to be different', All Kinds of Families and Everybody Cooks Rice. Oh and one about a monster called Bernadette who wants to just have group hugs..

Ferdy requested that we make some rice when we went home, but on the way back his request turned to chocolate muffins. Getting him to weigh everything out is a really good way for him to learn about bigger numbers and weight measurements. I wasn't very impressed however, when he said he'd added 1g of spit to the 225g of flour because he was drooling over the chocolate.

225g of flour and 1g of saliva

Our day ended with Ferdy writing about me: My Mummy is tall (yesssssss no one has ever called me tall), she has brown eyes and is nice. My cup runneth over.