Plant Power

 Conveniently, both boys are learning about flowers, plants and place value this week at school, so it didn't require a huge amount of creative thought to plan some place value maths work and a visit to the botanical gardens.

Following some spellings and handwriting practice (Ferdy's handwriting seems to have somewhat deteriorated over the summer, perhaps due to six week without writing a single thing), we played Place Value Guess Who. It's self explanatory really: Gil's numbers were two digits and Ferdy's, four digits and we had to guess each other's numbers by asking questions like 'what is ten less than your number?' and 'how many hundreds does it have'. They could use dienes and column addition and subtraction if needed.

Our new audiobook is The Secret Garden so we listened to it on the way to the botanical gardens. I had forgotten how disagreeable and unpleasant poor little Mary Lennox is in the first half of the book so we talked a bit about how sometimes people are mean and grumpy to others because they are miserable and unhappy themselves.

After a miserable drive (which made Mum grumpy), the gardens were truly a breath of fresh air.

I had been worried that it would be difficult to capture their attention with plants and flowers, but I hadn't considered the carnivorous plants. Ferdy was enthralled by the Venus Fly Trap (middle picture) which we had to test out with bits of leaf and biro tips, and Gil was delighted to see pitcher plants in their natural habitat (we have some at home gobbling up the flies in our kitchen).

In addition to learning about these silent hunters, we befriended peacocks (Ferdy named one Dusty), Koi Carp, bumblebees, parakeets and squirrels; watched chrysalids hatching in the Butterfly House; balanced on rope bridges and climbed up the oak tree and conifer towers, looked at the autumnal blooming flowers like cosmos, echinaceas and rudbeckias (ok, this was more Mum than Ferdy and Gil who were more interested in the insects pollenating them and what would happen if a bumblebee fell in a fly trap) and discussed stories about fly traps named Len and Simon.

Dusty

The first full week back is often pretty tough as Ferdy finds the transition between home and school really hard, and Gil is happy but slightly unsettled by the adjustment from reception to year one, so running around and soaking up a bit of nature felt like the right thing to do.

And when Ferdy got stuck in the turnstile at the end of the day, after I had told him multiple times not to play with it, how could I really get cross when he retorted that he was like the fly in the fly trap?