Christmas crochet

Have been crocheting chocolate orange covers for my nieces and nephew. Pattern from here for the penguin.

Here they are - quite pleased with these

Advent 2016

Delayed in posting this but here are our advent plans for this year

Luke helped me to make all these envelopes to help our countdown. They are filled with the activities we will be doing each day - e.g. church nativity, visiting Christmas tree festival OR things we will be making e.g. salt dough decorations, Christmas cards, presents for library staff.

I have raided the library again to help complete the stack of 25 books! - lots of wrapping.

Also we are looking at this short devotional with a short reading and sticker for each day.

Should be fun ;)

ENWC Nov - Fungi

This week we were focusing on fungi.
We discovered

• fungi have no chlorophyll
• they obtain their food from other dead material
• they send out threads called mycellium
• mushrooms are the fruiting body of the fungi
• mushrooms produce spores not seeds

Here is what I spotted - no idea what they all called!

Also spotted a rabbit and a rainbow ;)

The boys found more fungi in the garden

Her is the largest and smallest!

We made some spore prints - pretty cool

Autumn crafts

I love all the Autumn colours.

We made a bowl with some of the leaves we collected

Amy chose some autumnal flowers and made a vase with a pumpkin

We made a sticky picture at the beginning of Autumn and had a go at symmetry with more autumn leaves.

ENWC Oct Autumn Trees study

 After having a walk down into the local woods the children all decided to choose a tree from the garden to study over the next year. Ben and Amy both decided on this one in the front border- Euonymus Alatus - its bright colours attracted them I think!

 Luke decided to look at the plum tree in the back garden.


Here are the notebook pages the children made:

I love our tree studies - never noticed the little fruit on this plant before

Trips Sept - Oct

15/9/16
On Ben's first day at college, Luke, Amy and I headed to St Annes to make the most of the lst of the summer. It was a bit hazy during the morning but brightened up after lunch. Here they are on the prom

and doing some Maths on the beach

It was a long way to the sea so we just made our own moat!

Muller Wiseman visit 23/9/16

Learnt all about the process of milk getting from the farm to the fridge. The dairy works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year so we can have our milk for breakfast!

The tankers can hold up to 30,000 litres and are insulated to keep the milk cool. They collect the milk at each farm once a day and the driver checks the quality and takes a sample. This is tested again when the tanker returns to the dairy.

Once the tanker arrives at the dairy, another sample is taken before the milk can be transferred to large chilled silos. Each of these holds up to 250,000 litres.From the silos, the milk goes to be pasteurised, which involves heating the milk very quickly to 72oC for a minimum of 25 seconds and then cooled to ensure there are no germs.

The cream is then separated from the milk before being combined to make the different types of milk, including whole milk and semi–skimmed milk. Whole milk is homogenised to mix the cream with the milk.

The milk is then packaged into cartons, plastic or glass bottles. All of which are colour-coded into the different types of milk, skimmed (red), semi skimmed (green), whole (blue) and 'the One' (purple).

Dewlay Cheese 29/9/16

Thought we would follow up the milk visit with a trip to a cheese makers as I'd spotted this place close to Bens college

We were surprised how much was done by hand.

We purchased some yummy creamy Lancashire from the shop ;)

6/10/16 Visited Andrea in Blackpool and had a walk along the front

13/10/16 Afternoon walk with the Welbys

ENWC Oct Pond Study

On Friday we visited out local park to see what was going on at the pond in Autumn

Three pairs of Mallards watched us carefully

Emergent plants

Think these are flag iris

Water lilies (partially submerged)

Lots of duckweed at this end

A view from up the hill

Here are our nature journals