Wednesday

Lots of work today. We read history together. Tessa opted to do science while Josiah wrote his climbing diary. Tessa read to me from the science book, How Nature Works, then we collected flowers and dissected them, trying to identify the various parts, before grinding the petals to make chromatograms, separating the coloured pigments. The chromatograms weren't entirely successful; we think we misunderstood the instructions and we should have ground whole plants or at least whole flowers, not just the petals, so that there would be a wider variety of pigments in the solution. Might try again tomorrow.

Next Tessa wanted to do maths; it's the first time she's initiated maths work in a while. I presented an activity on adding and subtracting negative numbers, which Tessa quickly mastered. I'll present the Negative Snake Game to her next; I should probably get it out and practise first - it's been a while. Josiah and I read from his current science book, The Variety of Life. The kids recorded the final lines for their Lego movie and Geoff helped them manipulate the recordings to make them sound like Darth Vader etc.

Everyone in the family except me is reading Artemis Fowl books. I read the first one a couple of years ago and didn't like it at all. I like good heroes. But Josiah heard about the books and got the first out of the library (soon to be followed by the rest). He loves them - is completely hooked - we've found him still reading at one in the morning on a couple of nights. I think he's up to about the fourth book now, and Tessa has started the second so she must like them too. Geoff's just started the first - not sure what he thinks yet.