Breakdowns and concerts.

It has been a busy week particularly with work where I have picked up a client that has lots of vintage items that she wanted selling.

My stock room has just been overhauled with new shelving and I thought I had lots of space spare until the vintage treasure trove arrived, I have spent many many hours listing these beautiful items and researching their value and slowly getting through the listing process, a quarter of the haul is listed so I have a long way to go before I manage to get through the lot.

In between listing we managed to get to a birthday party we where invited to in Blackpool which was an adventure in itself as we managed to pick up a flat tyre on the motorway on our way there, my trusty Touran does not have a spare tyre so we had to call out the rescue man who was fantastic with the kids, he even let Oliver lift the car down from the ramp, Oliver has been talking about breakdown rescue for quite a while so it seems he has experienced a life long goal of finding out what a roadside rescue man does, and to top it if he got to lower the car from the ramp, Oliver was so suitably impressed he promised the man he would put him in his book that he is currently writing.

They had a lot of fun on the verge too, running amongst the trees and spotting strange insects including one that looked like a worm with purple stripes...

Although we where very late for the party the kids had great fun at the Sandcastle waterpark and we spent all afternoon splashing around, what a great place, I cannot believe it has taken me so long to get there, we will definitely be going back.

We also managed to get some tickets to see Watoto Childrens Choir at Kings Church in Bolton

What a fabulous concert, those kids are brilliant, so lively and such beautiful voices, they shared  their stories and wowed the audience. The back story of Watoto is an inspirational one, whether you are religious or not it fills you with hope and is a story that demonstrates adversity can be overcome with a little will and a helping hand.

Most of the children have been orphaned due to war and HIV and other disease, the Ugandan Watoto village raises funds by sponsorship of the children and various other fund raising events, the choir being one of them.

The twins have definitely been inspired by the concert, they have listened to the CD non stop all week and have asked for bible stories, so we have started on the Candle Bible Stories that they had given to them when they where christened, they already know a lot of the stories in the bible and enjoyed going over some of the stories they already know and they raised a lot of questions.

Kings church itself is a fabulous church, very lively and very friendly, it is a shame we do not live closer, I would have made it my regular haunt, sadly I have never found anything with the same amount of life in my area and I tend to find myself yawning by the end of session so I gave up a long while ago.

Do you need washing?

I have nothing much to report after a few days of full on work to do so I thought I would leave you with this...

Dinsaurs from Top to Bottom

Today was a very exciting day, we had a trip to Daresbury Laboratory in Warrington, the place is a fascinating place and is renowned for its world leading scientific research in fields such as accelerator science, bio-medicine, physics, chemistry, materials, engineering and computational science. 

We where lucky enough to get tickets for the Dinosaurs from Top to Bottom Lecture presented by Mike Walley, great lecture, Oliver took part in being the biggest baddest T-Rex and asked his questions, the kids really enjoyed it.

The lecture was audience participation based so all the kids really got stuck in volunteering themselves to demonstrate the evolution of the T-Rex through to Dinosaur digestion.

Mike Walley did a great job of sharing the news of great new discoveries in the dinosaur world, he has great experience of delivering dinosaur workshops and his experience shines through.

His websites with details of his palaeontology and everything dinosaur has some great download resources.

Daresbury has an open day on 9th July so that is something else for us to pop in our calender, lots of science stuff to see and do on that day......

Udemy Courses

I have just discovered Udemy Online Courses, I have heard of Udemy on a few occasions lately and finally got round to checking them out as they have a 20% discount on at the moment.

I have to say I am blown away with the amount of courses that you can take and again video based which is great for us.

Some of the courses are free and some are paid, I have my eye on a few music courses for Olivia to try out, these will help her greatly in finding a central place for her self taught music lessons.

They have both been asking for a camera too, which I thought may be something I might do for their birthday coming up, I use a camera daily for my work and also just snapping away at the kids and their daily doings and I am a great lover of photography, I noticed a couple of photography courses I like the look of that we can all do together just for the fun of it really.

I am pretty pleased I found Udemy, Discover For yourself Udemy's latest courses! it looks like we will be spending quite a bit of time there.

Lego, Lego, Lego....

One thing we use a lot of in this house is Lego... I am forever standing on bits of bricks lying around on the floor, the kids play with Lego daily.

Last year we received the Lego Story Starter Pack and it had a great literacy curriculum to go with it, Lego Education have a fantastic array of educational resources to use with their Lego, you can find out more about that here from their Website...

They also have a FREE Lego Magazine, which we receive, Oliver has no interest and leaves Lego to Oliver so he has claimed the magazine for himself, he really enjoys it's arrival.

Oliver and Olivia have decided they want to create a Lego movie, this will be their first adventure into stop motion videos. They love making videos so I have set them a task where they have to make up a script and them present the finished thing. 

This is another task in working together as a team which they usually take on with ease, they fall into the dynamics and spread out their strengths and weakness, but as they are twins it is like a duck takes to water when it comes to working together for those two, thick as thieves they are...ha ha..

Hopefully I will update this post in the near future with their finished film....

Link Find of the month March 2016

Basic Algebra - http://www.mathpapa.com/algebra-lessons/

Exploring Africa http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/

Crash Course Kids https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCONtPx56PSebXJOxbFv-2jQ

Open 2 Study  https://www.open2study.com/

Code Warriors  http://www.codewarriorsgame.com/kai-web-kai

Look and Learn Childrens Art Competition  http://art.lookandlearn.com/

BREAKING NEWS!!!!...

The news today blew me away, I  had an inbox this morning from Conquer Maths that states...

 Boffins recalculate Pi to 3.37

They go on to say,  lengthy study by scientists at the Orbicular Research Institute at the University of Hull has just concluded that Pi is no longer 3.142 (3 d.p.).

The study, which has taken into account such factors as rotational speed of the Earth, the steady geomagnetic reversal of Earth and melting polar ice caps means that maths text books around the globe will need to be rewritten.

Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan announced this morning that the changes will be implemented into the National Curriculum from next September.

ConquerMaths will of course be modifying its lessons to comply with the new rules in time for the change.

Pi: 3.14 not any more!

So does this mean we get more Pizza for our money?

The short answer is ‘Yes’! Before this announcement, if you purchased a 12” pizza, you could expect around 113 square inches of pizza. Under the new rules, pizza companies will need to give you a surface area of 121 square inches, a gain of 8 square inches!

A pizza, yesterday

What else will change?

It’ll take a little longer to fly around the world. It currently takes around 8 hours to fly from London to New York. The changes to Pi mean that this journey is expected to increase by around half an hour.

Environmentalists are concerned that the increased fuel use could negate many green initiatives. Brian Dogood from Greenpeas said: “In this current climate where we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions, it seems ludicrous that the government should entertain such a radical change which will further deplete our fossil fuel resources as well as clog the sky with dirt and chemtrails.”

What do you think?

I am torn… you can’t argue with maths or physics but does that make this decision right? Share your comments with us!....

The mystery of the locked door continues and pondering...

The Sky looked positively gorgeous at 6.30 this morning.

It gave me a good start to the day and I even managed to get my door open to my living room. I ended up sitting on the floor and putting my back to the door and giving a good push, using my legs as a lever, it worked a treat, after a good few pushes.

How they managed to do that I will never know, my saving grace was the fact that there was room on the other side of the cabinet to give me that leverage I needed to get through the door. I am so relieved my 'locked out from my living room' saga is over, and I can now get back to getting some work done.... after my morning coffee of course...

Lots of ebaying was caught up with today and the kids had free reading as they have already finished The Secret Garden, I fixed the fence in the back yard as the dog keeps escaping and although she never goes far she poops on the next doors garden and I don't think they are best pleased, to be fair i make it sound like she is always running wild but she doesn't only once in the past week she has gotten out due to the fence panel being a bit broken after the last storms we had, and she has just discovered the hole in the chicken wire she can get through, so I tightened the chicken wire and made sure there was some secure wood to keep it in place until I get a new fence panel....

The chickens had a good clean out and  although I did not get round to putting the rubbish in the car for the tip which consists of old broken childrens ride on cars, an old tent, their play house which has seen better days and a few bits of old fencing, which I could burn and use the ash for the chicken instead of taking it to the tip.

Oliver had a lesson in death today, as the old lady across the road from me passed away and the funeral was today, the hearse sat outside our house for quite a while and the kids did not even notice it was there for about half an hour, until Oliver made a huge 'shriek' pretty much letting the whole street know that someone had died.

He shouted at the top of his lungs 'Quick mum, someone has died'. I replied yes I know Oliver..

It dawned on me how had not experienced much in the way of death and I waited for the questions to come, he surprised me and only asked "why did she die", I replied "because she was old"..

I waited for some more, and there was nothing, no more questions... The twins really did surprise me, I think they have taken that one away with them,  and I am sure something will come up on the next few days....

 It is quite odd really as a few days ago Olivia mentioned something about coffins and how coffins are made of wood, we had a quick chat about the headstones and how coffins are made to be biodegradable and the reasons why. This was actually a really quick conversation that she brought up and it was pretty strange how a few days later we see the hearse parked outside our door....

The twins finished their day at Badgers group and we popped to McDonald's afterwards for our Junk Food Friday, we bumped into my oldest son in there, the kids where on the tablets and me and big brother had a good catch up natter...... He really does need a hair cut!....