Daily Diary January 2014

Friday 3rd January

It was Emma's 6th birthday today, she had her party at St. John's Church hall. Matt rang to say that Ava was full of cold and very grumpy so would I look after her whilst Steve took Mollie, Jake and Charlie to join the rest of our family and Emma's school friends at the party. However by the time I arrived at Matt and Vicki's Ava had eaten and was a lot chirpier so they felt it would be fine for her to go. Matt went ahead to help Vicki get the hall ready and I got Ava ready and took her round to join everyone when the party had started.

Saturday 4th January

This morning Mollie said she had been watching an episode of Nina and the Neurons in which they had been looking at fossils and it had left her wanting to find out more, so off we went to our bookshelves and dug out the Kingfisher Young Knowledge book on rocks and fossils and started reading (I think the book may be slightly above Mollie's current comprehension level and I would need to simplify a lot of the information to hold her interest), then we remembered that there is a little box on top of the wardrobe containing Daddy's childhood fossil and stone collection so we had fun examining and trying to identify some of the specimens. We think that Daddy may have samples of a pink mineral called feldspar, a grey/white crystal type stone which we think may be quartz  and possibly the black mineral called mica.  Daddy didn't remember what they were so he couldn't help us. We discovered that fossils are "any trace of a plant or animal that lived in the past, such as a shell preserved in rock layers for millions of years" and that the fossils in Daddy's collection were traces of Ammonites, sea creatures that lived when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Ammonites were closely related to the squid/octopus family. I think Mollie may be interested in making her own fossil/rock collection (she already collects shells) and there are projects in the back of the book that I feel she'll enjoy. Whilst we were doing this Jake kept coming over to have a look and seemed interested but it was his turn on the xbox so that was commanding more of his attention, it may be an idea to get the collection out in the week away from screen time.

Mollie and I also browsed through some art books and found lots of projects we'd like to try (see post: to do on blog/home ed/ plans etc.).