* went for a bike ride
* talked about carbon emissions from plane travel, and how we can use Greenfleet to offset carbon emissions. I checked using the Greenfleet Tree Totaller last night and it will cost $4.70 to offset the emissions caused by her return trip to Darwin (we contrasted that with the $87.50 it will cost to offset Nannie and Pa’s return tickets to England for Christmas!). We discussed using Greenfleet to work out carbon emissions from future holiday plans (inc. by car) and budgeting to offset them as part of the cost of the holiday.
* also discussed ways that we can save electricity/emissions around the home, and started with the idea of turning off lights in rooms we aren’t using, and opening blinds to use natural light instead of electricity in her bedroom. She also knows about turning off her monitor when she’s not using the computer, and the TV when not in use
* making words from syllables (still practising -ble, -ple, -tle and -dle), then writing them down on the whiteboard. B started writing “little” in cursive and realised it was so much easier to write it joined together, so we started practising her other words in cursive on the whiteboard as well. She then concentrated on writing her name in cursive in her exercise book, and was getting irritated by the jerky joins she was doing. I demonstrated that essentially cursive is about drawing a line which goes up and down, and likened it to riding a trotting horse, so we played with the idea for a while and then she practised a smooth wavy line
* discussed “stranger danger” and why I wouldn’t let her walk around the Botanical Gardens by herself but would be okay with her doing so with a friend
* watched ABC schools’ TV: Take on Technology – Food Containers, Behind the News Special – Personal Health Choices, then recorded Our Earth – How Old Is It?, Atoms of Fire – The Organic Mystery and came out to play in the garden with me and K
* “weightlifting” – she tends to have most difficulty with five-letter words, and start to struggle with four-letter sequences after the first six or seven words. We talked about how when she’s remembering longer sequences, it helps to break them into smaller chunks (eg. “sh-art” or “tr-and”) and to sound them out as well as trying to memorise the sequence of letters, so that they are easier to remember
* independent/shared reading: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
* lunch at ANBG with Pa; we saw heaps of the Eastern Water Dragons, particularly as we walked around the Tasmanian Gardens, where we also saw fingerlings and what were probably tadpoles in the various ponds. There were lots of baby lizards about as well, which I’ve never seen before, so it looks like they’ve had a mini population explosion recently. I mentioned the orchid greenhouse to Pa, who hadn’t visited it before and didn’t know it was open to the public. After Pa left, we took the pram back to the car and went to the Rainforest Gully. Katy seemed to really enjoy climbing up and down the stairs and going over the boardwalks in the upper reaches. She didn’t want to go home!
* while Katy watched Playschool, we explored a new purchase together: Shape by Shape, a puzzle based on tangrams and produced by Binary Arts. We fiddled around trying to fit the pieces into the frame freeform, then did the first six of the challenge cards. Lots of fun and quite challenging. I noticed that B was initially having difficulty orienting the shape she was building on the board with the gamecard: she would be building at right angles or even mirror reversed in the first two patterns we did, but eventually got the hang of it (I’ve noticed her having this difficulty in orienting in other situations, such as when she was using the Brain Box kit to build a circuit at a Science Festival workshop, and mirror-reversing the layout)
* the three of us played in the garden for an hour, including Katy wanting to climb up into the treehouse an awful lot because Beth was up there washing the window! We did a lot of sliding, until she lost interest and wanted to go on the swing instead…
* took dog for a walk
* played with E’s swirly colourful music webthang
* Scouts 7:00-8:30