Christmas Fun – Christmas Crackers

For the last few years we have made our own crackers and this year was no exception.  They are really cheap and easy to do.

I bought hats and snaps off ebay, very cheap and very quick delivery.  Elsa wrote some jokes, (typical of an 8 year old) :)and we put in a chocolate as the gift.

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Next we wrapped up toilet rolls with Christmas wrapping paper.

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We put in the snap and closed one end of the paper with ribbon, then put in the hat, joke and chocolate. Then closed the other end with the ribbon then used pinking shears to pretty the edges.

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Tah dah, all finished.  They look fantastic.  Let’s hope they work on Christmas Day.

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Merry Christmas and enjoy the holiday season.

 

 

Christmas Around The World

I thought it would be interesting as part of our Geography curriculum to add a Christmas Around The World theme throughout December.  I chatted with Elsa about how some countries might celebrate Christmas differently to us and that it would be interesting to see the differences in food and traditions of number of countries.

I downloaded some Christmas Around The World sheets off Twinkl, which gave us 12 different countries to research.

Then I found an amazing website where I thought Elsa would be able to find the information required without too much input from me.

She chose UK to start with as obviously it was the easiest one for her.

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She then found information about Denmark, China, India and France.

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This has been really interesting and we would have liked to have finished the others, but we went away on holiday in the last week before Christmas so ran out of time, however we will just have to do them next year. 🙂

Space Agent – Build a Rocket

The final mission and Elsa has been looking forward to this one the most 🙂

For the final time, we watched Jon’s introduction video. Apparently Little Jon is doing a secret mission.

Science

How does gravity work on earth?

We watched some videos about Isaac Newton, forces and gravity.  Then did an experiment using a jar and ball to see if we could cause enough pull to keep the ball in the jar.  Elsa wrote what was happening and why and spoke about it as we were doing it and we did a video of it to upload to makewaves.

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Mission 6 Part 1 complete

DT & Maths

This task needed us to design and launch our own rocket.  After looking at various different ways to do it, Elsa decided to use a bottle and make a cone to create hers.

Firstly she made a cone out of card and taped it up using parcel tape, she then taped it to the bottom of her bottle and decorated the whole thing.

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She then put a bit of playdough around the open end as a weight and taped it on.

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Tah Dah, all finished.

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To launch it she was going to use force from the pump and water.

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We used between 100ml and 400ml of water for the launches to see which one would work best.  Our results were the less water used, the higher and further the rocket went.  We uploaded a video to makewaves.

Mission 6 Part 2 complete

English

Write a letter of support to Tim?

Last task of the challenge was to write a letter in letter format, using full stops, commas and a variety of vocabulary to Tim and post it to him for his return.

Elsa wrote a bit about what she had learned and that she had watched the launch and docking of the Soyus rocket on the 15th December and that she thought the docking would be frightening for them all.  She wished him a good mission. 🙂

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Mission 6 Part 3 complete

She uploaded all of her work and was issued with not only the launch rocket badge,

build and launch a rocket

but she has also qualified as an Agent of UNSA

Agent of UNSA

This has been a brilliant, interesting project.

Space Cadet – Living in Space

Mission 5 and it’s the penultimate Mission.  This time it was split into Science, Maths and English again.

As always, we watched Jon’s video, this weeks was a little bit sadder as Mini Jon Space Cadet had gone missing.  🙁

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Science

How do we measure a day?

We watched several interesting videos which explained about how the sun affected days and nights on earth.

Elsa and I discussed this and then she drew a picture which showed how this happens and described about the earth revolving on it’s axis affected where it was night and day.

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Mission 5 Part 1 Complete

Maths

How does your day on Earth compare to an astronauts on the ISS?

Elsa know that on the ISS they see a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes and that they need to sleep to regular time as opposed to following them.

We were given information about what the astronauts do in a 24 hour period and Elsa had to work out her own day, then compare the two. She chose to do a bar chart as it was easier to see the differences.  She then wrote about them on the makewaves website.

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Mission 5 Part 2 Complete

English

How can you support Tim?

To complete this task we were asked to do this is a blog so Elsa created a blog post on this website.

Tim’s Blog

I then tweeted the link to Tim and he ‘liked’ it 🙂

Mission 5 Part 3 Complete

Elsa uploaded all her work to the Makewaves website and has been awarded her badge.

Living in Space

 

Christmas Fun – Gingerbread House

Anna attends nursery and their school encouraged all the children to decorate a gingerbread house (which they had made at school).

Both girls enjoyed doing this although gluing it together is great fun. 🙂  We ended up using superglue to stick the roof on.  Glue was a last resort as the icing and melted sugar hadn’t worked.

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We used royal icing to stick a variety of sweets on it.

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We decorated the roof with crushed up shredded wheat.

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The end result.  It looked great.

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Such a shame it wasn’t edible. 🙁

Christmas Fun – Sock Snowmen

I love the run up to Christmas, we get all festive and do lots of lovely crafts.  The internet is such a fabulous source of information, you can never run out of ideas.

After seeing this cute little video on You Tube, we decided to give these lovely little snowmen a try.

Firstly, cut off the foot part just above the heel then fill the foot part with rice (or whatever you want).

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Tie some cotton to make a head and body.

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Glue on buttons, eyes and nose.

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Then put the top half of the sock on as the hat.  (easy peasy).

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The finished items look so cute 🙂

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A Message to Tim

Tim,

Tim Peake

I know that you will be feeling a bit nervous and excited.  It is an adventure that not many people get to do.

You have done lots of training to get ready for Mission Prinicpia so you are ready for it.

In space you will see a sunset and sunrise 16 times every day.  That’s one every 45 minutes.  Your jobs that you do are very important so make sure you are relaxed in space.  You need to try and get a good nights sleep which mean going to bed quite late and waking up at 6 o’clock in the morning.  You shouldn’t use the sunrises and sunsets to set your routine even if they are very pretty.

sunset from ISS sunrise from ISS

You will probably miss your family, especially as you will be on the International Space Station over Christmas and your birthday but remember you can talk to them by using Skype, tablets and computers during your free time.

Make sure you exercise as you can’t walk at all while you are in space so you need to keep fit while you are there.

Hopefully the chef has made some of your favourite food and drink to take with you to keep you a bit happier while you are there.

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We are looking forward to following your mission on the ISS, we know you will be great.

From Elsa

 

Space Cadet – Astro Coding

Week 4, I can’t believe how fast it’s going, and to be honest, this week was the one I was most nervous about, to the point I completed the weeks tasks in case Elsa needed more input from me to help her.

I needn’t have worried, of course, children these days are so competent on computers aren’t they?

As normal, the girls watched the Space Shed video at the beginning of the week 🙂 these are a source of amusement, they just find Jon, so funny, with his biscuits and tea.

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This week instead of being separated into Maths, English and Science, it was all Science and Computing.

Mission 4 Part 1

What is HTML and CSS?

Firstly, Elsa looked at the relevant cards relating to HTML and CSS and then looked at the differences.  She concluded that HTMLputs bits on the page like headers, lists, paragraphs, pictures and links‘ and CSSmakes it look prettier by changing the font, colour, size, position, putting borders on it, and adding background colours‘.

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Next we had to print out a safe webpage (we did our Space Weather page) and she had to decide which parts of it were HTML and which parts of it were CSS.

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Mission 4 Part 2

How can I write with HTML and CSS?

Elsa realised that there are certain codes used to add the various different types of HTML and they all needed < > around them and that to add CSS it needed { } around it.  She wrote it down, but really couldn’t wait to do the next part.

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Mission 4 Part 3

How can I build a webpage for Tim Peake and edit it?

We created a CodePen account as suggested and were given the HTML and CSS to use to create Tim a webpage.  CodePen is great as you can see your edits as you make them which makes little people extremely happy.  First you see a boring black header, then after a bit of CSS you see an orange header in the middle of a blue bordered background.  🙂

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Tim’s Completed Webpage using HTML and CSS

Tim's webpage

After completing Tim’s webpage, Elsa decided that she would like to create an All About Me (her) page, which she thoroughly enjoyed doing as well as she could make it totally girly. 🙂

About Me

Elsa has worked really hard at this task and really enjoyed it.  She has completed it and been awarded with her badge.

coding