Tui, Dad and Mystic at RDA

 

 

Pooper scooper

 

Jacob is as great help volunteering at RDA, here he is with the giant poooper scooper cleaning up the arena for the kids to ride in. Good boy! 

Buttercup baby...

 

I remember doing the buttercup test when I was a little girl, though I had long forgotten about it...until i saw a big patch of buttercups at horse riding today. Pity the photo didn't dhow the lovely golden glow on her chin- must have been outshone by Pearl's lovley pearly whites! 

Buttercup

 

 

Tis the season...

 

 

Watermelon Angels

 

The good ol 're-use' draw is a lot emptier today! We made these Angels from egg cartons, old wrapping paper, beads and wool.
The girls decided to decorate their Angels with watermelon scented body glitter! Mmmmm.Jacob wanted green wings for his Angel to make it fly faster than the girls ones....and declined on using the cream on his ( eww that's girls stuff!) he also thought it HILLARIOUS calling it a fart fairy instead of an Angel so I had to explain the that christmas story wasn't going to be quite the same if it was a fart fairy who told Mary that she would be 'with child! instead of an Angel! BOYS!! :) 

 

 

Sleeping Jesus

 

We made these cool little christmas decorations today from a candy cane, wool, cardboard, wooden beads, felt and glue.
The hook on the candy cane made a perfect cradle and we made baby Jesus from a wooden bead ( remember those beaded carseat covers? we have a dismantled one!) The kids really loved it and when we put the tree up we will hang them on there. 

 

 

Don't glue yourself Tui!!

 

 

Advent Calendar

 

I had a small heart attack when I realised it is just less than 5 weeks to Christmas!! We decided to make a advent calendar using (mostly) recycled materials (naturally!!) I painted the tree and the kids took turns at numbering the tree up to 25 and gluing the numbers into place on the tree. Dad drew names from the 'hat' to see who gets to put the first decoration on the tree! We made decorations from cardboard and I'm going to suprise the kids with a special star to put on the tree that will say "Jesus is the reason for the season" or something to that effect! Over the next few days we will be adding more detail to the poster and the kids are currently counting down to the first of Dec when we will put up the tree... 

Antartic Enclosure

 

The kids made this cool antarctic enclosure out of 99% recycled materials. An old box was used for the house, the plastic from another box, egg cartons were turned into rocks, scrap cardboard penguins and cotton wool for snow.
We did a lot of verbal and hands on activities as opposed to 'book work' talking about their environment, what a group of penguins is called etc and decribing the Antartic environment( slippery, icey, freezing, shivery...)it was a great activity and utilised a lot of our 'hoarded' boxes! 

Tui and Pearl painting 'rocks'

 

 

Jacob ruling the lines for the window

 

 

 

We went onto the KT's site and found out that King penguin's can grow to 95cm (and are the 2nd largest species) Gentoo's can grow to 85cm (3rd smallest species) and blue penguins are only 35cm. (They're the smallest and KT's dosn't have a colony of them but we thought it made a great size comparison!) 

How tall is a Penguin?

We've been learning about some of the peguins we will see at KT's (only 4wks to go!)
We did a brainstorm to work out what we already knew and what we wanted to find out about Penguin's and one of Jake's questions was 'how tall is a penguin?' 

If I was a shark. Poem by Tui, Jacob and Pearl

If I was a shark

big and strong

I would eat king kong!

I would drink crocodile blood

and have a bath in the mud!

I would brush my teeth

with a leaf and

clean my gills

with duck bills!

If I was a shark

big and strong

I think I would pong!

Typed by Tui.

Hammerhead, bronze whaler, wobbegong....

Wow! A hammerhead's eyes can be as far apart as 91.5cm (3ft!)
Here's the kids using there team skills to wrestle the tape measure and get an accurate measurement of how far apart that is.

Over to Tui now.....

here are some interesting facts about sharks

A lemon shark can stay in as little as 91.5 of water that water! that water depth is only up to Pearl's shoulder.

The sharks we will see at Kelly Tarltons are the Bronze Whaler, the school shark the Broadnose sevengill shark and the Wobbegon shark.

The bronze whaler shark is 3.5m long

The school shark is (1.7m) the broadnose sevengill shark is (3m) A wobbegong shark is (3.3m)

i liked measureing them.

Whale shark v's dwarf dogshark

 

Look carefully and you can see the tiny shark next to the huge whale shark. The whale shark is an impressive sixty feet long and weighs 20 tonnes!! 

Dwarf Dogshark

 

The dwarf dogshark is only 25.5 cm (10 inches for all of your 'old' schoolers!! lol) long, just a wee bit shorter than Pearl's arm. 

School Sharks

Ironically out of all the sharks that we learnt about (see Tui's post) the only ones small enough for us to measure with the (2m) tape measure was the school shark and the dwarf shark. All of the rest exceeded 2m! So here are two of the cleverest school sharks I could find :) next to the tape measure which was stretched out to 1.7m so that they could get an idea of just how big (or small in shark terms...) the shark is. We followd this activity up with ruling lines with a ruler acurately, reading the numbers and recording the information.

Pearl's great speedway story and drawing. 

Guy Fawkes at the speedway

 

The kids had never been to speedway before and they LOVED it! Lots of crashes, dirt everywhere and noise! 

Guy Fawkes at the speedway

It was great at the speedway we saw lots of races and crashes.

One of the cars crashed and he got run into by the other cars -it was like ten pin!

Just before the fire works started the crowd counted down from 10 and then the lights went out. Suddenly it was really bright because the gunpowder in the firewroks went off. As the fireworks came down closer to you they made a big

BOOM!!!!!

and gave me a big fright and made me shiver.

They were gold, purple, red, green and pink and

I thought they were very pretty.

By Tui

  

Open wide...down the hatch it goes!

 

As you can see Jacob really enjoyed this!