Triassic Tuesday

Dino-dors!!!!

It’s been a long time since we did dinosaurs here, Fran was 4; there are Muddlepuddle pages to prove it. Oh how old they are now to look at…

Following on from yesterdays history and a relative interest from the younger 2 anyway, we looked at them again today. Fran initially turned up her nose but then joined in very enthusiastically. First we printed off as many colouring pages as we could find, using our various model dinosaurs as a starting point. They spent some time grouping them together into meat and plant eater and colouring the pages in ‘realistic but imaginative’ ways. Meanwhile i hunted out some info sheets on the ones they were doing and coloured created badges that they could stick on to each page; we covered
*period of time
*area of the world
*climate (a mistake, hard to find)
*size
*land, air or water
*carnivore, omnivore or herbivore

Once that was all done, they used the info sheets to find the info, make guestimates where required (we did sizes as ‘larger than a bus’, ‘smaller than a bus but larger than a elephant’ etc so some thought was required) and by the end we had a good bank of info to use for a wall chart later (if we ever do!) and everyone had really developed some info collecting skills. It was good all round.

I finished War Horse and cried.

We also managed to finish GP English and History chapter 1 with Fran, so that was good, did a load of vocab; “Fran is always ravenous when she gets to Helen’s” was one of her sentences, do music, do maths, read with Amelie (such a different thing to reading with the older 2), Amelie and Maddy did ETC books and everyone did some handwriting.

We’re enjoying Swallows and Amazons very much; i’ve just been describing the games i used to play from the book. They wanted to know if my brother and sister joined in or if i played them alone and honestly, i can’t remember? Greer?

Car still undecided, needs looking at by an engineer and he didn’t turn up. Pah.

I’ve just had a deja vu moment at the end of a programme on Graham Taylor’s England squad; the end was the sound of the press offices all phoning through their sports stories to the newspapers. I grew up going to matches with my dad (not football, those were bad days and he never took us to those but i went many weeks of the year to Basketball ones and most years of my teens i went to a 4 day London tournament with him) and the sound of a press office was so familiar to me, it took me right back. Those grim or gleeful faces of the journalists, the mutter of stories and leads that they didn’t want overheard, the occasional score time fixing (never trust a journalist!), standing around in the aftermath of a game while dad talked to coaches, players and bigwigs who knew and liked him. It was a fairly special thing i did with him, something i valued very much, on a par with the times i spent with my Nana at antique and collectable sales, a place where i spent time with one adult, doing something i learned to know the ways and people of. Funny how the sound of murmured voices could bring it back. Funnier still to think that those rooms probably don’t exist in that form now; my dad hasn’t phoned a story through in that special phone voice for years, so far as i know. These days it just goes by email.