Yesterday
After a late-ish return home on Monday it was a bit of a slow start on Tuesday. Kids started off on a bit of a Magic School Bus fest since I managed to finish acquiring all the rest of the episodes over Easter. The girls love them and they have decent science content.
They spent ages decorating the eggs they got in a ‘decorate your own Easter egg’ thing at Easter. Well SB spent some time. BB wasn’t so interested, she’d rather just eat them 
What else? SB did a fair bit of maths, and piano practice. BB playdoughed. I was looking up somethings for SB on African Animals as she had said a couple of weeks back that she wanted to learn some stuff on that. BB wanted me to find somethings for her, so I printed off a few Dinosaur pictures from Enchanted Learning. She painted one of those and did a bit of colouring on another.
On the African theme, I sat down with SB and looked at the the globe, the nice big atlas we have, as well as the DK book on the Earth. We looked at where Africa was, the names of some of the countries, what was a Continent, what the other Continents are. SB was able to say that it would be hot in Africa because of it’s place on the globe.
Whilst looking at the Atlas Sb noticed that some of the maps had curved edges, rather than being just a rectangle. so we wandered off onto a chat about how you have to change the shape/size of things when you translate a from a globe to a flat map. Demonstrated by trying to convert a rectangle of paper into a globe and comparing Greenland on the map with globe. I would have gone and looked up some different projections on the web, but by then we had had a powercut so couldn’t . wondered where my Peters Projection map is, but haven’t seen that for ages.
We looked at some of the different maps in the atlas – showing countries,communications physical geography etc. We looked at a good map of Africa which showed the different types vegetation cover – rainforest, savannah, grasslands, deserts etc. and looked at some of the pictures in the DK book to see what these areas looked like.
Was just about to go and sort out camping lamps, torches and candles before it started getting dark when the power came back on – which pleased the kids as they could watch some more Magic School Bus
Chippy was busy though with lots of people who decided not to cook dinner (power came back on at about 5.30)