wrecking balls, robot mice and writing!

Recently we have enjoyed doing some of the activities on the Mystery Science website. Vinnie has been really keen to do them so we've made sure to have a go at one most weeks.

One of the activities we did was learning about wrecking balls!

We watched some videos of wrecking balls, read a bit about them, then set up our own wrecking ball experiment. We had to knock down the wall, without knocking the houses.

This meant learning how far to swing the ball back and noticing the difference between pulling it a long way back or a short way back before letting go. We extended the activity a bit by talking about gravity and momentum as we have done some other force experiments from a library book.

As always we have also spent a lot of time at the park! The weather is getting colder but Vin still loves to get outside a lot.

We made a nice warming apple crumble to warm us up afterwards!

One of Vinnie's birthday presents was a really cool programmable robot. We had a go at some of the challenges and I was so impressed at how well Vinnie could figure out each step and plan ahead how he wanted his programs to work.

Vinnie also set up a little picnic with his play food.

I have been amazed at Vin's imagination with his lego over the last couple of weeks. He has been watching a few videos on youtube of people "speed building" various sets that he likes (mostly train ones!) and I can tell he has got some really cool ideas from watching them.

He used his building site set to build a slightly different set up and put smooth plate pieces on the base so that he could make a crane that moved by sliding along.

He also made a shop.

Vin is extra motivated to do writing at the moment as he needs to prepare for Christmas and write his letter to Father Christmas!

He has been practicing copying things out of the lego catalogue and practicing each letter.

He also built a lovely station with a platform, ticket office and post office, a train and a playground for the lego people to ride the train to.

The next mystery science activity we did is all about the weather. This week we have been "Weather watchers"!

We have been drawing pictures of the weather.

We went to the local park to make a fairy door! Vin really liked colouring in his door and window and found a nice place in our house to put it.

Vin is still enjoying doing activities from his comics. His favourites are mazes and stickers. He also recently has started to like word searches. We did some pages from his Go Jetters comics and he proudly wore his stickers at the end!

We visited Hever Castle and played in their new playground and explored the grounds. It had been very windy the previous night and there were lots of lovely leaves to crunch!

We did another weather drawing and this time we had a go at writing a little bit about the weather too.

We made oobleck but instead of using water we decided to experiment and use a different liquid. We tried it with washing up liquid. It was a different sort of consistency, much more easy to shape than with water. We now smell lemon fresh!

Another lovely Lego creation was made! This time a little cafe. I don't manage to get photos of most of his buildings as he likes to change them so quickly but he has made some really fun creations!