Vin's Learning Journey

 We had a bit of a quieter week this week. Our beans are growing really well and we had our first couple of meals with home grown beans. We had a go at panning for gold! We got a kit in Vinnie's Wild West Mystery in time we headed out to the "river" in the garden to find treasure! It was fun and we found a lot of chunks. Vin wished it was real gold. We wondered if the fools gold would react with anything as gold itself is very stable and not very chemically reactive. Vin suggested vinegar. We put the pyrite in vinegar and after a few minutes we prodded it a bit and it crumbled! We couldn't find anything online that suggested pyrite would dissolve in vinegar so we wondered if maybe there were a lot of other impurities in the pieces that did dissolve. It was a bit of a mystery! We read the Wild West book too, and Vin found a page in one of his older Phoenix comics that was all about the gold rush too. Vin had a go on the Lego Digital Designer software. He made a minifig...

 We have been lucky to have beautiful weather this week so have made the most of it with several trips out to nearby parks and to explore. We've played football and basketball at the court near us, taken Vin's skateboard out to practice as well as his go kart and the bikes on other days.  While out we have been spotting interesting plants and using google lens app to try and identify them. We saw some pretty flowering trees that turned out to be small leaved limes (but not lime trees that grow limes!) and a bush that had leaves a bit like holly and bright blue berries which google told us was a mahonia aquafolium. It said the berries were edible but very tart so we gave them a miss! We got a new board game this week called Times tables heroes. It was fun to play and Vin enjoyed coming up with unique ways for the superheroes to save the day! We've also been caring for our garden, making sure the plants have enough water, removing some of the weeds and we've had a few str...

 This week we: made some more fruit rollups! pineapple, peach, apple and lemon juice this time. We had some more fun with lego stop motion video making! I made mine into an animated gif. We celebrated World Chocolate Day on Wednesday by...buying and eating some chocolate ;) We had a lovely day out to Hobbledown Children's Farm. We saw lots of cute animals, flying displays with owls and hawks, fed some African Pygmy Goats, rode the zip lines, and climbed on lots of awesome climbing frames. Vin had fun (and frustration!) solving some logic puzzles on Cosmic Express. We've also read lots of books and comics and signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge at the library. Books we have from the library at the moment: World religions Frith, Alex (Children's author) 2017 Books 2 Who we are! : all about being the same and being different Harris, Robie H. 2016 Books 3 The exploding life of Scarlett Fife Evans, Maz 2021 Books 4 The case of the missing moonstone Stratford, Jordan 2016 ...

 A bit of a quieter week this week as we had a few family things to do. We made some lego stop motion videos. We found the youtube channel of the person from the legocon thing we watched last week and got some tips and inspiration. Then we set up our scenes and made our own. We played with lots of lego too, watched some octonauts, played some games.  We went out to a new nature area with some friends and we identified some creatures we found using google lens on the app. We think this guy is a lesser stag beetle. The first 2 strawberries from our garden were ready to eat! We also went to a wedding and Vin had fun playing with some children there.