Day Thirteen of LOCKDOWN!

Out on our walk around the neighbourhood

They met a cute cat called Izzy

We still had some chocolate themed activities left to do, so Zachary played a cocoa bean related board game with Daddy

It has general knowledge questions all about cocoa and you have to collect cocoa beans to win

Tahlia made a pyramid tower

Still going with the chocolate theme, we made our own sweet shop; everyone had the same amount of money to spend in the shop and they could choose their sweets and add up the total

Paying for their sweets at the till

They enjoyed eating their sweets while watching the Tom and Jerry version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

As today is Palm Sunday, we spent the afternoon doing some related activities...

We talked about Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem and made a little diorama

Tahlia enjoys colouring, so she spent a while colouring some rainbow tunics to put down in front of Jesus; it took her a while to understand why people would throw down their nice clothes to be trampled on by a dirty donkey

Completed 3D scenes of Jesus entering Jerusalem on his donkey

Zachary enjoyed doing some worksheets whilst the others made some palm leaves

Zachary learnt more about how Holy Week is celebrated

We reenacted the scene in Jerusalem improvising using our own little people; Jesus was a Tombliboo riding on a paper Trojan horse and there were numerous pirates and members of Paw Patrol in the crowd!

Then they made Jesus gallop over the coats and palm leaves

Here are their completed palm leaves

We learnt a few Palm Sunday related songs and also watched a video about Palm Sunday. We have also decided to do our own resurrection eggs this year. Each day, a new egg is opened with a clue to part of the story of the lead up to Easter and a related Bible passage to read. As there are 12 eggs and only 8 days until Easter Sunday, we opened two today.

They liked the look of the eggs

The first egg contained a toy donkey to represent Jesus' colt that he used to ride into Jerusalem; the second had 3 silver coins to represent the 30 pieces promised to Judas for betraying Jesus

Zachary read us the Bible passages

We are making our own book which is linked with the stories from the resurrection eggs

Palm Sunday would not be complete without a palm sundae!

YUM

 An update on the UK situation...

Day Twelve of LOCKDOWN!

Zachary was excited to see this morning that he had 95 responses to his chocolate poll. He put the results into a table on Excel and made a few graphs.

Making the table

Dairy Milk was the winner, followed by Boost and Galaxy

On the way to a park for our daily exercise, we popped into Plants Galore which is famously remaining open through lockdown.

We bought a few new plants for the garden and some onion bulbs for our neighbour

A nice park next to a stream

Working out our route

Watching out for the troll underneath

Making some ice cream at home

Whipping up the cream

We talked about how chocolate factories use thousands of moulds to make their chocolates the right shape. Then we did a related activity: making our own chocolates, with surprise fillings

YUM

Tahlia and Ptolemy watched a video about chocolate whilst Jory made his own Christmas tree out of a chair

Here's Zachary doing a worksheet based on a different chocolate poll

Our own poll was quite different to this

Then it was time for everyone's favourite... a haircut

They all love it

Our finished chocolates

Day Eleven of LOCKDOWN!

The kids (especially Ptolemy) were delighted to see Joe Wicks dressed as Spiderman for their PE class this morning

All working hard!

Jory can spell Morrisons -backwards (this was intentional; see if you can spot it)

The kids were delighted to receive a new book each, sent to them by Bumble and Grandad 

 

Tahlia loves anything pretty looking

Ptolemy particularly loves the pop-up T-rex

Tahlia spent ages on the colouring sheets they also sent

Daddy is getting some exercise in during his work breaks

 We headed out on another rainbow walk, this time in a different direction...

They were very pleased to see their friend Harrison, also out on a walk

They found quite a few rainbows; this one is a little hard to see due to the reflection of the sun

Later, we continued with our chocolate themed activities...

Zachary enjoyed setting up a poll to find out people's favourite chocolate bar; tomorrow he'll check up on the final results and make a graph

He was very excited when he got some responses and kept us updated for most of the afternoon 

This is our only chocolate themed book - Chocolate Mousse for Greedy Goose by Julia Donaldson

Their favourite part is when they all go to sleep at the end (spoilers!)

We watched Michael Rosen tell his excellent Chocolate Cake short story -he is so animated! Sad to hear he's in intensive care at the moment with possible Covid 19 (he's also the writer of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt').

The others built a den in the dining room but wouldn't let Jory in!

Our next chocolate themed activity was a chocolate fondue game

They had to spin the wheel to see what they had to dip; with a few unusual outcomes!

Ptolemy has to dip a cheese and onion crisp

Zachary was disappointed to spin 'carrot' three times in a row!

Next we did a dissolving experiment 

Whilst trying to keep all other factors the same for a fair test, we tested cocoa powder in different temperatures of water to see which dissolved the fastest

The hot water was the fastest in less than 20 seconds; the powder didn't dissolve much at all in the cold water; we talked about why this was the case

Ptolemy's potty training isn't going as well as we'd hoped; he never tells us if he needs to go or even if he's wet himself

Here we talked about how milk chocolate is high in calories. Here they are running on the spot for 30 seconds to earn just one M&M to eat -it takes a lot of exercise to counter those extra calories!

They were begging to play the chocolate bar treasure hunt again; this time Tahlia hid them all (unfortunately she threw half of them into our neighbour's garden as she thought we'd never find them)

Next, Ptolemy hid the chocolate bar wrappers

Free rides for all...