Tuesday 9 December 2014

The Speed of Light and Stories to Write

Following completion of our kitchen renovations, and the subsequent moving of boxes of stored utensils/appliances/random plastic bits I'd never seen before, last week was mostly taken up by the kids rediscovering their newly accessible toys. 
Squidge also played some Lego games, a bit of Rayman, and some Little Big Planet...


...and he and Moppet played on Blocksworld, among other things, with Squidge showing her how it worked, and sometimes reading the odd word too!


We resurrected the Nerf target competition, and Sprout resumed his scoring calculations.


We went out for Christmas drinks, and Sprout showed us all a magic trick he'd perfected.


He played some Call of Duty and read me the doctor's final journal entry.


We put together our photo album for the year, and took a quick family photo as we didn't have one from the entire year with all of us in it!


Sprout took his Christmas fairy duties very seriously, and came up with fantastic  plans and scenarios each night to set up. Here he's writing name tags for the playing pieces in a chocolate game of Santa chimneys and ladders.


We wrote some Christmas cards, and they all wrote their names in some of them, along with various pictures and lots of kisses.


Sprout spotted this happy little piece of art on a wall in town, and wanted to take a photo of it.


Moppet got out the Silly Story Laboratory, and spent some time matching the colours up. Squidge then took over and did a story with all the parts of speech in the wrong places which he thought sounded hilarious, then he did a couple the right way round too. Sprout then sorted all the magnets into parts of speech, talked aloud a bit about whether a physical object and a noun are the same thing, and asked me what adverbs are, then he made a story too.


He and I watched some videos, including world's most unusual museums, world's weirdest plants, and world's strangest animals, they were really fascinating and led to lots of conversations.


His favourite was the blobfish. 



Squidge played some more of the puzzle adventure games that he's into at the moment, including The Nutcracker and The Crooked Man.


Sprout thought maybe the crooked man one was derived from the other videogame of that name, and I suggested it might be from the nursery rhyme, which he didn't know so we looked it up.


Then we looked up the origin as he wanted to know if 'crooked' meant criminal in this context.


He told us about the other game too.



They made some more stories.



We did an impromptu shop, and they asked for sprouts, sugar snaps, carrots, and a pineapple (proof again that people given unrestricted access to all foods won't just choose sweets all the time!) The boys spent a few minutes choosing the perfect pineapple and scanning the barcode.


The subject of hippos' teeth came up, and the question of their size, so we looked it up.


Squidge made some loomband bracelets...


...and did some of the puzzles in his spiderman book including writing some words and numbers.


They all helped make the Christmas crackers the fairy had left.


In the car Sprout was telling Squidge that although light seemed instant it wasn't, and it actually had a speed. We looked up the value. He wondered how it compared to the speed of sound, and I reminded him about how we see lightning before hearing thunder when there's a storm, and he remembered and worked it out from there. The conversation led to Einstein, E=mc2, Stephen Hawking, time travel, time travelling trains, forces, momentum, waves, particles, the light spectrum, rainbows, prisms, crystals, fibre optics, Christmas trees, broadband, and water. He talked about how he thought a normal train wouldn't be able to withstand the forces acting on it if it were to travel at the speed of light, so it would have to be a specially designed train. He pondered the question of walking forward on a train moving at the speed of light, if nothing can move faster than that. He thought aloud through what happens if you're in a moving vehicle and jump, and why. I think it was my favourite conversation all week :)


We visited their grandparents, where people took turns pulling each other round on a blanket.


Squidge asked me if we could start saying what animal we're going as fast as when we're driving again, so we looked some up as we'd not done that in a while and I couldn't remember any! We added a person in too this time :) (The last one is obviously just for reference, I don't have access to a rocket car!)


Sprout spent the afternoon building an airfix working model of an engine with his grandpa, then took it home to get Gruff to sequence it correctly like a real engine,1-3-4-2.


We sung lots of songs on the way home, along with narrating the journey like a Dora adventure, then when we got back Moppet watched Dora with Gruff and the boys played Ben 10 together.


Sprout and I had decided a few weeks ago that if his big man guinea pig was a person he'd be Elvis in his white jumpsuit years, and would sing Blue Christmas. He wanted to show Squidge so we found a video.


Sprout and Squidge spent almost an entire day playing together, from Ben 10 figures to videogames to youtube, which is a total first for them (and was lovely). Later Sprout wrote down some console commands for Skyrim to spawn various things, then skyped with friends and played Minecraft for a bit while Squidge and Moppet watched Monsters vs Aliens.


Sprout discussed their next construction project with his grandpa, then he and Squidge played some Five Nights at Freddy's together, before watching a bit of tv and playing some bat and ball.


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