Biscuits

 As we came home from school early for us we had time to make biscuits. We used the recipe from this book:

 

Grandbunny’s Special Spiced Biscuits

Ingredients
170g golden syrup
67g brown sugar
60g butter
288g plain flour
2 teaspoons mixed spice
beaten egg, to glaze (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees and lightly grease oven trays. Combine golden syrup, brown sugar and butter in a pan. Stir over low heat until melted and smooth. Cool to room temperature.
2. Add flour and spice to a large bowl. Add cooled syrup mixture to bowl and stir well to combine.
3. Roll out half the dough to a 2mm thickness. Cut into shapes and place on prepared trays. Bake for 7 minutes or until golden.

Simple enough for P to do most of it on her own and they taste yummy!

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre

P and I visited the Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden, a wonderful little museum packed with his possessions and full of displays about his characters and books. The museum is aimed at children ages 6 to 12 years old and divided into three parts — Dahl's life, his writing process, and an interactive, kid-friendly story centre. I am sure this counts as one of the activities in our book, Amazing Family Adventures, which wants a literacy adventure!

Dahl joined the Royal Air Force in Nairobi after the outbreak of World War II. Being exceptionally tall at 6 feet and 6 inches, Dahl was told by the flying officer that he was too tall to fly. The gallery draws children into this with a measuring stick showing the respective heights of various Dahl fictional characters alongside a life-sized cutout of young Dahl. P is trying to be as tall as Matilda!

The Story Centre encourages children to be creative with magnetic poetry and sticky note plots. There's also a stop-motion animation station, dress up boxes, and place to craft creatures. There is a model of his Writing Hut as the real Writing Hut was protected behind glass in one of the galleries. 

 We had lunch in the twit cafe! My scone was one of the yummiest I have ever tasted and was warm! P had a slice of Bogtrotters Cake.

 Roald Dahl loved to garden! P then did a workshop where she made clay vegetables!

 We then went for a walk following the Countryside Trail, exploring some of the Chiltern countryside that Roald Dahl loved.

 Below is Angling Spring Wood, said to be the inspiration for Fantastic Mr Fox,

 We then also visited the church where he is buried

 and the petrol pumps which inspired the filing station in Danny, Champion of the World.

Paradise wildlife park / Gangsta Granny

This afternoon we visited Paradise wildlife park which is about an hour's drive from Cambridge.It is an award winning, family run Wildlife Park set in the beautiful surroundings of Broxbourne Woods in the Hertfordshire Countryside.

We enjoyed our day at Paradise Wildlife Park and although we liked how close up we were to the animals we felt some of them were stressed! There is a wide range of different animals including lots of different big cats! There is also a lovely play area with slides and bouncy castles and a woodland train (which costs extra to ride). We took a picnic with us and there are plenty of benches around the park to eat on. We were there for about four hour and a half hours
 

We then drove back in time to see Gangsta Granny, an adaptation of the  David Walliams' book. The girls loved all the glorious slapstick humour, farting and talk of bottoms and poo. It looks great too with the scenery changed by ballroom dancing policemen and gyrating lollipop ladies.
 

 

Mad Hatter Hats

Inspired by a trip our trip to Alice in Wonderland, the girls enjoyed being (mad) hatters and decorating top hats (bought from amazon) with ribbons, sequins. feathers, butterflies and bows!  They used PVA glue to stick things on and have enjoyed wearing them round the house! 

Hunting for the golden ticket

As you know in order to visit Wonka's factory you need to find a golden ticket and as my girls love a treasure hunt I thought I would combine the two!

I wrapped chocolate bars in golden tissue paper with a print out of a theatre tickets and hid them in the garden!

Garden Fun

A rare event - sunshine! The girls had swimming lessons and then the mother-in-law came round for Sunday Lunch. In the afternoon we all played in the garden. The husband mowed, I weeded and the mother-in-law entertained! G, E and P really enjoyed chalking on the ground. They made some beautiful patterns and pictures - rainbows and castles were the order of the day.  P did mark make but also enjoyed chalking on various bits of her body and eating them (does that mean she is deficient in some key nutrient?). I even got E to practise some letter formation - so much more motivating than writing in a boring bit of paper and I do love large scale writing!

treasure hunts

I think this is one of the girls favourite  activities - there doesn't even need to be a prize at the end. It is so easy to differentiate for the different ages - E had pictures clues and G and I had different written clues. Then they all went away and wrote one for P and me - brilliant writing for a purpose!

Polar books

I have decided to try and have a box with topic based books, with the main aim of developing language. I am hoping this will have a knock on effect in terms of the small world and imaginative play ... you need ideas and language before you can use small world play. I have found it useful, although the girls still tend to choose books off their shelves in the playroom, I have read them books from there.

For our polar topic we have looked at:

Write your own story book

Today as bribery for keeping her room tidy I bought Miss I this book. It is perfect for her as she loves to write short stories. The first half of the book offers ideas for how to plan a story, making up characters, different settings etc. Then it gives you different story genres, from a school diary, to a journey through time, an animal adventure etc. Each genre has questions to start you off, wordbanks and some have points to consider. The last bit of the book is Story Writing Toolkit - thinking of good opening sentences, exciting adjectives and verbs etc. She has already written her 1st masterpiece entitled "Rose the lost Kitten"!.