Day Four

So, continuing the theme of stories, this time we looked at one in particular. I chose a rather spooky Roald Dahl story about a boy who is eaten by a carpet. (Apologies to the late Mr Dahl for the simplification!)

While I read the story I asked them to think a bit about some simple questions: When was it written? Who might have written it? And Why? We had some interesting discussions about how you can tell when a story was written from the use of language, and then got onto the subject of spooky stories and why we like them (a subject much on my mind since we went to see the fantastic but terrifying Coraline last weekend). One interesting thing that came out was that several of the children had seen a number of very scary films - two that were mentioned were Chucky and I Am Legend. We didn't have time to explore this much further, though.

We finished off with a quick game of Just a Minute - but sad to report, my doorbell keyboard still isn't working. I'm going to give it another try this weekend. Still, we played it au naturel and it was great fun, although my daughter won a little bit spectacularly (in fairness, she's had quite a bit of practice)

It's half term next week, so there's a bit of a break until the next session where we're going back to science for a while. I'm planning to spend a bit of time talking about the scientific method, experiments and hypotheses. And I've been given the go-ahead by my boss to do something a bit special under the auspices of the company where I work, so I should have something rather fun to bring in.