End of the Blog..

As we are essentially easing out of lockdown and I haven't updated in a long while in any case, I plan on stopping updates to this blog. It will remain here and I can alway start again if there is a new need.

Competitions, Competitions, Competitions.....

Various folk on the Black Isle are running various competitions at the moment..

Rosemarkie Amenities Association - Poster Competition
For Under 7's and 7-11year olds in IV10 - design a poster encouraging people to keep our lovely villages tidy, take up litter and pick up after dogs.
Entries can be emailed to rosamenexec@gmail.com or put through letterbox at 35 High Street, RosemarkieClosing date 18th May.


Groam House Museum and Avoch and Killen Community Council
Build and display a scarecrow outside your house.  Follow scarecrow antics here - https://www.facebook.com/groups/BlackIsleScarecrows/

Inverness Science Festival

The Inverness Science Festival (normally a brilliant event anyway) has moved online.  They're been running loads of brilliant competitions and have a million and one suggestions for STEM activities - it it well worth checking out.
https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/inverness-science-festival/

Talking about science - we are going to do the classic homemade lava lamp experiment today (it says something when you add random items to your Tesco shop for kids entertainment reasons doesn't it?) I will post some photos when I'm done....
https://www.homesciencetools.com/article/how-to-make-a-homemade-lava-lamp-science-project/

Learning Words....

This morning for my sons "formal" school activity we typed four of his tricky words into the computer together - we picked the words together too so a mixture of ones he did know and ones he didn't.  We then chose crazy fonts for each and sized them so that they used an entire sheet of A4 paper.  I then strung them up over our swing as we had to shout out a word and try and hit it with a ball - it worked really well and was really good fun!
I then cut up a couple of extra versions as jigsaw puzzles that he had to reassemble...

This afternoon we're working on number patterns so I'll let you know how that goes.

My son is very resistant to doing anything to do with school so we're trying a new thing of aiming for two 30 minute "formal" school sessions a day.  Today is the first day so fingers crossed it continues as well as it's started.

How is your home schooling going?

Coloring Pages

Coloring is good for us all - not just kids.
With that in mind my work has launched a free coloring book with some of their iconic projects - including the new Forth Bridge - it's available here and well worth a download/print.
Let me know if you can't print and I will print you off a copy!

https://www.jacobs.com/newsroom/news/free-downloadable-coloring-book-jacobs-iconic-projects

Virtual Dinosaurs..

The Natural History are running a family dinosaur festival...it's full of craft ideas, dinosaur information and other goodies....

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/events/family-festival-dinosaurs.html?utm_source=fb-link-post-20200414-lj&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=family-festival&fbclid=IwAR1KlE0VIQNFdLVgdpfpwklou1bzeeiI3NOI5syf3sKSp1v9K5gIm6gkRuU

Slow, slow, slow...

Sorry I've been slow with ideas lately...it's been the Easter weekend and the weather has been lovely so we've just been well pottering...gardening and bouncing on the trampoline and swinging on the swings....

One thing I did do for my youngest the other day was photocopy a sheet of Paw Patrol characters (from a book although I'm.sure you could get pictures on the internet), cut them out and then hide them around the place. We spent a good 15 minutes finding them and hiding them again....