First we cut some fruit into pieces. Then we threaded it on sticks. We chose apples, bananas and blueberries.

Cutting up the fruit

Here’s my finished fruit stick!

The finished fruit stick

Then we made some seed lollies to hang up. We mixed seeds with some dried fruit and lard and put them into cups with a lolly stick in them. Then we put them in the fridge to set.

Mixing the seeds, dried fruit and lard

Setting in the fridge

Then we took them out and hung them up in the garden.

Our fruit stick hanging in the tree

Our back bedroom window looks out on the garden so we went upstairs with our bird spotting book and our binoculars to see if any birds came to visit!

Looking for visiting birds

So far we have seen blackbirds, blue-tits, great-tits, robins, pigeons, sparrows and some others we haven’t worked out yet!

We started by getting some small birthday cake candles, matches, a baking tin, a jar and some water.

Our experiment kit.

We stuck the candles in a baking tin with wax.

Candles in a baking tin.

Then we lit them with a large candle. We had to be very careful.

Lighting the candles.

Once they were lit we tried some different ways of putting them out. We started with some water but daddy forgot to take a picture of that. Water cools the flame down. Fire needs heat to keep going.

Next we put a jar over a candle.

Putting a jar over a candle.

The candle went out.

Candle in a jar going out.

It goes out because fire needs air (actually oxygen) to keep going.

Next we let the candles burn all the way down to the bottom.

Candles burning right down.

These candles went out because they ran out of fuel. The wax and wick are fuel and fire needs fuel to keep going.

All of this tells us what fire needs to burn but it doesn’t tell us why fire is hot. That’s very complicated so we started by looking at the different parts of the flame: blue, yellow, orange and red.

A flame.

Then we watched a film about flames. It has some very big words in it but there’s a song about them that we all sang.

First we found all sorts of interesting things in the house and in the garden. Here’s what we found:

The interesting things we gathered

Next we rolled out some clay into tiles and then started making prints and marks into the clay with the things we’d found. It was exciting seeing the patterns the different things made.

Making marks in the clay

When we’d finished our pattern making we made a little clay wall round the tiles and then Grandad mixed up some plaster.

Grandad mixing the plaster

When the plaster was ready we poured it into the clay tiles and we tapped the table to make sure there weren’t any air bubbles trapped in it. We had to wait a while for the plaster to dry and go hard. We tried blowing on it to hurry it up!

Drying the plaster

When the plaster was hard we pulled the clay off. Look what we made! The plaster casts had all the little details of the things we’d found. We’re going to try and do this again with different things to see what kinds of casts they make.

The finished casts

There’s a place near us where they make glass things and they let you watch them. We went along. Here’s a man working with glass:

Working with really hot glass.

Glass is heated up in a furnace until it is so hot it glows red. Then you can do all sort of things with it, like blow into it to make it bigger or pull it into different shapes.

When we got home we watched a few videos of people making amazing things with glass. We really liked this video of a man called Bill Gudenrath making a fish:

We found some pictures of muscles in our body books and some interesting stuff on the internet too.

The muscle man in our book

The drawings we found were really complicated so we decided to just do the main muscles. We found some red paint and got started. We started with our head and chest. It takes 15 muscles just to smile! The muscles between our ribs are called our intercostal muscles. That’s a long word!

Muscles in our heads

Next we did our arms. Muscles can only pull not push so they have to work together. In our arms we have biceps and triceps which work together to make our arms move.

Biceps and triceps

Then we did legs. We did long swishing paint marks to show the long muscles.

Long leg muscles

Last we added some muscles in our hands and feet. Here are the finished pictures!

Muscles!

What shall we do next? Maybe brains…..

Looking at the Leonardo book

We loved looking at the book. Leonardo was interested in everything! We really loved his drawings of animals and we found this funny cat:

The funny cat!

He was also really interested in maths and science and did lots of drawings about this too. Here are some Venn diagrams. We found out all about those too but we’ll tell you about that another day.

Venn diagrams

Then we decided we wanted to do some drawing like Leonardo. He drew all the tiny details in everything so we went out into the garden to find some things to draw.

Frieda drew some chives:

Chives

Olive drew some lovely flowers with swirling leaves:

Flowers and swirling leaves

We didn’t want to stop drawing and next Olive drew some rocks and stones in the garden:

Rocks and stones

Frieda drew some more flowers and leaves:

Flowers and leaves

A few weeks later we went to see the Leonardo exhibition. It was at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. It was brilliant. We saw drawings of landscapes, buildings, horses, people, weapons and skeletons. We weren’t allowed to take photos but you can see some of the things we saw here.

The #importantthings list from Twitter.

We wanted to think about what was most important so daddy thought of a way that would help us decide. He got the idea from @martinhowitt on Twitter, who mentioned something called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

First we wrote our names on the top of two big pieces of paper (one each).

Making a place for our lists.

Next we stuck our big pieces of paper on the wall.

Our big pieces of paper.

Then we started to draw and write important things on post-it notes. We thought of five ourselves and used five from the people on Twitter.

Olive drawing an important thing.

Frieda writing an important thing.

We stuck all our post-it notes onto our big pieces of paper.

Frieda sticking on her important things.

Once we had done them all we re-arranged them with the most important ones at the top and the least important ones at the bottom.

Olive re-arranging her important things.

Here are our finished lists:

Our finished lists.

Frieda’s list was:

• Doggy (her cuddly toy)
• Nature
• Smiling
• Her generation
• Electricity
• Trees
• Love
• Food
• Chocolate
• Fun (this was later moved up the list)

Olive’s list was:

• Sandwich (her cuddly toy)
• The sea
• Electricity
• Food
• Family
• Bubbles
• Creativity
• Her face
• Her generation
• Staying away from giraffes (they kick)

Drawing Asia

We only had one atlas so Olive had to draw from a picture on the internet.

Drawing North America

Once we’d drawn all the continents we cut them out and stuck them on a big piece of blue paper.

Pritt-Sticking Australia

Here is our finished map of the world:

Our Collage Atlas

Next it was time to get busy with making food out of Fimo. We made a lot of sushi (not all of it today). We stuck this on Japan.

Sushi on Japan

We also made some European food, including pizza, a chocolate eclair, toast and jam and sandwiches.

European Food

Here is our finished map (it’s made us hungry):

The Finished Food Map

Balsa wood and special glue.

We used a special saw called a Scroll Saw. It has a blade that goes up and down very quickly.

Scroll Saw.

We were a bit scared to use the saw as it was very loud and it made our fingers tingle when we touched it, but we had a go and cut a piece of wood in half.

Cutting a piece of wood in half.

Next we drew some shapes on the wood that we wanted to try and cut out.

Drawing shapes to cut out.

Cutting the shapes out was hard, especially if there were curvy edges.

Cutting shapes out.

Once we’d cut shapes out we learnt how to makes the edges smooth with sandpaper.

Smoothing the edges with sandpaper.

Here’s a wooden man we made.

A wooden man.

Next we wanted to try and make something more complicated. We decided to make a table for our dolls’ house. We cut lots of pieces to the right size and shape and glued them together with the special glue.

Sticking pieces together.

Once everything was stuck together and had dried we made a table cloth and put some cups on to finish it all off.

Our finished table.

We like to make things so the first thing we did was make a little bee of our own.

A fuzzy bee.

Next we started finding out about bees by looking in books and on the internet.

A book about bees.

We also found a lovely film about a beekeeper.

We learned that bees only fly around if it’s warmer than 10 degrees. If it gets colder they huddle together in their hive or nest and try to keep the queen bee warm. The workers all shudder and tremble to make her warm and they take it in turns to be on the outside so no bee gets too cold (a bit like penguins!).

We love honey so we wanted to learn a bit more about how it’s made. Bees make honey in their hives. The honeycomb they make has a really good pattern, which is made up of hexagons (six-sided shapes). We made a honeycomb pattern.

Putting together hexagons to make a honeycomb pattern.

Putting together shapes like this is called tessellation. Honeycomb is a great example of tessellation.

Once we’d made our honeycomb pattern we drew some bees on it. They’re going back to the beehive to keep warm until the weather gets better.

Bees going back to their hive.