We’ve been learning a lot about birds and we wanted to see if we could get more birds to come into our garden. We decided to make some food they might like. We made fruit sticks and seed lollies. Here’s how we did it!

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!

Last week we went on holiday without our mum and dad to Cornwall! We stayed with our Grandma and Grandad. It was very exciting. While we were there Grandad got some clay so we could do some plaster casting. Here’s what we did:

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

We got our body pictures out again today because we decided we wanted to do some more work on them. We decided to look at muscles. Did you know we have over 650 muscles in our bodies?

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…..

We love drawing and our mum told us that there was going to be an exhibition coming to Bristol of drawings by someone called Leonardo da Vinci. We really wanted to go and see it but before we went we decided to find out a bit about Leonardo. Luckily we found a book in the house which had lots of his drawings in it so we had a look.

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.

We’ve been thinking about important things so we decided to do a project about them. It started yesterday when daddy asked people on Twitter what they thought were important things. They gave us a good list.

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)