Saturday 28 May 2011

More garden, Peru and Mercury


We've been doing a lot in the garden over the last couple of weeks, and decided that this bit of garden would be handed over to Lemmy. The paeony was already in, as were the forget-me-nots but Lemmy chose some plants at the garden centre to fill in. He made a bee-line for the marigolds, for some reason he is very taken with them. Of course he couldn't resist the snap-dragons, and I was very pleased when he picked a bright red zinnia as it's always been one of my favourite flowers.

Lemmy also learned how to build a cane support for the runner beans which he planted in the greenhouse a while ago now. We built the support and he planted the runner beans out - though only time will tell if he'll actually eat any!

Lemmy has a subscription to the National Geographic Kids magazine and it arrived this morning. He sat with his breakfast and browsed through it until he found an article which got him very excited - a feature on Machu Picchu. He announced he wanted to go there! My cousin visited there on a trip to South America a couple of years ago and fortunately has some photos online so we went to look at them and Lemmy seemed quite impressed that someone I know has actually been there! This afternoon we expanded on this a little by finding Peru on the (very large!) map of the world we bought this week. Then a little time on the internet to learn what language they speak in Peru, and what their flag looks like and to find out who built Machu Picchu. By that time I was losing his attention a bit so we decided to turn our attention to other matters.

I also bought him a poster of the Periodic Table this week, and he was keen to do something with that. I asked him what he wanted to learn and he just wanted to pick one of the 'squares' so off he went and picked Hg - Mercury. We talked about the chemical symbol, and then about the atomic number - we wrote on post-it-notes and stuck these on the poster. We also watched some Youtube videos, one of a man handling mercury which led to a discussion about it being poisonous and then a video demonstrating that even a heavy lead musket ball would float in the mercury.

One other things which has really grabbed Lemmy's attention of late is Oz's toy soldiers. He's currently in the shed learning how to re-enact the English Civil War........

Tuesday 10 May 2011

In the garden



Helping to cut back the stag horn trees....




Helping to prepare the bed for the paved barbeque area....





Helping to build a new Barbeque.....



And using the box as a space-ship....





We decorated our outdoor table......



We had some tree surgery done and they brought a cherry picker. When offered the chance to go up in it Lemmy could barely contain his excitement! He was very well behaved and even got to make it go up and down.....