Snow Leopards and the Moon

Our bacteria didn't grow. Zilch. Nothing at all. Wonder what we did wrong? We do have another sachet of agar left, so we'll have to have a think about doing it again and seeing if we can get something to grow this time.

Last week's "work"...let's see. Emily carried on with mountains-ish stuff for geography, watching the Mountains episode of David Attenborough's Planet Earth and then researching snow leopards. The Snow Leopard Trust had some interesting materials about snow leopard conservation and the challenges of protecting a predator in areas where people depend upon their livestock for a living.

Science was biology again, looking at what cancer is and how it develops. Lots of great stuff at The Centre of the Cell including a neat animation about how cancer occurs and a game based around developing cancer treatments.

In history last week, Emily continued with the modern theme, looking at the moon landings in more depth. We read from this lovely book by Stewart Ross which looks at moon mythology, science and history and watched some footage related to the moon landings. Emily also investigated some of the theories about the moon landings being a fake and told me all about the various photographic and film anomalies and their suggested explanations.

We didn't do much on Thursday, I don't think, as I had to take the car back to finally get its MOT finished, which took several journeys and most of the day on and off. On Friday, Jacki and her girls came to visit us - the girls made delicious chocolate chip cookies and together they all sewed plump little felt chicks. Over the weekend, Emily surprised us both with this fantastic cake - I love how she can now just waltz into the kitchen alone and produce - with or even without a recipe - such lovely bits and pieces :-))

Emily and I are both thrilled that Hazel has offered to teach Emily some GCSE-ish psychology with Romy once a week. In return, I'll do some history with Romy and Emily, which will probably be less thrilling...but I'll do my best. It will be good to get back to seeing Hazel and Romy regularly....it's been far too long. Next week we're off ice skating together before our educational efforts begin, lol.

We seem to be doing quite well, education-wise, at the moment. I'm still fretting over Emily's free time, though. Because Jon and I have to work during the evenings, we don't get to spend enough family time together - bizarre, really, given that we're all at home all day long. It seems that working from home can sometimes be a recipe for less family time, not more :-(( I wish we were in a position, financially, to be able to draw a line at the end of the day and have free evenings, but we're constantly playing catch up with real life work so it's just not happening at the moment. Must work out a way to make this happen. Invent 48 hour days or something. There must be a way.