We built a snowman.

It was great fun building - we didn’t use a carrot for a nose - we poked the nose with our fingers with our gloves on, and we did that for the eyes as well.

Mummy did most of the snowman. Peter was getting some snow. I think I was getting the scarf, which was made out of a piece of tree [Daddy Notes: Cordyline
Australis].

Daddy took the photo. He was at church when we made it.

It is unusual to have snow in April in England.

Last week was half term.

Before half term, we were learning about planets and stars and the galaxy.

Now, we’re talking about owls.

• My group is barn owls.
• My best friend’s group is tawny owls.
• The other groups are called little owls and eagle owls.

Barn owls look like ghosts as they fly through the moonlight. They screech as well. They don’t just live in barns - they live in churches and buildings and trees.

Tawny owls are the most common owls in England, my book says.

In the year 2 classes at my school, most people like barn owls, I think, and for the least popular, it’s little owls.

Tomorrow it will be my show and tell and I can’t wait. I will be showing my blog and it will be fantastic when I have done this. It is so exciting!

At school my group, Earth, were doing doubling numbers and Mars group were doing halving.

[Daddy writes: This term, the groups in Pippy's class are named after planets]

Your could add 4 and 4 - that makes 8.

To double a number, you have to add the same number twice.

If you have a number 6, you have to take away half of it - that is 3.

My school project

This is my school project about space.

You can click on any of the pictures to see a big version.

The Solar System - there are 9 planets (unless you think Pluto is too small.)	The Sun is big. It is a star.

The Inner planets

The Inner Planets - They are the 4 planets nearest to the Sun.

Mars is the red planet. It is the 4th out from the sun.	Earth is the only planet with food.	The moon goes round the Earth.	Venus spins backwards. Its poisonous clouds trap the Sun’s heat.	On Mercury 1 day is 59 Earth days.

The outer planets

Jupiter (it is big.) Jupiter has a red spot.	Saturn has lots of rings.	Uranus rolls on its side!	Neptune has 8 moons.

Today, I have been reading “The Great Blueness” by Arnold Lobel.

At the start, there were no colours in the world at all, because everything was black or white or grey. A wizard lived there, and he was very sad.

He knew was something was not good, so he made a colour called blue, but that made everybody sad.

Then he made the colour yellow, but that was too bright. Everyone had a headache.

Then he made red, but that made everyone cross and bad-tempered.

Then the wizard made all the colours you could possibly imagine, and then the world was all colourful, and everyone liked it.

I like this book because it has lots of colours in it.

[Daddy writes: The book must be at least 35 years old, since it was mine when I was Pippy's age, and "grannie and grandad" recently passed it over to Mary and I for our children.]

This is a note from Pippy’s dad, again, in praise of Chris and the team at OpenMind for Numberjacks.

Some years ago (from 1989-1992), I had the good fortune to be accepted to Balliol College, Oxford, to do a degree in Mathematics and Computation.

Dr. Frances Kirwan (who later became president of the London Mathematical Society) was one of my tutors. While I was an undergraduate, Frances had one of her children, who is now at Cambridge (reading Mathematics.)

Anyway, I recently went to a mathematicians reunion dinner at Balliol, and met up with Frances again, and inevitably the subject of mathematical literacy in children came up. I mentioned Pippy’s comment at age 4 “A prime number that’s a square number? Ridiculous”, and Frances was both amused and highly impressed at a child that young being aware of the concepts, so I explained about Numberjacks.

FACT: Pippy learnt about square numbers from Numberjacks.

FACT: Pippy was motivated by Numberjacks to play with buddy blocks, and make square, and what she then dubbed “rectangular” and “tricky” numbers. “Rectangular numbers” is a term with an obvious meaning to anyone who understands “square numbers”. “Tricky numbers” turned out to mean “prime”, which is the word I then supplied to her.

I have no idea whether Pippy will be interested in mathematics by the time she gets to University age (or, for that matter, have no idea whether she’ll even want to go to University), but having a conceptual grounding at age 4 that good?

Thank you so much, Mr. Ellis!

This year, I found a nativity play card. It has a star, and Mary holding Jesus, and the moon or sun behind her.

Daddy says it’s actually called a halo, which is a light round someone’s head.

The card is green and blue, and I’m a bit surprised that it has green and blue on it.

Today is the first day of Christmas. Every year on the first of December, we put up our Christmas tree.

We had forgotten that the lights broke last year, so we bought new ones. We bought an extra set to decorate my room.

I chose the holly lights, which we put on the Christmas tree, and the multicoloured ones which we are about to put in my bedroom.

Daddy took a picture of the Christmas tree. (His camera flashed right in my eyes right as I was trying to sleep under the tree like Clara in the story The Nutcracker.)

There are volcanos in the world. There is one in Italy (that kicked poor Sicily) and there is one in Sicily too.

I coloured deserts in Africa and South America and grasslands in North America, and Europe and Asia which are joined together. Australia is red because of the red rock in the middle (Mummy writes - Uluru).

I drew on the cable under the sea (Mummy writes - the Sea-Me-We 3 cable network - the longest undersea telecoms cable)