We have learnt how you get a foul and what happens if you get one.

• If you get a foul in the black D, the other team takes it to the top of the circle, and passes it to another member of their team – it’s called a Hit Out.
• If you get it anywhere else, it just goes to the other team.

I like hockey more than netball. I am doing training with mum as well as learning at school.

I have found out my facts in two medieval books:

• Castle
• The Middle Ages

My facts are:

1. Most castles have round towers.
2. Some medieval ladies wore headdresses
3. Knights used to save the castle from danger
4. In medieval times, the kings and queens ruled the kingdom
5. A church inside a castle is called a chapel

Next, I told Peter how the king moves in chess. I told him about castling first.

The we played noughts and crosses.

Granny is mummy’s mum.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.]

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!