In September my new class is going to be Kingfishers. My teacher is called Mrs Tong. That is in Year 1.
In September I want to be better at jumping in the air and cartwheels. We do jumping in PE when the mat is near a bench but I don’t know about cartwheels. I want to do some drawing and sometimes going to Dragonflies which is the other Year 1 class. The Dragonfly teacher is my old teacher that I had in Reception (Ducklings). The Dragonfly Class were Goslings in Reception.
The father’s day card for daddy that I gave him was the one I made at school.
On the front there is a picture of daddy and me in a hug together. I drew the picture on Friday, and brought it home, but it was a surprise for daddy.
And today is Sunday, it’s father’s day today. Me and Peter gave daddy a book. I helped wrap the books up - I made a mistake once and mummy helped.
In a comment on this blog late last night, Chris Ellis, writer of Numberjacks, wrote:
For Pippy, her Dad and others who have said kind words - you might like to know that Numberjacks won the Royal Television Society’s Award for best pre-school educational programme, which of course we are delighted about.
The Royal Television Society have the following to say about it:
This winning programme is an innovative combination of live action and animation of great appeal for its audience, made with a thorough understanding of how young children learn and rehearse basic mathematical concepts.
We second that!
Congratulations to all at OpenMind from a raving fan (and his daughter!)
Regards,
Mark
Lazytown is really great. There is someone called Sportacus, who always saves the day.
Miss Busybody is always talking.
Stephanie’s uncle is the mayor of Lazytown. Ziggy loves eating lots and lots and lots of sweets. Pixel is alway playing computer games, even at night-time. Stingy wants everything. Trixie sometimes tells jokes. Robbie Rotten tries to get rid of Sportacus.
Stephanie is 8 years old, and has pink hair. I love pink, but I don’t have pink hair.
My Balamory DVD has four titles but the extra bonus one is my favourite. It is The Tortoise and the Hare. They all have stories on them.
My favourite characters are the girls - Josie Jump, Edie McCreedie, Miss Hooley, Penny Pocket and Susie Sweet.
I like the sweet shop drop game on the Cbeebies website. I especially like the pink ones.
Time for a post from Daddy again, in praise of Numberjacks.
The Numberjacks DVD arrived a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been running several times a day. Both Pippy (4) and Peter (2) love it.
However, quite apart from the entertainment value, the numeracy of both of them has taken a huge leap forward. Peter can (with help) count to 100 now, which isn’t bad going for a two year old. We tend to cheat, slightly, in that he and I will count alternately, with him doing the odd numbers, and me doing the evens, so the rollover from 29 to 30 is always daddy’s problem 
With Pippy, however, is where it’s got a bit scarey.
A few weeks ago, she’d been watching the Numberjacks play with their “buddy blocks” (the little building block things they use to illustrate things like 3+3 = 6, and square numbers.)
Anyway, Pippy got out some of her building blocks, and decided they were buddy blocks, and brought them in to me one evening, announcing she wanted “Number Fun”. So I decided that we’d have a got at breaking down the numbers into prime factors (OK, I’m a pushy parent ).
So, we wrote the numbers from 1 to 10, vertically, on a piece of paper, and decided that we’d work out how to make up the numbers, by playing with the buddy blocks… 4 was 2 x 2, obviously, and 6 was then 2 x 3, but when we got to 8, she decided it was 2 x 4…
… so I pointed out that 4 was 2 x 2, and that meant that 8 was 2 x 2 x 2 - hence, prime factorisation.
She then noticed that 2, 3, 5 and 7 were, in her words, “tricky numbers”, so I explained that “tricky numbers” were called “prime numbers”.
I knew that Mary (aka mummy) had been carrying on the number fun with her, and that they’d prime factorised the numbers up to about 40… but nothing prepared me for what happened the other night, after she’d watched the Numberjacks use their buddy blocks for square and cube numbers.
Mary had said “A square number”, and I said “no, you mean a prime number”…
.. and Pippy, age 4, said “A square number that’s a prime number - ridiculous!”
Huh - a four year old who has independantly observed that square numbers cannot (by definition) be prime. She’s in reception at school, for crying out loud, the target for this year is for her class to be able to count to 20!
Why aren’t Numberjacks mandatory viewing in schools? They seem to have got over some fairly sophisticated concepts very, very, early.
I’ve won twice in the two Tommy Zoom games on the CBeebies website as you just have to get all three stars to win - that’s in Super Zoom. Polluto is up to no good every time Tommy comes. Tommy always has to come when Polluto is about. Polluto and Smogg try to catch Tommy but Tommy keeps flying. Polluto can’t fly.
The Pontipines song is another one from CBeebies [Mummy writes - they are the tiny characters on In The Night Garden]. I like the Pontipines song because at the end it does a dance. It keeps going round and round the garden and every time it stops it goes in and out [Mummy writes - a bit like a country dance].
In The Night Garden is a new programme on CBeebies. The start of the song starts with the flashing stars. Igglepiggle takes down the sail of the boat and put the light on. The sail is his special blanket that he carries around the Night Garden. At the end if the song the big star goes up into the springtime blossom.
Makka Pakka has to go under a bridge to get to the Night Garden because people have to use the bridge to cross his path otherwise they would have to go round.
Upsy Daisy’s bed is in the middle of the daisies. On Upsy Daisy’s game on the CBeebies website her bed runs off and she has to chase it. Then it goes back to its place and she comes and finds it.
The Tombliboos are called Om, Ee and Oo [Mummy writes - we think these names are right.]. When you click on the Tombliboos on their game page their shorts fall down and that makes us laugh - it’s so funny.
It is so funny when Igglepiggle and Upsy Daisy fall over on the TV. Upsy Daisy fell over when the flower was so pretty she couldn’t believe her eyes.
The Pontipines are so small you can’t see if they are there at all. Even when there are ten you can’t see if they are there. 1 Pontipine, 2 Pontipines, 3 Pontipines, 4 Pontipines, 5 Pontipines, 6 Pontipines, 7 Pontipines, 8 Pontipines, 9 Pontipines 10 Pontipines. When the Pontipine children are missing they go into and onto strange places. Once they fell asleep on Upsy Daisy’s bed and another time they got onto the Tombliboos’ roof because they were making so much noise that they couldn’t hear anyone except the Pontipine children on the roof.
The Haahoos are so big that when you are so little like the Pontipines we have just talked about you can’t see how big they are.
The Ninky Nonk is so fast we can’t catch it. The round one is the Tombliboos’, the tall one is Upsy Daisy’s, the little one is the Pontipines’ and the back one was Igglepiggle’s when he was on his own.
The Pinky Ponk can fly. When you are a bird in the Night Garden and you can fly you might be able to catch it as it is so slow. The large people go in the bottom and the Pontipines go up the top.
I’m going to make a cinema of Nina and the Neurons.
Nina and the Neurons is a new programme. I watched it for the first time today.
Then I went to the CBeebies website and printed out the Nina and the Neurons printables. I painted them and I played on their homepage.
Now I have printed them, I am going to make my own question. My favourite Neurons are Ollie and Belle. Ollie studies smell and Belle listens.
Nina and the Neurons was on straight after Numberjacks.
[Daddy writes: Nina is a human, the neurons represent the five senses - Bud is taste, Ollie is smell, Felix is touch, Belle is hearing, and Luke is seeing. The names are reasonable puns in either English or Latin.]
It looks like, as of this morning, Amazon and Play have both listed the Numberjacks DVD.
As revealed two weeks ago (on my daughter’s Blog!), the release date is early April - both Amazon and Play are quoting April 2nd.
You can pre-order from Amazon.co.uk by clicking here
Only six weeks to go!
