just another morning here

Okay, I know this is a rubbish picture, but bear with me and read the story.

A couple of weeks ago in Josiah’s maths workbook we were doing some weighing activities, including guessing the weights of various objects. One of the pictures was of a duck, at which point Joe said “I’m not doing that one, I don’t have a clue how much a duck weighs, how old is that duck anyway, is it a duckling or a grown up duck?”

Thinking that those were very valid points to make, we skipped over that part of the question, but then decided to email Pennywell Farm to ask if they could weigh a duck for us! Had a lovely email conversation with someone there and we ended up visiting yesterday. Joe got in for free as we’d collected activity stamps last time we went

The staff on the desk hadn’t actually heard anything about our little mission, but the lady who was doing all the children’s activities that day was more than willing to help us out.

So, around lunchtime (well, after the story time, egg collecting, goat milking, lamb feeding and goodness knows what else we did!), we found some scales (hidden under the bucket in the picture) and Josiah weighed this month-old duckling. He held it first, and made a guess of 600g, then we put it in the bucket, and lo and behold it weighed almost exactly 600g! I say almost exactly as the duck didn’t really want to sit still in the bucket to be weighed so it was a bit difficult to read the scales, but it was pretty damn close. We didn’t bother trying to hold a fully grown duck still to weigh that as well, although I suppose that would be an interesting question to ask/answer, but fairly irrelevant at this point in time!

Anyway, it was fabulous that Pennywell were so accommodating (I knew they would be, they are so lovely there), we had a great day. Joe did all the other activities and really enjoyed himself (Robyn and I literally just followed him around!), and he was pretty chuffed to have estimated the duckling’s weight well too.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 9:28 and is filed under general, josiah, maths, out and about. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.