How Many ?

It was raining properly this morning as I left for work but fortunately it stopped mid-morning, just in time for the children's playtime. It all gets a bit frantic when they have to spend the day in the classroom. My children always start the day with a 'morning challenge' before we settle down to do the registers. Today they had to count some supermarket vouchers (that are being collected by the whole school) and put them in bunches of 10 secured by a paperclip. That then led to an impromptu maths lesson where we estimated and counted all the sets of 10 to see how many we had in total. Lots of estimation, multiplication and division going on before we finally found we had 1,500 vouchers. The owls are still bustling about in their nest box though I'm being very strict and switching off the screen if the children start to get too excited. It's the only way at the moment as they are still rather noisy and silly but today was a definite improvement, thank goodness. This recent rain is hastening the demise of the early spring flowers like this tulip at school. Travelling to school some of the cherry trees are already starting to look threadbare with swathes of colour across the pavements below. I'm so lucky with my journey to school, most of it is through farmland and as soon as I reach town I turn off the main road and drive about a mile through residential streets with large front gardens. At the moment colour is supplied by cherry blossom, tulip trees, forsythia, aubretia and magnolias and of course lots of spring bulbs. So much nicer than the dirty built up London streets I used to have to travel through.