Yesterday, we made an ammonite bowl. We had a big stamp, and we used glue to stamp ammonites onto glass.

Then we put colours on - the colours were red, black, blue and white, and they were actually glass, too. So we had to be really careful, because you can't breathe it in, it's super dangerous! If you breathe it in, it can really damage your lungs, so I was wearing goggles and a breathing mask, so I was super-safe. (Edit from Mummy: and we washed our skin and changed clothes when we went back in the house!)

This is what the bowl looked like when it went into the kiln. It didn't come out right, there's a big bubble in the middle, but you can hide a real ammonite underneath it, and so we still like it. We might have another go soon.

This is a fossilised feather from an archaeopteryx, and it is x-rayed. There is a palaeontologist at the University of Manchester, and he's called Dr Phil Manning, and he x-rayed the feather to find out what colours archaeopteryx feathers were.

And he found out that they were black and white! The x-ray light was brighter than a million suns! That is a lot - a million suns!

You can read more on the University of Manchester website: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=10202 (edit from Mummy: bottom image taken from there, top image taken from http://blogs.rsc.org/ja/2013/06/13/plumage-patterns-in-a-150-million-year-old-bird-revealed/ )

Eight weeks ago, we covered up six things to make an archaeological dig. We wrote about it on the blog (you can read about it here). Today, we dug it up. I was really, really excited, I couldn't wait!

I had a trowel, and this picture is me going across with my trowel very evenly.

This is a bit of my Lego brick. First we only saw a little bit, and I saw the word Lego on it. We carefully dug across and then when we got it all, we pulled it up, and we put it in our findings tray.

This is a little piece of banana skin, with the sticker on it.  If it didn't have the sticker, we probably wouldn't have found it. It rotted away lots, and there were little bugs eating it. It was brown and nearly the same colour as the soil, just a bit darker!

This is the ammonite we found. It was still the same.

This is me cleaning the banana skin, my best find. It was most, most interesting! And there was another interesting find, and that was the paper - it was gone!!! The coin, the Lego brick and the ammonite stayed the same, because they were inorganic. The banana skin and the hyacinth leaf rotted away lots, and the paper was completely gone. Below are the pictures of the hyacinth leaf and the banana skin. It was super fun to do an archaeological dig - you can do it at home, you just need to print off some sheets of paper, and you have to find things to bury, and you have to do what the paper says, and you have to bury them for eight weeks. We got the idea from the BBC (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/history/handsonhistory/dig_family.pdf).

I've been watching a programme about the ice age. It's called Ice Age Giants, and you can find it on the iPlayer from the BBC. The presenter is a lady called Professor Alice Roberts, she works at a university.

There are three programmes. My favourite bit was the cave bear. The Mummy bear and the cub were going deep in the cave, but then a cave lion came and found them, but the Mummy cave bear killed the cave lion and protected her cub.

There was lots about a giant sloth as well, but it wasn't called a megatherium, it was called the shasta giant sloth. And about Neanderthals and how they became extinct. There are lots of museums and places in the programme that I want to go to, so many that I can't even count them. There was a place near San Francisco were the stones were rubbed smooth by mammoths having a good scrub. I would love to travel all around the world and see all these places.

You can read more about the programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018c9fm - and you can watch it for another five days.  It is for grown ups, but I liked it! (Edit from Mummy: image taken from BBC link above.)

Two days ago, I made a Lego Mary Anning cliff. And the mini figures were Mary Anning and her brother Joseph. There are a few crystals, a dinosaur tooth and an ichthyosaur, and a fossilised fish. Mary Anning has got a hammer and a cloak. We couldn't find a bonnet for her in my lego box. She had a little white dog, but I didn't have a white dog, I only have a grey and black dog, and that was a lot bigger, so we just put a cat in. And Joseph was bigger than Mary Anning, but in my Lego set he's smaller. Maybe when I have more Lego pieces that are grey, I can build it a lot higher and wider cliff, and maybe I'll get figures that fit better for the dog and Joseph.