Week 2 - the Natural History Museum

Day two of homeschooling was supposed to be about dinosaurs, so we decided to head straight for the Natural History Museum once we'd dropped Vaughan off at school.  Both the kids love the Natural History Museum, but it's huge and crowded and I usually find it a bit stressful.

For the first time, we decided to get a free Explorer's Backpack from the information desk.  You can get them on several topics, but dinosaurs wasn't one of them.  So we chose the one on Monsters, which is concentrated on the main hall, with the fantastic replica Diplodocus skeleton.  We did a few of the clues, but mainly Emily liked the hard explorer hat and the binoculars, even though everything seen through them was hopelessly blurred!

Then we went through the dinosaur rooms.  Of course the highlight is the life-size animatronic T-Rex, but we also had fun on the lower level, sketching a dinosaur nest and learning about the different kinds of plant life in the three periods that dinosaurs lived in: the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous.

Then we did a bit of revision on mammals, mainly because I can't resist the big room with the lifesize blue whale!

We couldn't escape without visiting the shop, where we bought a new book (one I nearly bought a couple of months ago at the zoo), How Big Was A Dinosaur by Anna Milbourne & Serena Riglietti, which is mainly great because of the giant poster in an envelope at the back!  We also bought a crystal growing kit and a couple of postcards.

Week 1: Making a Start

Well, this post is a bit late, but last Friday was our first day of flexi-schooling and it was great!

We dropped V off at school and went home for our first activity - tidying the bedroom, dressed up as a maths activity (sneaky mummy!).  Emily's been using her doll's bed as a wardrobe for a while now and it's been quietly driving me crazy.  So we made our own worksheet, then sorted and tidied all the clothes, kept tallies and then added up the rows and columns.  Emily was really interested that the total of the rows and the total of the columns was the same, and I got to show her long addition.  Best of all, the bedroom is tidier by 47 items of clothing!

Earlier in the week I'd given Emily a few suggestions of projects we could do, and she picked the theme 'Animals'.  I've been wanting to visit the Grant Museum of Zoology for a while, so I decided to teach Emily about vertebrates and invertebrates.  After the tidying, the first stop was the library and here's where we had the most difficult part of the day.

I should have encouraged Emily to go wild in the toy bucket while I picked the books I wanted to use, but I didn't, and by the time we sat down to look at them she was bored.  So we didn't get too far, but we did a little writing and Emily illustrated the pages for cold-blooded vertebrates and warm-blooded vertebrates with a frog and a parrot respectively.

Then she played with the toys and made me 'lunch' with the tea set while I did a bit more browsing.  We came home with three great books.

In the afternoon it was off to the museum!

The Grant Museum of Zoology is run by UCL, part of the University of London, and it's very small - just one room (unless there are others we didn't find!) - and it's only open in the afternoons, but it's free and it's fascinating; I highly recommend it.  Occasionally on Saturdays they have talks for families with children (also free), and I can't wait to go to a few of those.

We played a game of 'Vertebrate or Invertebrate?', which went quite well while I was asking the question, but then Emily spotted a turtle and decided to turn the tables!  For all I knew, turtles could have been a kind of snail!!  But thankfully a couple of cases along there were some more turtles and tortoises and a card explaining that they're reptiles, and their shell is made from their ribs and backbone.  There was even a tortoise skeleton on display with its shell toward the back of the case so you could see the thin backbone running along the inside.

My favourite exhibit was the sinuous anaconda skeleton realistically wrapped around a log, but Emily wasn't at all interested.  'That's not a skeleton', she said scornfully, 'that's a skeleton!' - pointing at a plastic human skeleton on display near the exit.  And at that point I knew: it doesn't matter what I teach her, she'll learn in her own way and at her own pace.  And I'm so thrilled I get this extra chance to see it happen.

Coming soon: dinosaurs!  We had our second day of homeschooling today and it was great, but I'm exhausted and it'll probably take me a couple of days to get the photos uploaded.