North is on my left: How many weeks has it been? Anyway...Materials, Part 1!

Oh my, it's been such a long time since I've written anything, but we haven't been idle! First we went on holiday - a week in Lisbon, which was fantastic, can't recommend it enough. Then we moved house. That was about a month ago, and I think I'm just about recovering.

In the meantime we've done homeschooling days on Great Explorers (mainly Vasco da Gama, part of our Portugal preparation) and planting grass seed, which isn't really growing because it hasn't rained and we don't have a watering can, so it tried to sprout and then turned brown. Poor grass. And lots of other fun stuff. Hopefully I'll get a chance to post about some of it soon. We also had a meeting with the school, who seem quite happy with Emily's work but suggested we might do more tie-ins with the school curriculum. So...

This term they're doing Materials at school. I wonder how they can make this topic last a term, because we're struggling to make it last longer than a day! But we had a great day, and we also have a plan for next week.

We went to the Tate Modern on the South Bank. The Turbine Hall is always great, and this time was no exception - a giant winged installation made with sheets of wood and draped with fabric. Materials all over the place!

We also explored a couple of the galleries. We found a great silent video about a lightbulb factory in China which was fascinating to watch, as well as lots of interesting art. Emily's favourite was a wooden board which had plastic bags full of paint and secured with wire and string placed on it, then covered with a thick layer of plaster. When it was dry the artist hung it on the wall and invited people to shoot at it (not while we were there sadly, many years ago) and burst the bags of paint. Quite a few Materials, all in one place, so convenient.

Then we found a room full of installations that were great for a Materials project. There were several forms of wood - old dead tree trunks, twiggy brushwood, and planed and geometrically cut wood. There were rough stones and polished stones and metal. There was even a drippy sculpture moulded in lead which we named The Deflated Elephant.

After we'd eaten our lunch, we wandered over the Millennium Bridge and onto the Thames foreshore, where we found shells, bones, pottery, bricks, pebbles, glass, you name it. Emily had a great time wandering and collecting things. And the weather and the view were both great :)