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 :)

Finally, our inevitable gift shop purchase: a great book featuring 10 real animals that you can mix and match to create fantastical beasts!

More soon! x

Weeks 7 & 8: Planets

So, Emily wanted to do a project on Space and after our uninspiring trip to the Science Museum, I did a bit of browsing on Pinterest and came up with a new idea: we'd cut out and paint the planets, to scale.

This turned out to be great fun, with one note of caution: choose your scale before you start!  More on this later.

Emily had a great time doing the inner planets and she got to learn how to use a compass, as well as what the word radius means.  The photo below shows Mercury and Venus

Then this happened...

I'd chosen a very simple scale - 1cm:1000km.  And so Jupiter is 140cm across and Saturn isn't much smaller at 116cm (Of course, we didn't even attempt the Sun.  That would have been something like 14m diameter :D)  We had to roll up the rug, and break open a new roll of lining paper for Jupiter.  And then painting it with our tiny brushes took forever!  Thankfully Uranus and Neptune were much easier.  Then Emily wrote the planets' names and we stuck them on the walls all over the house with Blu-Tack.  Finding wall space big enough for all of them was a bit of a challenge.

I had a little extra fun figuring out distances at the same scale for a few of the planets.  Emily was pretty impressed to discover that if the Sun was as tall as our house, our little 5cm Mercury would be further away than her school, at 600m away.  Earth would be almost exactly a mile away, with Neptune 26 miles beyond that (assuming my maths isn't too far off!)

The planets can stay up on the walls until we move next month, but after that we'll take them down and decide their fate - do we throw them away or do we roll them up with all our other posters and drawings and take them with us?

An Unexpected Story

We got a great surprise when we got up today - Emily had a very creative morning!  She was up much earlier than us as usual - particularly because today's Saturday, and who likes to get up early on Saturdays?

Here's a Tarzan story Emily wrote.  The transcription is underneath.

Monkey is meeting Tarzan (picture caption)
A Tarzan Story
by Emily
The monkey swinged for himself
up in the air
and landed in Tarzan's arms (that line had to go at the top because Emily ran out of space at the bottom)

Monkey said to Tarzan, "Thank you".
He loves the way Tarzan rescued him.
Monkey looked at Tarzan and they be
friends.  The End.

As you can see, the school's 'sound it out for yourself' approach to spelling only yields results slowly, but I'm happy that Emily is writing confidently and I don't want to spoil it by being strict on spellings.

Emily also did a beautiful picture of the Solar System, following on from yesterday's homeschooling session (featuring in a blog post soon!):

From top to bottom, the captions read:
Shooting Star
Mars
Sun
Mercury
Earth
Saturn
Moon
Jupiter

I especially love the Sun and Jupiter's faces!

Weeks 5 & 6: Revision, and the Science Museum!

Week 5 we stayed at home.  It gave us a chance to do some revision, and restock the energy supplies.

We spent the morning reading our Egypt library books (or looking at the pictures anyway) and doing a little writing, and in the afternoon we did a cutting and sticking activity on vertebrates which I found on Pinterest - you can download it here.

The next week, Emily chose Space as our new topic, so we headed off to the Science Museum.  They have a great gallery with a lifesize model of Apollo 11 (see the top of the post), complete with spacemen and moon rocks, but Emily just wasn't interested.  The next gallery caught her attention a bit more and we saw the actual command module of Apollo 10 (below), which has been to the Moon and back!

We tried a little sketching but it wasn't a great success, we got a very uninspiring picture of Sputnik and an interesting take on all the wiring in the rocket engines.

Here's a link to a picture of the engines Emily was sketching.

So we had our lunch early and then headed upstairs to the Launchpad.  There are loads of interactive activities there and it's tons of fun - especially since most of the school parties were at lunch so Emily wasn't outnumbered by much bigger kids.  We turned a handle to generate electricity, which flowed through electrodes in a tank of water, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen, and when enough hydrogen collected at the top of the tank it fired a rocket - very loudly!  We used air to make balls travel uphill, found out how liquids of different viscosity behave differently, (nearly) constructed a self-supporting arch, made a magnet float using a bigger magnet and loads of other great stuff.  We were having such a great time we totally failed to take any photos!

We'll try the space gallery another time - it's much more fun to do whatever is making Emily most enthusiastic and with only one day homeschooling a week, activities that turn into a chore are just not worth it!  This is supposed to be enjoyable after all :)

Weeks 3 & 4: Calpol, Germs and Ancient Egypt at the British Museum

So after my last post, the family was hit by a nasty cold.  A couple of bottles of Calpol, two trips to the doctor and one unnecessary (and unfilled) prescription for antibiotics later, we're all feeling much better.  But the first flexi-schooling Friday after my last post was done with two children at home - one of them a very ill little boy indeed.  So that day consisted mainly of going to the doctor and then home after a quick trip to the library, followed by lots of reading all snuggled up together under a duvet on the sofa.

Last Friday everyone was better except me.  So V went to school as usual, and Emily and I walked to the British Museum for our Ancient Egypt day as planned.  And although I was really dreading it, it turned out to be one of the nicest days yet!

We got to the Rosetta Stone (I didn't get a picture, but here's the Wikipedia entry) almost as soon as the gallery opened at 10am, mainly avoiding the horrible crush that you usually find gathered around it.  Then we wandered through all the monumental sculptures and found a sarcophagus, which had extremely clear hieroglyphs on it, so we sat down to copy them.

Then we went upstairs to look at all the mummies, which is always good fun.  After we'd done that, we ended up downstairs again and sat for over an hour sketching a status of Horus, the falcon-shaped god of the sky, son of Osiris and Isis.  The bottom picture is a depiction of the sun god Ra taken from the centre of a tablet covered in hieroglyphs (on the left) and a giant bust of Rameses II mounted on top of a giant block of stone (which wasn't really as colourful as Emily imagined it!) with Horus behind him and the window of the gallery above.

Then we had fun trying on all the medieval knight costumes in the shop.  I bought a much-needed new mouse mat - I should say Mouse Rug, because that's what it is!  It's a bit posh-looking, but it's the nicest mouse mat I've ever used.  We also bought some postcards because I'd forgotten the camera.  I'm glad we did, because most of the photos I took of the galleries with my phone came out blurred.

We left the museum about 1pm and had lunch in our favourite little local Italian restaurant - L'Osteria 57 on Gray's Inn Road - it was a bit of a treat for us, but as we only ordered olives, a pizza and a can of lemonade to share between us the bill only came to £10 and it was so relaxing and enjoyable it was definitely worth it!

Then we went to Coram's Fields because so far I haven't scheduled in nearly enough unstructured play time for Emily.  We had nearly an hour there before we had to pick up V, and we discovered that Emily can now use the zip cord without needing any help.  We practised a bit on the 'big girl's' swings and then Emily inexplicably spent the next half an hour in a cold damp sandpit having the time of her life.  I asked her what she was building just before we left and she promptly replied, 'Pyramids!' - so there she was carrying on the Ancient Egypt theme all on her own!  I got a bit cold and bored and invented the sport of 'foot raking' - tidying up the thick layer of leaves that covered the park everywhere.  In the distance I could see a member of staff with an actual rake and I really wanted to ask him if I could have one too, but I figured he'd say no in case I injured myself or someone else, so I improvised with my feet.  It kept me warm anyway!

 

I think the day went so well because it played to Emily's strengths and it contained plenty of her favourite things: a trip, sketching, no reading and writing, eating out and going to the park!  It'd be nice to include something from that list every Friday, but I feel like we need to do the hated reading and writing parts too, so I guess I just need to find the right balance.  This week will be a day spent at home revising the last few weeks - we're helping the in-laws move at the weekend, so I'm keeping it simple to avoid getting too exhausted.  Until next time!

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.

Flexischooling - the day the school said yes!

What great news...our application for flexischooling, made before the summer holidays, has finally been approved!  Starting after half term, we can homeschool Emily every Friday - our first school day together is less than three weeks away!

Here's a copy of the school's consent letter (I've pixelated the school's name):

We've also been asked to share written and/or verbal evidence of the work we've done with the school every Monday, with a review meeting just before the February half term.

Here's a copy of our original application:

We just can't wait to get started and can only hope that it'll go so well that the school will change its mind and have no problem with continuing the arrangement.