Back to Canterbury; non-fiction books; photographing our children; and welcoming spring

If you’ve been here a while you might remember that back in November we went on a Big Day Out to Canterbury. It was so good that yesterday we went back, and spent another 3-4 hours in the cathedral, and visited the Roman Museum.

Top tips:

1. The Canterbury Cathedral website has excellent learning resources which I only discovered after our visit, but would be worth looking at beforehand if you’re more organised than I am.

2. The Roman Museum is expensive (£30 for a family of 4!), but has real Roman objects for handling, dressing-up clothes and toy Roman soldier shields and swords for play, genuine Roman mosaics on a now-wonky floor because 2000 yers of earth movements will do that, and a fun Roman game called Petteia which you could play at home with a chess set. Excuse my very amateur photography.

Today we are having a fairly quiet and relaxed day after yesterday’s exertions. I asked the children what they could remember and they ended up coming up with 30 facts between them! One of them said we could make an encyclopedia of Canterbury Cathedral, which I thought was a brilliant idea, so we ran with it. I printed some of the learning resources from the website, typed up their remembered facts, made a pouch to hold the map we were given yesterday, used a cathedral postcard to make title pages, and now they each have their very own Canterbury Cathedral book. I’m feeling extremely pleased with all this and it was a great way to cement yesterday’s learning while it was still fresh.

Non-fiction books we borrowed recently

At the weekend my daughter and I went to the library to collect the rest of the Percy Jackson books we’d requested. We (of course) took the opportunity to do some browsing, and came away with a stack of tempting non-fiction. (My children are 6 and 8.)

• The Story of Planet Earth. Sections are: Big Bang, First Life, Leaving the Seas, Age of Dinosaurs, Primate Power, and Changing Planet. We really enjoyed the Story of Science in the same series. A great one to read aloud a page or two at a time.

• Samurai: Japan’s Noble Servant-Warriors. Not my kind of book, but my son loves it. Explains the history of samurai in a comic-strip style with a focus on specific events and individuals.

• 24 Hours in Antarctica. Another comic-strip style book. My daughter loves this one. Lots of excellent detail about a day in the life of the Rothera Research Station (British Antarctic Survey’s main research station).

  

• The Story Behind Gold. Somewhere between a picture book and a text book, this covers the history of gold, finding and mining gold, uses for gold, and myths and legends about gold.

• Fourteen Wolves. This is another book about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. Longtime readers will remember my love for Bringing Back The Wolves. Clearly no sane family needs two books on this subject, but I wanted to have a look. There is some good detail in Fourteen Wolves (about how they captured and moved the wolves to their new home, for example), but overall Bringing Back is the better book. If you can only find Fourteen Wolves though, it’s still good.

• A Child Through Time: The Book of Children’s History. How have I not used this book before? I’m sure I’ve seen it recommended. We meet children from early civilisations all the way to modern times, learning details about their lives, and there are pages focusing on things like Clothes Through Time, The Silk Road, and The American Civil War. I really want a copy of this book to keep.

  

• The Magic of Forests. Hugh amounts of information on a range of forests, from mangroves to cloud forests and everything in between. Not just science: there are pages about forest folklore and enchanted forests.

• First Encyclopedia of the Human Body. This has a good level of detail for my 6 and 8 year old. Instead of simply stating that the heart pumps blood around the body, for example, there’s a double-page spread with a diagram of the heart, information on heart valves, beats per minute, and so on.

• Medieval Medicine. This probably has too much detail for my two to take it all in, but I’m looking forward to trying out this angle on medieval history. Content headings include: The Christian Church, Public Health and Plague, Islamic Medicine, Doctors, Surgeons, and Hospitals, and Women in Medicine. It’s part of a series: Ancient, Renaissance, Industrial Age, and Modern Medicine are also available.

• The World’s Wildest Places. 20 wild places around the world each get two double-page spreads exploring their habitat and species. Each one also briefly details the people helping that place, and how we can help too.

  

Photographs and Spring: Things I liked in my own reading that you might too

I recently read Tracks by Robyn Davidson, about her solo camel trek across the Australian desert. For part of the journey she is joined by Mr Eddie, an elderly Aboriginal man. At one point a National Geographic photographer takes a Polaroid snap of Mr Eddie and hands it to him as a gift, partly as a way to win him over.

But I knew Eddie would see it as a cheap trick. And he did. He didn’t like Rick, didn’t like being photographed, and certainly didn’t like being handed this useless bit of paper with his face on it, as a bribe. […] Later, in Warburton, Glendle asked Eddie what he would do with the Polaroid of himself. “Oh probably burn it,” he said nonchalantly. We cracked up.

Everyone today takes a lot of photographs. Even if you’re not the person who photographs their restaurant meal for Instagram, you’re likely still taking hundreds of pictures of your child(ren). I do. There’s nothing wrong with it, although of course we could question why we feel the need to photograph everything just because we can, and what effect it might have on our children to have so much of their lives documented in a way it never was until the 21st century. Personally I am not hugely interested in seeing the limited photos my own parents took of me, and I am certain my own children won’t want to sift through the thousands I have of them.

No doubt there’s a whole post on this subject, but for now I just thought it was interesting how little weight and value Eddie attached to a photograph of himself. Sometimes I panic that I’ve accidentally deleted a photo—one of thousands of my children—but Mr Eddie is happy to burn the only photo of him he’s ever owned.

I’m now onto My Ántonia by Willa Cather. What a novel. (No spoilers please, I’m still going.) I thought those of you in the Northern Hemisphere might like this:

When spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.

---

See you on Friday for a special guest post about why we should all be teaching, and learning, classical history, including a special giveaway just for readers of How We Homeschool.

---

Thanks for reading. If you’re not subscribed, sign up for free and never miss a post.