How we homeschooled this week
The Amazon, The Odyssey, The Unrelenting Hard Work
As regular readers will know, I’ve started using a weekly almost-timetable this academic year (there are no times, just the work that I aim to get through day). I like this new weekly plan so much. There are blank spaces on the schedule, so I can easily add in extra bits and bobs—the card game we played, the book a child read, the visit we made and so on. The weekly view means that if we don’t get to something one day, I know we stand a good chance of getting to it later on. With a daily list if you don’t get through the list you feel you’ve missed your chance. If there’s something we haven’t got to at all—this week we somehow missed both history sessions—I can prioritise it on Friday morning before we go out for the day.
It’s going so well that I thought I would share this week with you. But of course, as soon as I thought that, things started to go awry…
Monday
On Monday we got through everything on the list. Hallelujah! Maths, spelling, multiplication, more spelling, writing up a science experiment, Ancient Greek, grammar, and non-fiction reading aloud (about the swallow migration, and the science of sugar dissolving in water). Oh yes, I’ll definitely be sharing this with my readers, I thought.
Tuesday
On Tuesday we woke up to find that our weekly fruit and veg box had been stolen after being delivered overnight. I know this is the pettiest of petty thefts, but it got my day off to a seriously bad start. It was especially ill-timed because we’d been away all weekend, so I hadn’t done the usual food shop, so there was very, very little food in the house and I had been counting on that box. So, struggling to love my fellow man, and knowing it is never easy to do a big shop mid-week, I was not in a good frame of mind for kind, compassionate, enthusiastic education. However, I decided to be a grown up and get on with it anyway.
My son asked me to read him the Odyssey straight after breakfast. He wanted the whole thing, which I refused, but I read quite a bit (from Usborne Greek Myths for Young Children). Then, because the children were happily colouring while I read, I decided to read them a bit of the same story from Emily Wilson’s translation, which was super gruesome and which they heartily enjoyed. (Find Emily on Substack here.)
Because ancient reading was going so well, I moved onto the Bible. This year we are slowly working through a children’s Bible, and the children are loving it. This week was all about Joseph, so we read lots because the story is so good, and I resisted the urge to play the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
For maths we did some word problems on the blackboard, because I couldn’t face patiently sitting by each child while they worked in their workbooks, and because turning word problems into numbers is an important skill that we don’t do very much of. I made them up off the top of my head, inspired by recent problems in their workbooks.
I asked them to have a go at writing the new spellings I introduced on Monday, and we revised the new vocab from the past few French With Mr Innes videos we’ve watched (because the videos are good, but watching a video once is not enough to embed new vocabulary in your brain, alas).
And then, because I can really hold onto a grudge and was still grumpy about the veg box, we went out for the afternoon for a trip to the library.
A short pause to talk about books about the Amazon rainforest
Recently we read the new Usborne Extreme Planet book, Journey Through the Amazon. It’s lovely, and informative, but left me wanting a bit more. In the two libraries we visited this week, I also picked up Amazon River and Let’s Save The Amazon.
Amazon River is aimed at slightly older children—9-11. It’s beautiful, and full of great information. It’s the only book, for example, that mentions the Hamza River, a second river flowing 4km below the ground-level Amazon whose discovery was only announced in 2011. It also talks about wildlife, local myths and legends, dams, fishing, the Inca Empire… it’s very comprehensive.
Let’s Save The Amazon is a short book you can read in one-sitting, but which packs a lot in. Each page is a reason we should protect the forest, from medicine to indigenous people, to rainfall across South America and the global chain the Amazon is a part of. Did you know that dust from the Sahara weighing the same as 250 blue wales, is carried across the Atlantic and enriches the soil of the Amazon every year?
By happy coincidence, this month’s National Geographic is all about the Amazon, so if you’re also on this topic, get your copy now.
Wednesday
I have graduated to the next level of home-educating parents and organised a home ed sailing class, which took place on Wednesday morning, bright and early. It was a success, but while my daughter sailed I took my son to a different library, so I spent the morning carrying a very heavy backpack full of books. Then when we returned them I bought a large quantity of bread flour, because when you’re near a shop selling good flour, you have to stock up. By the time we got home from sailing, I felt like I’d taken part in some kind of army training exercise.
There was a short respite over lunch, and then we went out again on an unsuccessful emergency shoe-shopping trip for my daughter. When we got home it was time to throw some banana bread in the direction of my son and run for the bus to take him to Beavers (Tiger Cubs in the US). After dropping him off, I got another bus to a supermarket (did I mention we had no food in the house?), where I bought as much as I could carry, and got a bus to pick my son up. Except the bus stops going that way were all closed, so instead I had to walk, with all the shopping I wouldn’t have bought if I’d known there were no buses.
I picked up my son, and my husband simultaneously dropped off our daughter for her own Scouts meeting. I had 30 minutes at home to get my son ready for bed, hang up the laundry, and unpack the shopping, before it was time to get back on the bus to collect my daughter. I hate Wednesdays.
(You are correct, no formal education took place on Wednesday.)
Thursday
By Thursday the house had descended into complete chaos. My husband is clearing out some books so there is a narrow path through the hallway until we get the giant bags of books actually out of the house. The kitchen is a disaster. The sitting room (which is also a library, school room, playroom, dining room, laundry room) is giving me serious anxiety. This morning I thought I could at least clear the table but here we are at 3.30 and I haven’t done it. I decided that what I needed today was 1/3 school work, 1/3 rest, and 1/3 housework. I made a list of the work I wanted to get through:
Maths
Dictation
Apostrophes with plurals
Amazon reading
Poetry learning
Greek revision
History reading
My daughter wanted to write a letter to a Jewish friend to wish him a belated Shanah Tovah (oh yes, at some point this week we read a sweet little book about Rosh Hashanah). While she did that I worked with my son on his current maths workbook. Then out for fresh air to buy stamps and post the letter, and home for a snack and some reading on the sofa, about the Amazon.
Then we moved on to the floor for some Ancient Greek vocab revision, and some maths. I borrowed Professor Fiendish’s Book of Diabolical Brain-Benders from one of the libraries, and today we made a gentle start. It was fun, and investigative, and each child worked at their own level and in their own way. I am still completely baffled at the discovery that two rectangles of the same perimeter can have different areas. Can someone explain this in the comments? Anyway we made a nice table showing the different options so we knew we’d discovered all the possibilities, and it made a nice change from workbooks. The book is aimed at 10+ so I doubt we’ll read it cover to cover.
I printed off a worksheet or two so the children could practise apostrophes. Dull but important. And then we broke for lunch.
After lunch the only things left to do were poetry learning and dictation. The dictation came from Alpha to Omega, the spelling programme we are now working through systematically. I started with just one sentence to ease everyone in gently.
I decided we’d save history reading for tomorrow, so after some poetry learning, the children entertained themselves and I wrote this, while thinking that I should instead be thinking about supper and tidying up. So you can guess what I’m off to do now.
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I really am no mathematician but let me give it a go.
For any given perimeter, a circle will always be the most efficient way to enclose the biggest possible area. Let's pretend you have a piece of string, the floor is covered with Maltesers, and I'll give you the Maltesers as long as they're enclosed by your string. Assuming you like chocolate, you'd want to arrange the piece of string as much like a circle as possible to cover as many Maltesers as possible. You wouldn't want to arrange your string "like a worm" (i.e. as a long thin shape)—you'd probably only get single Maltesers that fit within the worm. Imagine if you were able to make your string infinitely like a worm (i.e. maximally long and thin for that given perimeter): its area would be near zero and you wouldn't get any Maltesers at all.
The same holds true for rectangles. The closer a rectangle is to a square, the more efficient it will be at enclosing a big area—in other words, the bigger its area is. Imagine the same piece of string, but instead of making circles or long thin shapes, it's making rectangles. Given the same perimeter, the longer and thinner the rectangle is, the smaller its area will be. And that's what the chart is showing you.
JCX has it nicely.
My explanation is to think of your perimeter all straightened into a single line, but made up of meccano type pieces so you can click it into all possible rectangles. Long and thin or short and fat. You might well notice that you only need half of your long perimeter to make two sides of the rectangle. You can call the longer one L and the shorter one W length and width. Or call them whatever you like. Your perimeter will always be 2 x L + 2 x W or, more elegantly, 2(L + W). Your area will always be L x W, or more elegantly LW. To make the area as big as possible you need L and W to be as close to each other in value as you can make them. Conversely, to make the area as small as possible make W (or L) as small as you can, say 1.
For example a rectangle of perimeter 20 could have its smallest area with length 9 and width 1 (area 9 squares) or its largest with length 5 and width 5 (area 25 squares).
Which of those would hold more Maltesers??