How we homeschooled today #24

Brunel, house martens, spending and saving

• Percy the Park Keeper audiobooks from BorrowBox. (Our various ‘real-life’ library memberships also give us access to audiobooks and eBooks via the apps Libby (worldwide) and BorrowBox (UK, Aus, NZ and some others). Worth seeing if yours do too!)

• Work in the Addition and Subtraction activity books.

• Gardening session—planting, watering, composting.

Last night, unusually, I had gently planned a somewhat academic day at home (by which I mean I’d jotted down a list of six things I wanted to do). By 9.30am it was very clear that nobody was going anywhere near my list and that in the interests of family harmony, getting out of the house was Priority Number One. I announced that I was going out to walk some more of the Thames Path and everyone was welcome to join me if they wanted. (Earlier post here on our challenge to walk the whole Thames Path, and our difficulties getting out of the house.) So a mere hour and a quarter later, we set off to…

• The Brunel Museum, where we learnt about the world’s first tunnel built under a navigable river. We discovered that Brunel’s Tunneling Shield was inspired by the shipworm (not in fact a worm but a wood-eating clam). We went into the tunnel shaft, heard that when the tunnel was built 13,000 boats a day were using the River Thames, saw the marks on the walls where the elegant staircases had once taken visiting tourists down to the foot tunnels, and felt the vibrations of trains thundering along beneath our feet.

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• I bought Awesome Engineering: Tunnels which we started reading together at teatime.

  

• Then we began our continued walk along the Thames Path. I threw in some multiplication questions as a nod to my long-lost list. The highlight was seeing dozens of house martins dashing in and out of their nests, at very close quarters. They were so fast we couldn’t identify them visually, but Merlin came to our rescue and identified them by sound. At the end of the walk we looked at our map to see how far we had come and marked off our route, adding to the big red line showing which parts of the path we have walked.

• Back at home we discussed savings and interest. Granny had kindly given each child some pocket money recently and my son suddenly realised he could use it to buy one of the magazines he gazes at longingly every time we go to the supermarket. His sister is keen on saving, especially as the only way she has of getting money at the moment is waiting for her teeth to fall out (I think this is what is known as ‘not scaleable’.)

• Running around in the garden with friends and reading the new magazine.

• At tea, as well as starting our new Tunnels book, we watched this video about how people dug a tunnel through a mountain 2,500 years ago. The Pythagorean mathematics may have been slightly beyond my 5 and 7 year old but it was really cool nonetheless!

• Bedtime stories: The Hippopandamouse and Poo in the Zoo.

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