How we homeschooled today #28

Cherries, Romans, iron

I took a break from the daily post last week, and it’s good to be back! Last week we visited Dover Castle. If you haven’t been, I highly recommend it. On one site you can see a Roman lighthouse, a Saxon church, a 12th century castle, tunnels built during the Napoleonic Wars, a WW1 dressing station (in a tunnel) and the tunnels where Operation Dynamo (the WW2 evacuation from Dunkirk) was planned and overseen. On one site!

Before Dover, my daughter was ill and it feels like this week we are finally returning to normal life. Here’s what that looked like today.

• My daughter finished reading Florence Nightingale and my son read more Viking myths in bed this morning. They were both keen to tell me about their books so I seized the opportunity to create a reading record, writing down my son’s narration for him. I was inspired in this by Susan Wise-Bauer’s book The Well-Trained Mind. But the book doesn’t explain what to do when a child takes great exception to the mere suggestion of a reading record, so at the moment my daughter doesn’t have one.

• My daughter wrote a quick thank-you note on a postcard.

• My son made a ramp to race his cars down, and by happy coincidence my daughter and I were working on an experiment from her Curiosity Box which also involved ramps. The experiment involved rolling coins down a ramp and seeing which coins were ‘trapped’ by a magnet. We had to adjust the angle of the slope so the coins rolled slowly enough for the magnet to catch them. We counted money and identified which metal used in the coins was magnetic. Then she counted up all her pocket money and I showed her how to group it into pounds so she didn’t have to hold the running total in her head.

• While we finished this my son took down our map of Europe jigsaw puzzle and completed it a few times.

• Multiplication by Heart

• We watched this video explaining the flow of sediment in the Irrawaddy River, and then found Myanmar on the world map (and the river too!). The children noticed that New Zealand appears on the world map twice, so we discussed the challenges of making a 3D sphere into a 2D rectangular map.

• We stuck various new labels onto our timeline, largely connected to Dover Castle. The section from 1700 onwards is rather crowded, and the timeline starts at 1AD which frustrates the children when they want to add something earlier, and so we hit on the idea of each child having a ring binder folder that they can add whatever they want to. They were so keen on this that we went straight to the shops, bought the folders, came home and started filling in pages. Each child chose to start with the Big Bang and then added various eclectic events of their choosing. I scribed for my son and my daughter did her own.

• At lunch I read another of the French books from our One Third Stories subscription.

• My daughter completed the first section of her new handwriting workbook, which I am hoping to introduce as a daily habit.

• We did a cherry taste comparison, comparing two types of cherry from the market with the cherries on the tree in our garden. We each had a chart which we filled in with marks out of ten. This involved much staining of fingers (and clothes…), juicy chins, and delight. I highly recommend it.

• My daughter then chose to sew a cherry bag and was thrilled to find that two rows of running stitch could produce a serviceable envelope-style pouch. Followed by picking more cherries in the garden while thunder cracked all around us. I explained that thunder is the sound of air being heated very fast by a lightning bolt. (The cherries aren’t really ripe, the cherry tree is one cultivated for blossom not tasty fruit, and we live in a busy city with busy city air. None of these things matter to the children as they gorge on cherries straight from the tree. Also here is a cherry poem I love, The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer.)

• At tea we talked some more about iron (the metal in some coins which makes them magnetic) using this book and these infographics. I also started reading Roman Britain (inspired by the Roman lighthouse at Dover, and with plans to attempt a slow but chronological study of British history).

• Bedtime stories: Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat, The Thieves of Ostia, and Illustrated Norse Myths

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