How we homeschooled today #32
Squeezing some work into a day of play
Today we spent 6 hours in the sunshine at the Princess Diana Memorial Playground. Here’s what we managed to learn on the side.
Before we left the house the children worked in their Jolly Phonics handwriting/spelling workbooks.
My daughter’s new Curiosity Box arrived and she made a molymod model of hydrogen peroxide, and we talked about how it’s made of the same elements as water.
I asked the children to each choose a French-English story book which I read to them on the train.
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On the journey the children spotted that one of their favourite sculptures was being cleaned, so we went to ask the cleaners (who turned out to be restoration specialists) what they were doing. We learnt that the sculpture is bronze and that the copper in bronze reacts with oxygen in the air and chlorine in the water. The restorers work on it every week to remove the copper oxide and coat the sculpture in wax to protect it.
On the Underground we talked some more about tunnels (following our visit to the Brunel Museum recently, and subsequent tunnel learning) and wondered if the tunnel we were in had been excavated with shovels and picks or a Tunnel Boring Machine, or something else. We talked about how the shortest route between two points will be a straight line, Roman roads, and whether TBMs can turn (they can, by about 0.125 in./ft!)
At the playground I left them to their own devices while I read
’s book Seven Myths About Education. Before they came asking for lunch I ripped a page from my notebook and made some multiplication questions, folded them up and put them in a sun hat. At lunch we played times tables lucky dip which the children seemed to accept was a fun game (!).My daughter made a friend who is visiting from America and they swapped addresses.
On the way home, exhausted, we played Guess What Animal (yes/no questions, great for thinking about habitats, continents, diets, history [because my son always chooses extinct animals and has to work out their period], mammal/reptile/bird etc). This morphed into Guess My Character From Greek Mythology. There are a lot of characters in Greek mythology…
Still on the way home, the children started talking about words that have lots of different meanings (see how many you can think of for ‘set’) and words that sound the same but are spelled differently. I told them about homophones and about the Ancient Greek words ‘homos’ and ‘phonos’. (Not sure how much of that went in.)
Bedtime stories: Two Magic School Bus books, The Rot Squad and Makes a Rainbow.
Well well. Who would have thought that a TBM could turn at a ratio of 1/96 of its forward motion. If that maths is wrong forgive me.