How we homeschooled today #48
Palm oil, ancient history, and some highbrow bedtime stories
We had a very lazy start. My daughter slept in for an hour while her brother read to himself, and once they were both up there was more reading and I read aloud a story from Myths from Around the World. The children finished a game of Ludo they had started with their dad (The Common Reader) yesterday, using two dice for a some addition practice. We didn’t manage anything else before a dentist appointment. The dentist kindly explained to my daughter why there is blood when she loses a tooth, so that was a little bit of science for the morning.
Back at home we:
Read a page from The Humans, about the ancient Egyptians, and found Egypt, the Nile, and Sudan on the world map. (Yesterday we read about the Nubians, who came from modern-day Sudan.)
Each child added a page to their history folders (my daughter chose the earliest known bony fish, and my son the earliest known hieroglyphs).
On the walk home from the dentist we had stopped at the shops to buy biscuits (I know, I know), and discovered that there is only one type of biscuit for sale in Tesco which doesn’t contain palm oil. We try not to buy products containing palm oil so this severely limits our choices! At home we watched a couple of videos about palm oil (this one from Greenpeace which made me cry, and this one from the BBC), and then my daughter wrote a letter to the company which makes Jammy Dodgers, asking them to stop using palm oil. It was quite a lot of writing compared to her usual daily output, and she flagged at the end of it, but the plight of the orang-utans (and the desire for Jammy Dodgers) pulled her through. I said she could have a day off her Jolly Phonics workbook because she’d done so much writing already.
After lunch there was quiet time, while they both played independently with Lego, and after quiet time was over they combined their games and played together.
They wanted to play more Ludo, so I suggested Multiplication by Heart first so they could tick it off their lists. After Ludo their friends arrived and they all played in the garden together until tea.
Bedtime stories: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a beautifully illustrated prose version with some original text) and The Aeneid (starting from the beginning after we let it lapse). Nights like this balance out all the evenings they choose old Pokemon comics!
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