How We Homeschooled Today #65

Archimedes in the paddling pool

I’ve spent the day on a shady verandah. A gentle breeze caressed my skin, an ice-cold drink rested in my hand, and from time to time I stood up and dipped my feet in the cool stream that runs along the bottom of the garden.

Well, that’s where I spent the day in my head. The reality was a little different.

At the risk of boring you, it’s still really hot here in the UK. Once or twice, tempers got nearly as hot as the temperatures. We watched an episode of Octonauts and learnt that water bears go to sleep when they get too hot. I sympathised.

Here’s what happened IRL.

• At 9.30 we sat down for some work. A spelling, and her daily Jolly Phonics page for my daughter (7), and more Beowulf tracing for my son (5). (Very much enjoying the tracing, by the way. Being a grown-up poem not a piece of handwriting text, it includes things like commas and apostrophes, which we talk about as we go. Obviously also the vocab and general quality of the words and sentences is brilliant.) We did our French, including reading a book from our One Third Stories subscription.

• As I read, I was aware of something making a noise in the garden. It turned out to be a woodpecker, and we all got a really good look at it. We later identified it using our bird book.

• A break, while I went out for heatwave essentials (watermelon and strawberries), followed by Multiplication by Heart and Ancient Greek (one word a day, gradually building up in readiness for Chapter 4 of our Ancient Greek text book).

• Last night, in a blinding flash of inspiration, I realised the only thing to do in the heat is anything involving water. So we’ve spent much of the day exploring Archimedes’ Principle ie. Why stuff floats, or doesn’t. First of all we filled measuring cylinders and measuring jugs using water squirters (scientific tools, naturally), and talked about how we can measure water in millilitres. I collected a few random objects, and the children predicted which would float or sink. Then we tested their predictions. We got some surprising results: the large apple floated, but the Brazil nut sank. The empty glass jar floated, even though it was very heavy.

Via Unsplash

• Things degenerated into a water fight, which was fine by me.

• Later on, we discussed what the objects that sank/float had in common, and my daughter offered the word ‘density’. I showed them a page of our science encyclopedia, showing the molecules of an apple and of a steel ball, to give them an idea of what ‘dense’ actually means. We talked about how air is not very dense, but that if we filled the glass jar with water, it might not float anymore, and tested this out.

• I read them Aesop’s fable of the crow and the jug, and told them about Archimedes, jumping in his bath, yelling ‘eureka!’ and proving that the king’s crown wasn’t pure gold. My son remembered that Archimedes, like Aesop, was an Ancient Greek, because he’d read it in his Mysteries in Time magazine.

• And then, needing another excuse to get everyone cool and wet, I filled up the paddling pool (designed for babies, and too small for anything now apart from science experiments). I gave the children various containers and various ‘cargoes’—wooden blocks, Duplo bricks, tins of food. We talked about how very heavy container ships, with very heavy cargoes, still float on the water. We experimented with how much we could load into different containers, and found a way to load heavy objects so they didn’t tip the balance.

• Things degenerated into chucking everything into the paddling pool, which was also fine by me. Last time I checked, they’d stripped down to their underwear, and I can’t say I blame them.

Signing off now. I can’t do anything about the verandah, the breeze, or the stream at the bottom of the garden. But I might just do something about the ice-cold drink.

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