How We Homeschooled Today #85

Ancient whales, the Moon on Earth, and a chocolate cake recipe

(My children are nearly 6 and 8.)

A very wet and gloomy start to the day; for the first time this autumn it made no difference when I opened the curtains. We all read in bed first thing: More Secret Explorers, and John Adams for me. At breakfast we did a few Greek flashcards (not hugely successfully), and then the children played while I did some chores. I also made a chocolate cake. (Recipe here. Cake side note, feel free to skip: It’s an olive oil cake, but it’s not oily. I reduce the sugar to 150g, never bother with the marmalade, orange, or crème fraiche, and am very lazy about the beating. It still turns out beautifully every time. I make it in a 2lb loaf tin. It’s a not-too-rich but very satisfying sort of a chocolate cake.)

At 9.30 we sat down to work. They asked to do more of their Easy Learning Times Tables workbooks, followed by some games from Tiny Polka Dot (a deck of cards designed for various maths games from age 3-8ish), which came to 45 minutes of maths this morning.

A family game of Muddles, and then I read aloud from two non-fiction books (the same as yesterday): Water Cycles and Amazing Earth. In the latter we read about Valley of the Whales, a desert in Egypt full of prehistoric whale fossils (and other marine creatures). We learnt about whale evolution, and then went outside with my giant tape measure to see just how long 21m is (the length of Basilosaurus, a prehistoric whale. I told them that as they know ‘basileus’ is Ancient Greek for ‘king’, and ‘sauros’ means ‘lizard’, we could deduce that this whale was named ‘king lizard’. They were uninterested.). We measured various ancient animals, and also the longest blue whale ever recorded, which at 33.5m is longer than my tape measure.

Basilosaurus fossil in Valley of the Whales (Wadi al Hitan), via Wikipedia

We then had a very spur-of-the-moment trip to visit Museum of the Moon with a friend and her children. If you haven’t seen it, this is a giant 1:500,000 scale reproduction of the Moon, made using NASA images. At the moment it is hanging inside Southwark Cathedral, and it’s incredible. There are multiple Moons touring worldwide: see where and when here (there’s also an Earth—dates here). We had lots of fantastic discussions about space, tried to see if we could tell which was ‘our’ side of the Moon and which was the far side, wondered whether the universe ever ends—and if it does, what’s at the end?!

Also at the cathedral we examined a case of mudlarking finds (things found along the banks of the River Thames) ranging from Roman nails to a Victorian toothbrush and dominoes made of bone, and saw an older part of the building including a Roman gravel road, a medieval coffin, and a Norman arch.

After that, we went home via Neal’s Yard Dairy, an excellent cheese shop. It’s really interesting for the children to see real, huge cheeses instead of the usual plastic packets in the supermarket. I asked my daughter if she’d like to try some cheese and choose one to buy a small piece of, and after careful consideration she chose some Appleby’s Cheshire. We also chose some stinky blue cheese (Beenleigh Blue) for the Common Reader. There’s a sort of shower falling into a barrel of water in the shop, and I explained that it’s to keep the air moist so the cheese doesn’t dry out. The very nice lady serving us said my daughter’s cheese goes well with apples, so then we went to a fruit stall and chose a couple of varieties to try with it in a taste test. Walking home from the train station, we revised our latest French vocab, and back at home we watched two videos about cheese production.

Now they’ve returned to the imaginary game they were playing this morning. I’ll send this out now and add any noteworthy updates later and share on Notes.

Updated: Reading about the Dead Sea at teatime (in Amazing Earth, again), and planning to do a couple of salt-based science experiments. Reading in bed: Flat Stanley, and more The Mouse and the Motorcycle and Runaway Ralph. Do you think AI can generate a new Beverly Cleary series so we never have to run out?

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