Off Grid

As we're nearing the end of our adventure we needed a suitably adventurous send-off and headed off for a short stay in a tree house in North Wales.

Built 30ft above the floor, with wooden spiral steps, rope bridge, no electricity, composting toilet, wood burner and a gravity powered shower (situated underneath the tree house) it's the perfect off-grid location for top quality, back-to-nature family time.

I'm still habitually observing learning opportunities so it would be remiss not to mention the links to the history curriculum - how people lived, washed and cooked before electric lights, toilets and ovens etc - as well as practical PE and DT skills with all the usual log chopping, rope swinging, climbing and walking.

When I holler 'Pack your bags, kids - we're leaving in 20 minutes!' up the stairs, the only question I'm asked is 'How many nights?' As a by-product of our various adventures (mostly to much loved Youth Hostels) they have learnt the +1 rule : 2 nights away means pack 3 of everything. In the spirit of learning through doing I never check their bags : the boys learnt through trial and error the inconvenience of forgetting to pack pants, gloves, PJs or a book. A BOGOF lesson - first in the perils of careless packing and often swiftly followed by a bonus lesson in how to share with your brother or make do (socks make great emergency gloves, turn t-shirts back to front if they're filthy, a bin bag can stand in as a poncho...).

I love the ease with which we can head off on adventures these days. Practice has made (nearly) perfect.

Wales delivered the weather you'd expect at this time of year and we waded, jumped and squelched our way through 2 days of perfect family fun for our last term time adventure.

www.living-room.co

Stone Age

The stone age has been a fantastic topic; we took about 4 weeks over it, using it as a running thread through various activities.

I've been too busy to blog properly for the last month or so so I'll cheat with visuals, a resource list and a question-based structure to show our working ...

History : How long was the stone age and what are the Neolithic, Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods?
How does life now differ from stone age life? Where did people live, how did they cook, sleep, hunt? English : Compehension on Skara Brae.

 

Literacy : Stone Age Boy + The Secrets of Stonehenge.

RE & DT : Where is Stonehenge and what is a henge? How was it built, over what period and why? Who might be buried there? Where did the stones come from and how might they have been moved? What clues were found to indicate the original purpose? Did the purpose change over time? Why do people worship there today?

Art : Making natural dyes with herbs/spices/berries, using charcol for drawing, stone age cave paintings.

Resources:
History timeline
Twinkl stone age resources, incl making a paper model of Stonehenge
Comprehension on Skara Brae
Horrible Histories clips
Field trip to Stonehenge

Rockpools

We packed our buckets and crab nets and headed to the Jurassic coast for an adventure at Kimmeridge Bay.

For a mere £5 you can enjoy the lovely toll road to the beach and once you're there you can spend the day happily mooching around the rocks.

There are plenty of impressive ammonite fossils to be seen at low tide and some great rock pools. We didn't find any mermaids purses, dinosaur bones or spider crabs but we weren't disappointed as we saw edible crabs, snails, shrimp and some amazing seaweed. We found a spider crab shell and a crab claw which was a highlight for the boys - especially investigating how the claw worked.

The staff at the marine centre were fab, giving us plenty of tips and lending us some spades. Once W is more confident in the water I'd love to go back to do the snorkel trail.

A proper British seaside day : cold sea, grey skies. We left drenched and happy.

 

Abstract

Matisse's work appeals to my two. W loves colour and minimalism. K loves detail and technical balance. I wanted the boys to create an abstract piece of art and I was curious to see what they'd come up with without guidance from me and while sitting next to each other.

W takes his lead from K in many things but when it comes to art he sets his own path and isn't influenced by his big brother. We spent some time researching Matisse and getting inspired by some of his later cutout work. Shape and colour are the joy of Matisse - he also knew Picasso and they were both friends and rivals. K was drawn to 'Bees' and W to 'The Parakeet and the Mermaid'.

Art is best interpreted by the viewer, so I cordially present :
K's piece : "Static" inspired by technology and a badly tuned TV.
W's piece : "Abstract"inspired by woodland and a strawberry mousse for lunch.

Both available for general sale, signed and authenticity assured, for £5m each from the Fridge Gallery at my place.

Thoroughly inspired, we headed off to The Tate a few days later. We stuck to the abstract gallery as there was enough there to keep us busy. Highlights were Dali and Picasso but the whole experience was cool and unpretentious and the variety of artwork was diverse and engaging. We'll be back to explore other areas. It was fun to chat about what art is and how things are valued by how much people want them. 

The Tate sits right by Shakespeare's Globe Theatre so we watched a Midsummer Night's Dream from the Yard. It's cheap but standing for 4 hours was tough going on little (and big) legs. We'd pre-read the play and the boys kept up with the story but we were hampered by visibility and missed a lot of the physical jokes because of a pillar in our line of sight. We'll return when the boys are a bit taller or save up to pay for seats!

Then we ate crisps, stalked pigeons on the lawn and chased bubbles on the edge of the Thames - just in case we were getting a bit up ourselves. 

Finally a cheeky Picasso from W - with a small diversion into genetics! He drew me and S, then cut the faces and swapped parts so each face is half mum, half dad. K is on the right, W on the left!

Art imitating life.

Crime & Punishment

On a car journey last week I drove past a guy on the pavement who threw some litter casually into the road and the boys had to endure my rant that it was the "worst sort of lazy, selfish behaviour", "low standards", "no respect for himself or others" and "if you're going to be a criminal at least do it properly".

Always eager to please, K cheerfully comments that "If I was a criminal I'd do it properly and rob a bank ...." "... or burgle a house" adds W helpfully. I spend the next 10 minutes explaining how there are much better career options than criminal mastermind but they've seen Despicable Me so I don't think they're buying it.

So we had crime on the mind (hopefully not dreaming up more ways to be an evil genius) while we did a bit of craft and W came up with a cool robber design for a peg person. Just to be clear being a robber is definitely not cool, but W's peg person was.

He set about making a prison for his robber. As we chatted about prisons we ambled onto escaping which led us nicely to the Great Escape which took place 72 years ago, on the night of 24th March 1944.

The co-incidence of the date was too good a history opportunity to pass up, so we did some WWII revision and took a quick tangent into the Jewish faith, persecution and brain washing.

Using the fabulous resources from the National Archives, which are easily adapted to suit upper and lower KS2, we looked at Belsen and eye witness accounts from the liberation. It's a perfect platform for exploring human reactions to cruelty, hunger, trauma and the logistics of war.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/sessions-and-resources/

We read an interview with a now elderly Auschwitz SS guard who escaped prosecution to briefly explore the difficult issue of holding individuals to account decades after an event. It's heavy going for an 8 and 9 year old so we only touched on it lightly, but I was amazed that the boys were able to articulate thoughts on something so ethically complex - they recognised it wasn't a black and white issue and felt that what he'd done with his life in the intervening decades might be relevant.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-interview-with-a-91-year-old-former-auschwitz-guard-a-988127.html

Cheering up was needed and it was too early for me to have a gin so we moved onto the headline topic : the daring and wonderful great escape from the camp at Sagan. We thought about the practical problems of escaping and looked at the ingenious ways the escape committee managed to conceal their efforts, shore up the tunnel and make civilian clothing.
We used this history of the great escape, plus it has a handy quiz at the bottom :
http://www.historyonthenet.com/ww2/great_escape.htm

War and imprisonment never have a happy ending so it was fitting that only 3 of the escapees made it to the UK, 23 were returned to the camp and 50 were murdered on Hitler's direct orders. The boys could hardly believe it and looked genuinely crestfallen; we're too used to the good guys always beating the odds in stories and films.

To finish off, we looked at images and plans of the tunnels and the boys reconstructed hut 104 and 'Harry' tunnel in Minecraft.

An unplanned topic and fairly heavy going but we covered a lot of ground and had some fantastic discussion. So it's not all doom and gloom.

Except for peg robber. He's serving life.....

.... for pinching things.

Pompeii

By no means the only Vesuvian town Pompeii is iconic, giving us an extraordinary link to a natural disaster occurring 1900 years ago. The site gives a snapshot of human civilisation and highlights how family, status, art, religion, business and community have remained relatively unchanged over the intervening centuries.

Archaeologically interesting, we looked briefly at artefacts online but the human aspect is where we were focussed. We touched on causes of volcanic eruptions from our Weather topic last year, disaster response, beliefs and looked for similarities in our own town (despite our notable lack of a volcano, much to the boys' disappointment).

We read extracts from Pliny the Younger who wrote to his uncle about what he'd seen at Pompeii, watched a fantastic CGI animation of the timeline of the eruption and finished up with a virtual tour of Pompeii thanks to Google Streetview.

Resources

"You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore." Pliny the Younger

A computer animation showing a timeline of the volcanic eruption:
http://www.openculture.com/2016/02/watch-the-destruction-of-pompeii-by-mount-vesuvius-re-created-with-computer-animation-79-ad.html

Google street view, explore the ruins from the comfort of home:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7489468,14.4848331,3a,75y,209.48h,82.37t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1e-bu_kis-dL1BnVGZhDdw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en

Pompeii in images (good for quick reference):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9557356/Pompeii-in-pictures.html

Pliny the Younger:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pliny_the_younger.shtml
Plus an extended version of his letter:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pompeii.htm

Full, detailed information on the various buildings etc found:
https://sites.google.com/site/ad79eruption/

The Black Death

What killed 1/3 of the population of Britain in the middle ages?

It sounds like a bad cracker joke but it's just our intro to our topic. There's nothing like starting the new year with pestilence and agonising death.

I like a bit of context with my history, so we started off with a timeline to get a rough feel for where we were parking our history train on the recent-human-history timeline.

Timelines are a bonus as you can cover quite a few historical periods or events while surreptitiously sneaking in some maths with negative numbers and do some cutting and sticking to boot. We cover BC and AD, major and minor ticks and identify our (humbling) little centimetre of our own personal history. Cross curricular link: Maths, number lines.

The boys cut out pictures to represent the major time periods like stone age, middle ages, Tudors, Victorians and so on and stick them on, marking the periods they covered. "Why was the Stone Age so long?" I ask. "There are a lot of stones." Fair enough.

Next lesson, we talk about life in the middle ages and begin to explore the Black Death and how many people in Britain and Europe died. Cross curricular link: European geography.

Lesson 3, we look at causes, creating a flow chart of how the plague spread and talking trade routes and shipping. We explore the ideas people had at the time about the cause (angry God, planets, bad smells) and how the poor were worst hit and why. Cross curricular link: Science, flow charts / RE, beliefs.

Lesson 4 was symptoms. We act out the stages, with apples under our armpits and give ourselves the dreaded black spot.

Lesson 5, on to cures and the bizarre and disgusting ideas (like exploding frogs and dead pigeons) that were popular at the time. Cross curricular link: Science, medicine, germs, hygiene.

We look at persuasive writing in advertising and briefly divert into how humour, glamour, alliteration, rhyme and catchy tunes and slogans can help sell products. Cross curricular link: Literacy. The boys come up with their own crazy cures and design posters to sell their wares. We have a bit of fun with ageing our paper with candles and tea bags. Cross curricular link: Art.

Some persuasive writing tips are to use exaggeration, flattery and to start off with a question. K's opening gambit on his poster is perfect "Have you got the Black Death? Don't worry - the new Black Cream is in town and it will cure you in minutes!"

"Guaranteed to prevent death, or your money back!"

Finally, the short book "The Plague, a cross on the door" about a boy whose master dies from the plague was a perfect round up. Cross curricular link: Literacy, reading and listening.

Next stop in our British history scheme for this term : Tudors...

Big History

A sense of time isn't the easiest thing for anyone to grasp, especially when the numbers run into billions of years.

I wanted to kick off some work on the history curriculum, but where to start? The past is a very big place.

TED talks came to the rescue via Louise Leakey and her loo roll analogy. Armed with a roll of loo paper and a pack of stickers we started to try and gain a sense of scale. It was all very inexact but then when we're counting in millions and billions of years a few inches here or there doesn't much matter.

We begin in the kitchen, with the Big Bang. Appropriate as it is the scene of many unimaginable concoctions and explosions. We're roughly 14 billion years in the past which is unimaginably far away: "Were there cars then?" No darling, so we side step into the concept of nothingness.

We lasted about 20 seconds before our brains ached and so we carried on unrolling.

As we trek around the ground floor and then up the stairs we note that land formed, the first signs of life started to emerge and dinosaurs ruled - and we add stickers to mark each occasion. A few feet from the end of the roll and we mark the end of the dinosaurs, marvelling at the length of their dominance over millions of years.

Apes appear on our final sheet of toilet paper. We use the smallest stickers we can find in the last couple of millimetres to show the inauspicious arrival of homo-sapiens and our puny 200,000 years of human history.

The house was covered in loo roll and Bailey was happy to bounce around like a giant Andrex puppy. Big picture done and we're all set up to start zooming in on our next history topic.

For the most inspiring and addictive history of our past 14 billion years, head to http://histography.io/

For a rough guide to the universe on toilet paper -
http://www.earthintransition.org/2013/07/how-history-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper/

Firework Night

A quieter week. Just as we got a chance to (metaphorically) breathe after a fortnight of car accidents, boiler failures and eye-wateringly-expensive van services (AND my hair dryer broke - please send help), we have now all caught colds and so find physically breathing difficult.

First world problems. 

Despite the crippling agony of the common cold, a little extra time for me to plan goes a long way in terms of how much we get done in a day... and we're on fire today, which is useful as today is Bonfire Night.

Here's the afternoon topic plan : 

Starter : Bonfire Night mind map

Introduction : Firework safety quiz

Main : History, dates, key characters

Key learning point : Persecution then and now

Wind down : Firework poem

Plenary : Wordsearch

Follow up - the Firework Maker's Daughter story

Most importantly, the real fireworks are on Saturday!

If Music Be the Food of Love..

.. play on.

The weather was kind and so the play was indeed on - and it was fantastic!

Surrounded by the reassuring sound of champagne corks popping and a sea of Waitrose picnic food, we picked our spot and then passed the time cartwheeling across the lawns and eating our tea while I tried to conceal our haribos in the infinitely-more-becoming mint crumbles bag, bought specially for the occasion.

The play was performed by a traditional all-male troupe which adds to the fantastic confusion of a man playing a woman who is disguised as a man. It's asking a lot of a 7 year old and a 9 year old to follow but our pre-reading last week really paid off.

As the play opened and the first infamous line was delivered with gusto W expressed his confusion at ye olde English language with an embarrassingly loud 'HUH?' while dramatically shrugging his shoulders. I reached for the Fox's glacier fruits like a child-shushing ninja.

K was mesmerised from the beginning and it only took a little while for W to get drawn into the rhythm of the play with me whispering the main character names as they appeared on stage. As the farce continued apace we passed notes to keep abreast of the story line. Amazingly, both kept up although evidence suggests K was briefly distracted by the glacier fruits..

We laughed ourselves silly when Malvolio appeared in his yellow stockings. We were on the edge of our seat during the duel. The boys loved Feste the fool's lute playing and singing. The teenagers in front of us giggled every time the word 'bosoms' was uttered. It was pure joy.

And posh though Waddesdon Manor is, you can still get a Smarties ice-cream during the interval.

The boys may have consumed a week's worth of sugar in one evening but it was well worth it. As I tucked the boys in at 11pm, a final thought from K :

"I like Shakespeare Mummy"

So do I darling. Why this is very midsummer madness.

Cracking the Code

Capitalising on the boys' spontaneous interest in coding this week we headed over to Bletchley Park. Seemed a good opportunity to stop talking about it and go and see it! Fantastic location and lots to do; the family-friendly audio tour was superb and there are code breaking puzzles for the kids in lots of locations around the site.

The huts where the code breaking took place were authentically kitted out so K & W could get a feel for the scale of the work that was carried out there and the sense of urgency each day in the race to decipher messages.

One of most interesting characters in the history of Bletchley is of course Alan Turing although there are numerous exciting stories of others. Dilly Knox was a fantastic person to find out about at Bletchley as we've got the memorial to him in the village.

Oh - and when the boys started asking 'can we go home now?' (there is a limit to 7 & 9 year old interest in war memorabilia) ... there's a really great little cafe and park! Happy days.

PS. You can go back free for a year so when we cover probability in Maths we'll head back to Hut 8 as there are great resources there. There's a separately charged National Museum of Computing on site which will also be worth a look on a return visit for ICT.

Don't Mention the War

Or do.

We ended up on the Second World War topic after W made a booby-trap in the bath using balloons and string. It's too complicated to describe and any photos would involve nudity so suffice to say if you'd tried to use our shower yesterday you'd have had a nasty shock when a balloon partially filled with water fell to the floor! That'd teach you to use our shower without asking!

We googled booby traps but I fell into one as everything the internet could offer seemed to make use of the word booby (snigger) or involve swearing or death or both. With a bit of filtering during translation we did find some interesting stuff about pit vipers being hung from trees in the Vietnam war and pressure sensor bombs being hidden under helmets by the retreating German army in WWII.

It was all a bit of a downer as there's nothing terribly cheerful about a deadly snake attaching itself to your face or having your legs blown off so we moved on to code breaking. We watched a short video on Enigma and got to thinking about cryptography and why armies needed to send secret messages in the first place.

For our secret code machines the boys made matching rotating cyphers so that they can exchange secret messages and change the settings each day at midnight, just like in the war. Or maybe 8am because we're not as disciplined as the German army.

So far the secret messages say 'ask mummy' (for what?! this is torture!) and 'snail'. I guess the lettuce-eating invaders in the back garden had better watch out. Or maybe someone will ask me for a snail. Only time will tell.

Topically, we had a good rummage through my Dad and Grandad's things as well today. Lots of war memorabilia which was very topical. Here's Nana with a 'Dig for Victory' poster, making a guest appearance in class!