Hoover Disassembly!

Over the summer we have had the opportunity to make use of the educational resources from The James Dyson Foundation. The children have borrowed the Ideas Box and the Engineering Box both packed full of learning resources and equipment to disassemble.

They absolutely love taking things apart but usually only get to work on things that are broken and no longer useful to any body. So it was very exciting for them to take apart an actual working hoover then reassemble it, hoping they had followed instructions carefully enough and see it working again.

Both of them were extremely enthusiastic and it was lovely to see them working through the packs and spending many hours totally engrossed in the projects.

The educational boxes are lent out to schools and home educators on a 4 week basis, they are really quite large but the children loved their time spent as budding inventors and engineers and loved the challenge of looking at things in new ways.

After the boxes went back we were allowed to keep the educational resources packs from each box, which will give the children further things to do, we have also just ordered the challenge cards. I have put a link to the James Dyson Foundation at the top of this page for any home educators wanting to know more about the boxes.

A Summer of fun and a 'MOOC'

The summer has been full of parties, fun and theme parks for us. We managed to fit in a trip to the dinosaur park along with the two theme parks and of course our usual days out to the beach, long nature walks and some pond dipping.

We tend to slow things down slightly during the summer holidays as everywhere is so crowded, the children have been busy as usual with various projects. My son was especially excited to try out one of the new 'MOOC' (massive open online content) courses earlier in the year. Many of these are free for everyone to try.

The above logo is from the course he took with Coursera... Dino 101 Dinosaur paleobiology. The course was amazing, run by the University of Alberta, perfect for any budding dinosaur expert. Dinosaurs are a big passion for my son and the course was taught in a way he finds very easy to learn. He managed to pass the course with a score of 100% and got a statement of accomplishment. I have put a link to the course above as it is about to run again, the new start date is september 3rd if you are interested.

We are currently planning many Autumn trips out to keep us occupied in the coming months.