Education update April 2017

The children have been very busy and involved in so many projects that it would be a very long post if I included it all, so we have picked a few of our favourite things to share with you here.

After seeing pictures online of the many sock toys made by other people they made a plan to recycle some old socks into these cat plushies. I'm very proud to say that all the little sewing projects I had given them over the years must have paid off as they pretty much completed this project by themselves.

My eldest daughter's cat brought her a surprise one morning... a pile of frogspawn!!  We have no idea how the cat carried these in but in an attempt to try and save the eggs she brought them round to us. We are pleased to announce that many of the eggs are now wriggly tadpoles, this has made an excellent nature project for my youngest children and given them the chance to study the life cycle of a frog at very close hand.

We have joined the Woodland trust's project to plant more trees, with great success as we already have many little trees coming up from our packet of seeds. This project has coincided with all the seed planting we do every year to grow our vegetables on our allotment, so it has been very busy.

The latest science project the children have been studying is sound, vibration and wavelengths. We have completed many experiments including a tin can telephone, balloon noise and the above experiment to see the sugar move on the cling film by the sound vibration alone.

We have also tried to recreate how the wavelengths looked on an oscilloscope by using a really long piece of cord and moving our hands either fast or slow as seen above, until it looked the same as a given noise.

 My daughter wanted to try some new recipes in the kitchen, sticky toffee squares were one of her new experiments... and very tasty they were too. We have also been eating some of the early harvests from the allotment, so far this has been asparagus and rhubarb.

Another science project has been about light, this led to an art project involving stained glass windows to really brighten up the house. The children's sports club started up again this week for the summer now that the weather is improving which has been keeping us extra busy, along with the building of a new poly tunnel at the allotment with the hope of allowing us to grow extra vegetables.

 Will update very soon with some new projects and updates on the ongoing ones like the tadpoles and baby trees.

Home education update October 2016

The last few weeks have been quite busy, Autumn always is with all the food preservation from the allotment and finishing off the summer projects. The children have been busy with days out, drawing, making Halloween crafts and writing books as well as going swimming and a new home ed sports club. They have also been enjoying the experiments in some science kits with Dad.

Some of the experiments were exploring densities, this first one is to recreate a kind of Lava lamp. They started by pouring water and oil into a jar, waiting for the liquids to separate then they added food colouring and salt. The salt dropped through the oil layer talking some oil with it, after the salt dissolved the oil returned to the top in what looked like bubbles. We have added a short video to show this in action.

The next experiment was to create the look of fireworks in a bowl of water. They first mixed oil and food colouring together and poured the mixture into a large bowl of water.

The oil and food colouring mixture rose to the surface but after a few minutes the food colouring began to sink down and look a little like fireworks, or streaks of colour. We have added a short video to show this in action too.

There was also a fizz bomb experiment but that really didn't work at all well. They then tried out the volcano experiment with vinegar, food colouring and bicarbonate of soda. The first time they tried not much happened at all, just a bit of a trickle, it was a bit of an anticlimax so Dad added more ingredients, this time it worked much better... a little too well.

So well in fact that it left a big red stain on the ceiling! I have spared you the video on this experiment as there was a lot of screaming.

We have enjoyed some lovely nature walks looking at all the leaves changing colour and the jewel like berries and visits to the beach for Autumn beach combing.

Also a trip to the local sea life centre, where the children watched the rays for what seemed like hours and got the chance to see the turtle having his lunch.

Heritage open days 2016

Last week the Heritage free open days took up a lot of our time, we love this time of year and to get the chance to visit some of our local Heritage sites is always very exciting. Day one started with two garden tours, the Bishop's beautiful garden is a favourite of ours and has many different plants from all over the world.

This year there was an added attraction for the children, the Bishop's cat! Well we assume it was the Bishop's cat as it came running from the house to greet us and insisted on giving us a tour of the woodland gardens.

The children love the wildflower maze and the large swing that hangs from a very old tree near the ruins. As these visits coincided with the anniversary of when we first met, my husband and I took some photos of us sitting on this swing as a memento of the many wonderful years we have spent together.

The garden has some quite quirky plants like a tree that oozes the smell of curry, and a vine with flowers that resemble snails and smells incredible. Did I mention the little cat?... best buddies, they spent ages together.

After lunch we went on to look around a gallery housed in an old Victorian skating rink with a unique and extremely vast collection of South Asian art and objects. Followed by a medieval church in which our children got the chance to try their hand at some brass rubbing.

Day two we visited two small museums, another church and an old shawl and clothing exhibition. The first Museum is in a centuries old merchants house with a 14th century under croft and very old herb garden. We got to try on costumes, play old games, learn to write in Tudor letters, complete a shakespeare quiz and make old puppets on sticks.

We finished the week on day three with a visit to the castle museum, the children got to watch and chat to some stone masons at work which was very interesting. My daughter made a crown and they both made a shield using the heraldry pictures to describe themselves.

We had a wonderful time visiting all these places and were extremely exhausted by the end of the week.

Rock pooling

We recently went on an educational adventure to one of our local beaches to explore the rock pools. The beach we chose has an interesting chalky foreshore and lots of flints leading to a range of good rock pools and even some fossils.

The children started searching the pools as soon as the tide started to recede, with the hope of finding something new. They were very soon rewarded with something we hadn't seen in a rock pool before... a moon jellyfish... in fact we found several different kinds of jelly fish by the time the day was over.

The jellyfish was quite large, it was approximately the size of an adult hand and you can see the exposed chalk foreshore behind it. Another new sighting for us occurred not long after when we spotted a shedding or moulting shore crab, it was a chance which was too good to miss so we have taken a short video for you to see.

We waited for the crab to move away and hide in the weed and decided to look at the now empty crab shell, it had stayed together and from a distance still looked like an actual crab.

This was a lovely experience for the children and after this we found many crabs that had also moulted and quite a few cast off shells.

There were hundreds of tiny baby crabs all over the pools most of them much smaller than my daughters little finger nail. We also found a few hermit crabs and managed to take a really short video of one for you to see.

As the day went on we had found many of the usual rock pooling finds like anemones, winkles, prawns and even some tiny fish. Although we never seem to find starfish at this beach.

There are a few of our finds in this bucket, although we did have to empty it often to stop it getting too full. Below is a close up of one of the small crabs caught in our net.

As I mentioned before this place is very good for finding fossils, even in the chalk foreshore belemnites are a common find and often get washed out of the chalk after the high tide.

These are some of our fossil finds today, previously we have found sea urchins and sea sponges. This beach is a place of scientific interest because of the exposed fossil beds in the cliffs and we intend to revisit in the Autumn to examine the geology in more detail and see if any fossils have been exposed at high tide. A steppe Mammoth was found in the freshwater fossil beds at the base of these cliffs a few years ago and the children are quite excited to see where it was found.

You can read more about West Runton here, this site also directs you to good sites to explore for fossils in your area.

The photographs and videos on this post were taken by my wonderful husband.

Home Education journal July 2016

Just through the other side of the busiest few weeks for birthdays and it feels great to finally be able to sit and breathe for more than a minute. So leaving out the four birthdays and our wedding anniversary, here are some of the other things we have been doing over the last few weeks.

A zoo visit gave us some chilling out time, especially as they had a new attraction in the play park... bouncy pillows. We had to return to this part of the park several times to bounce as it was a huge lure to my young bouncers. Another high point was the pooping bird video! ... A striated Caracara bird of prey was chatting to my son and I thought it looked so cute that I should try to film it to preserve the memory. However as soon as I had started to film, the bird stopped talking and pooped much to the amusement of the children.

Around this time the elderflower had come into bloom, we love elderflower cordial very much and make some every year. Spurred on by a twitter chat we decided to make extra this year and freeze some for the up coming birthday parties as a special treat.

It is very easy to make and very delicious, if you would like to make some you can find our recipe here.

We have been for some wonderful country walks and hikes through our local nature reserve, the children love to document changes in the wildlife and plant life at various locations throughout the year.

It's especially nice to find fields full of daisies and other wildflowers whilst looking for a place to eat your picnic... the butterfly, bee and insect action going on in this field was amazing to see.

The children's interest in science has continued to grow and they have been studying various aspects of geology. Some of their experiments have included making two different types of lava to compare and using sugar cubes to study erosion.

They spent some time plotting volcanoes around the ring of fire in the pacific ocean to give us this giant map amongst other activities.

We were lucky enough to get the chance to buy a couple of boxes of fruit,  plums and peaches, for just 7 pence a punnet, so we jumped at the offer. This meant quickly processing it before it went off ... so we got down to making batches of both peach and plum wine, both types of jam and a few cakes for tea.

It was a very busy few days but not a single fruit was wasted... the above photograph is my upside down plum cake which was the very tasty end of the last punnet of plums. I may share this recipe in the Autumn when the plums are in season. So that covers a few things from our daily lives.... until the next post.

Home education journal - A busy time

It's been a while since I have posted an education journal entry as we have just been so busy, but I have picked out a few things from the last few weeks to record here. We have started to go swimming again for an hour or two each week which the children have enjoyed immensely and it's a very important life skill. We had a short break over winter to allow my daughter's new ear piercings to heal but at least nobody forgot how to swim.

We have continued to spend a lot of time at our local nature reserve, so that we can observe the seasonal changes in wildlife there. Also taking the time to explore the ruins of Trowse Newton Hall found in the reserve.

With the commencement of spring, plant experiments start all over the house and garden. The one pictured above is to see if various plants can find their way through a maze to find the light... the children tested beans and potatoes.

They have also continued looking into plant anatomy in much more detail including flower dissection and labelling.

Another science project had them looking into energy and motion, they made straight roller coasters and bumpy ones to test how much energy was needed to get the marbles over all the bumps amongst other things, which proved very entertaining.

We have spent some time exploring the directions on a compass and made little signposts to have in their rooms to enable them to know which way our house faces and also the windows. They found which way to position the signpost using a compass. Another part of the Mystery science course was to plot the sun's passage over our house using a little plastic dome.

We also took part in the RHS school's gardening project to grow rocket seeds that had been in space. 

We had to plant two packets of seeds, one from space and the other a control, to see how each packet grew. Each seed had to be planted independently in it's own compartment in the seed tray, so it took quite a lot of time and patience. 

The children took one packet each and all our results are being recorded on a very large chart.

That covers just a tiny fraction of the things we have been doing and some of the science projects the children have been experimenting with. It's been very busy here sorting out the allotment, plants and various other activities. Hope to be back really soon.

Home ed Journal entry - last few weeks

As usual we have been so busy over the last few weeks and with the onset of spring there has been so much more to fit in. This is a quick update of some of the things that have been taking up our time.

We have been out and about on a few nature walks in our local nature reserve and on the local marshes, monitoring and looking at the kinds of wildlife that is around in early spring. We visited the nature reserve on a lovely sunny afternoon but decided to go to the marshes extremely early on a very frosty morning and were rewarded with a sighting of a white egret, although photos proved much more difficult.

The children have been enjoying cooking as usual, and have carried on making many things after the success of the Chinese dumplings for Chinese new year. It's lovely to make these as a family every year, they taste amazing.

Chocolate Easter nests are usually a very simple, favourite every year, ideal for young children to make and enjoy.

We have also been looking at life on the home front during the war and have been considering a dig for victory theme for our allotment this year. In the meantime, as I have several wartime ration and victory cookery books, which have been fascinating, I have been trying out the recipes. This week we cooked an old favourite of my grandmothers... Rock cakes!

These were recommended during the war by the Ministry of food because of the minimal amounts of sugar and eggs in the recipe. I must admit to avoiding these as a child if I could but they were definitely really tasty, I obviously didn't know what I missing and the children loved them too.

My husband and daughter have also been rescuing and renovating a wartime dressing table with the most fabulous mirror if you would like to take a look.

The children have been really fascinated with science as usual and we have been continuing with the Mystery science courses and some of the of the shelf science packs. They have been studying different forms of energy and plant science mostly due to the fact that spring has arrived and our growing experiments and activities have been taking off.

We have made a root viewer, so that we can study roots closely and also if we turn the viewer every few days the directional change of the roots can easily be seen.

We made some grass heads... we have made these before when the children were very small but we wanted to make them again to try out some of the theories on the science course.

The quest this time was to get the hair to grow in the direction of your choice. My daughter wanted her grass hair to grow upwards and my son wanted his to grow straight out the back, so I think that worked well.

After our experiment finished we thought it may be a good idea to hide the grass heads in the garden so that they could continue growing and add a little extra magical interest. We are hoping it may look like a little troll head popping up out of the ground, my daughter added ribbons to her head first.

As for me I have increased my cacti and succulent collection over the winter season by about sixty new young plants so I have been really busy as most of these, and some of my larger ones have needed re potting as the spring arrived.