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 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.

Bean Projects

Every year since we started home educating, one of the spring science and nature projects has been bean growing in a jar to see the root growth. We have studied them, grown them, dissected them and eaten them... We have tested growing variations like light, dark, with water and without, and grown many different kinds of bean to compare. We have kept records and logged our data in every different way we can.

This year we tried something different....

This year we placed one side of the jars so that they touched the window, it has been so very cold and frosty here that we thought we would see how much temperature affected the beans. We put two beans in each jar on opposite sides, one side was touching the window pane at all times, the other bean was facing into the house.

As you can see in the two photographs above the bean on the inside of the jar (the warmer side) grew but the bean touching the window (frosty side) did not... the results were the same in each and every jar so the children's temperature experiment is quite conclusive even though there is only a short distance between the two beans on either side of the jar, this makes a big difference!

There is also added incentive to grow beans this year....

My husband built this tepee in the garden from some tree prunings, we wanted to create a living tepee, a quiet place to play or read in a bare part of the garden. The beans will be grown up all around the sides to provide the cover for little ones to hide in, my husband has added a little fence at the bottom to protect the young beans from the chickens. Although it looks like Dotty is having a quick dig to see what is in there, which doesn't look good for the beans!

On the celery front, we are continuing to grow new plants from the stubs which you can read here if you missed it. I have noticed some new shoots coming up from last years plants too, which is very unusual as the weather in the UK is too cold in winter for celery to survive!

We also still have and love the three chickens that live in our garden, they have been no trouble at all (so far) and have provided us with loads of eggs. In fact so many that we haven't had to buy any at all for over a year and I think there are about forty in the kitchen waiting to be used.

That concludes our quick update for now, we will be back very soon to breathe some life back into the blog.