No Two Days Are the Same: Friday

Morning

Despite saying last night that he would have a major lay-in today, Tiger actually set his alarm clock for 7:45am and got himself up at that time!  However, I didn't get up early today so once again, our expectations of each other are not quite synchronised -- more work needed there!

We had breakfast, completed our long-than-usual morning chores (we have a few additional chores on Fridays), and settled down to start work at 10:30am.  Tiger started on the second part of his science homework which involved researching on and writing about how clean drinking water gets to UK homes.  As usual, I asked him whether he needed my help.  When he said no, I went to the kitchen and started cooking lunch because last night's dinner was so well received that there was none left for today's lunch.

Tiger completed his research and wrote his report on the water treatment process.  He then brought his completed report into the kitchen and read it out to me.  It was spot on.  No mistakes at all.  I then asked him to prepare for his class this afternoon by looking through the topic, photosynthesis, as we waited for lunch to be ready.

Afternoon

Lunch was ready at 12:15pm.  Pan-fried venison with blueberry sauce served with mash and steamed vegetables (a modified version of this recipe).  Yum!

The rest of the afternoon was taken up by science class.  It is a small class attended by five children.  Two of them were absent this afternoon so it was almost like a one-to-one tutorial today.

I sat at the back of the class as usual, half listening in on the lesson.  Most of the time I read but the science class is always quite lively because of the many hands-on experiments and I find it difficult to concentrate on what I am reading.  When that happens, like it did this afternoon, I work on something else that requires a different type of concentration, such as drawing or hand-lettering.

During the 10-minutes break this afternoon, Tiger's science teacher was interested to know what I was reading because he has seen me reading the same book for weeks.  I showed him the title page and he became interested to know what a liberal education is.  I tried to explain it to him but felt that I have had a failed elevator speech moment.  He is an ex-school teacher and has a young son who attends elementary school, so if I have not explained the concept clearly (I don't always feel up to it), perhaps I have piqued his interest such that he may look into it more closely at his own time.

We arrived home around 4:15pm and my husband took Tiger out to a nearby skate park to play with the remote control car.  Meanwhile, I start drafting the blog post for today and changing the all the sheets in the house -- Fridays are all-sheets-change day so every towel, hand towel, bed sheet, pillow case, etc go into the laundry basket.


Evening

The boys came back in time for me to take Tiger to his swimming lesson.

It is 8pm at the moment, and we are just about to have dinner.

Next week, according to my calendar will be somewhat different from this week, so it is true when I say that no two days are the same for us.

Dances With the Daffodils

It's that time of the year when daffodils are in blossom again.

It is interesting to note that, since we are recording our sightings into our Calendar of Firsts (by learning to draw the daffodils from here),  we have noticed that the daffodils are blossoming earlier this year.

Drawing the daffodil put me in a poetic mood, so we listened to a reading of William Wordsworth's poem, Daffodils (otherwise known as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud).

I was oohing and aahing about the beauty of this poem read wonderfully by Jeremy Irons when Tiger announced, "If you think I'm going to copy this poem into my book, YOU'RE WRONG!"

To which I replied, half amused, "That's absolutely fine.  You don't have to do anything if you don't want to, but I'm going to add it to my Calendar of Firsts because I think it'll go very well with my drawing."

I started copying the poem into my book using a green pen when, less than 15 seconds after I started, Tiger picked up his pen and started copying it too!

I'd like to think that, at that moment, I was a shining example of inspiration for my son, but that is hardly true.  The poem speaks for itself, and my boy knows a good thing when he sees or hears one -- he always has a love for language -- otherwise nothing will persuade him to copy four stanzas of poetry for its own sake.

Last year we did a detailed study of the daffodils, so this year I thought we would be a little more crafty in our approach.

We tried our hands first at a simple craft of making daffodils out of foam.  The result turned out quite well.

Encouraged by our success, we continued with a more involved, more complex project of making egg carton daffodils.

This project certainly took much longer than the foam project but we think the effort was worth it.

This post is linked up to:

1. Keeping Company: March Link-Up
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/17/15
3. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years #47
4. The Virtual Refrigerator
5. Collage Friday: The Hidden Benefits of Homeschool
6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the taste of spring
7. My Week in Review #29 
8. Science Sunday: Experimenting with Model Rockets part 2

Foreigners are Everywhere!

We have been taking quite a few walks in the past two weeks.

Of the many things we have seen in nature, none was more exciting than the ringed-neck parakeet.

The boys were out in the woods when they heard an unfamiliar bird call that caused them to look to the direction of the call.

This little beauty (originally from India) was difficult to spot, so here's a close up:

We also spotted a squirrel's drey.  It is more than likely to belong to a grey squirrel (native of America) because we do not have red squirrels where we are.

As we walked further along on one of our walks, we saw evidence of a lot of deer activity.

There were a few different types of deer tracks, some bigger than others.

We have half an idea which deer the different tracks belong to, but we want to be sure so we consulted this very useful deer guide which points to three types of deer:

1. fallow deer (originally from the Mediterranean and the Middle East)
2. roe deer (native to Britain)
3. muntjac deer (native to Southeast China and Taiwan)

We have seen the fallow deer and the roe deer in groups in the fields around here, but the muntjac deer is much more elusive and is therefore a very rare sight.  Its presence was confirmed by the droppings I found nearby, according to the Muntjac Field Guide.

At first we thought they were rabbit droppings, but upon reflection (I doubt many people reflect upon animals droppings, but there we are), we noticed a few distinctive features about this patch of droppings:

• there was no smell (rabbit droppings usually have a foisty smell)
• they were slightly bigger in size than rabbit droppings
• there was only one clump of these droppings (rabbit droppings would have been more spread out and numerous over the field area)

That's probably more information about animal droppings that most people care to know, so let's move on to the next set of evidence to deer presence:

See those parts of the branch circled in yellow in the photo above?  Those are evidence of deer gnawing on the branches for food.  The branch was about adult waist height and the type of marks on the branches are that of animal gnawing on them.  Deer usually eat fruit and berries, but they'll sometimes have to make do with barks in winter when food is scarce.

We also spotted our first batch of snowdrops (native to mainland Europe) last week.

The first bunch of them was spotted in a neighbour's front garden, but a few days later we saw carpets of them deep in the woods.

I also spotted a lone hare (native to Britain) in one of the fields very early on a cold, misty morning.  It seemed slightly lost and wasn't displaying any of its usual 'mad March hare' behaviour.

So far, out of the seven things we have spotted, five of them are non-native.  To add injury to the insult, the most unusual creature that we saw (even rarer than the ringed-neck parakeet) was the red-legged partridge (native of Continental Europe).  That brings the native-to-non-native ratio to 2:8, or 25%.

And I bet you would not be able to guess where we spotted this rare bird: on an airfield!  It certainly pays to keep our eyes open at all times!

When we first spotted it, we were not sure what bird it was.  As it was quite a distance from us, we had thought it was a female pheasant.  When we came home and zoomed in on the photos, we first thought it was a grouse, because of its body shape.  However, the page on the RSPB site tells us that it is not a grouse, so we looked into our next possibility, the partridge, and with the help of the RSPB pages, we determined that it is the red-legged partridge, with it distinctive plummage and white chin. 


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/24/15
2. Finishing Strong #44 
3. The Virtual Refrigerator
4. My Week in Review #26
5. Hearts for Home Link Up - February 26 
6. Collage Friday: The Well Rounded Homeschooler
7. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the really awesome snow
8. Keeping Company: February Link-Up
9. Science Sunday #18

Fascinating Fungi

It all started with Tiger finding some fungi (panaeolus foenisecii) on the lawn one day...

We cut some off to observe indoors before making a print with them.

A few days later, more fungi (mostly Parasol Mushroom and Field Mushroom) popped up on the lawn:

Since there were so many fungi popping up around us, we might as well get to know them!

We made a few trips to the woods to to search for fungi.  Boy, were we in a treat!  Fungi was to be found everywhere!

We found fungi growing on tree trunks:

Moving down a little along the tree trunk, we found fungi growing on the exposed roots of certain trees:

Mostly, various fungi could be found on rotten logs or exposed parts of branches that were starting to rot:

 

Even on rotting logs, there were many different varieties of fungi growing.  Other than the tubed mushrooms (see photos directly above), the most common type of fungi we found on rotting logs were from the bracket fungus family.

We didn't take our field guides with us on our walks but Tiger took many photographs of all the fungi we found so that we could identify them when we got home.

The fungi on the ground were very well camouflaged and we had to look quite hard to pick them out from the piles of fallen leaves.

The most exciting find was the Fly Argaric, the quintessential fairytale toadstool where we almost expected to find a fairy hiding under it.  We also saw a fairy ring made up of fly argaric, which is rather unusual.  The fairy ring was located very deep in the woods where there wasn't much light so the photograph doesn't do the magical atmosphere justice.

After our numerous walks, we collected enough photographs and samples to conduct more close-up investigations of the fungi at home:

We identified all the fungi at hand, looked at them through our hand-lens (I think we'll need a microscope next year) and noted the different types of patterns and gills of each fungus.

Then we covered each fungus under either a glass jar or a bowl (depending on its size) to make a spore print.  Unfortunately, some of the prints did not turn out very clearly.  It was fascinating to see how the Fly Argaric expanded to twice its size to fill the entire bowl.

The fungi were kept covered for a few days to get the spore prints.  By then, they were starting to give off a slight rotting smell.  They were discarded before they became rotten (which wouldn't be a pretty sight) but we became fascinated by the concept of decay for a few days:

Apparently, we were not the only "weirdos" who were enthralled by fungi!  We went along to a fungi workshop conducted by The British Mycological Society, where we learnt various information about fungi, including its life cycle and taxonomy.

At the workshop, Tiger was given some starter culture for the Oyster Mushroom, which he cultivated inside a toilet roll (all of things).  We left the mushroom to grow in a corner of our bathroom and observed it everyday for two weeks, noting changes to its growth.

Watching the oyster mushrooms grow was an amazing experience.  Unlike the picked fungi above with which we tried to get spore prints, these live mushrooms did not smell at all.  Although we were assured that they are completely safe to eat, we didn't eat them in the end because: (1) both boys don't like the taste of mushrooms, and (2) we don't fancy eating anything that was grown in the bathroom, even though our bathrooms are very clean.  Therefore, growing the oyster mushroom remains a scientific adventure.



This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 9/30/14
2. Finishing Strong Week 31
3. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #85
4. Collage Friday - Homeschool Moms: Sometimes We Need to Ask for Help!
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the One Direction Concert
6. Country Kids from Combe Mill

 

How to Be a Narcissist

Well, not really!

Although I have had some run-ins with a few narcissists in the past, I don't teach or encourage people to be dysfunctional.  This post is really about the next flowering plant Tiger and I studied together: the narcissus family which consists of the daffodil and the jonquil.

We used pages 549-552 of the Handbook of Nature Study to guide our observations.

The interesting part about nature study is that we learn to closely observe objects that we often take for granted.  For example, prior to studying the narcissus family so closely, we thought there are only different-coloured daffodils.  Little did we know that, at a basic level, the daffodil family consists of:

1) the 'normal' yellow daffodils that we often see -- either the smaller wild one, or the bigger garden-cultivated ones;

2) the mutant daffodil that has two or more layers of petals;

3) the Poet's Narcissus;

4) and the jonquil.  Funnily enough, Tiger and I had never thought of looking for the jonquil until we read about it in the Handbook of Nature Study.  We were very excited when we spotted them in somebody's front garden one day.

As we looked closely at the flowers, we noticed that the ovary of the flowers that had withered in our vase had swollen up to a size that was not observed in those that were left in the garden.

We are not entirely sure why the swelling occured but we think it was caused by self-pollination (since there are not insects in the house to facilitate cross-pollination) which resulted in the maturation of the ovules.  We then made a cross-section cut of the ovary to observe the triangular compartments that contain the rows of ovules.

After that, Tiger pulled the flower apart to look inside.  He discovered some liquid at the base of the style, just above the ovary and wondered whether it was nectar.  Both of us scrapped the liquid with our fingers and tasted it -- it was sweet!  Nectar!

It suddenly occured to me to ask Tiger whether he knew the Greek myth of Narcissus, who gave his name to this family of flowers that we were studying.  He said no.  Gasp!  I distinctly remember Tiger becoming somewhat of an expert on the Greek Myths in Year 1 after we spent a few months studying the topic, but I appreciate his honesty at admitting that he is not entirely sure about the subject.  As far as I'm concerned, it is better to acknowledge our ignorance than to pretend to be an expert when we really don't know something well enough to call ourselves that.  As part of his growing self-awareness, Tiger is learning to know what he doesn't know and be comfortable at acknowledging that to himself and to us.  Not knowing something is not a problem -- all we have to do is to get a quick review by listening to the story followed by watching a clip:

Along the way, I also realised that we had not formally learn the scientific names of the flower parts, so we watched the following clip:

I also printed off the Parts of the Flowers cards set and used it as a learning tool.  Being designed in the Montessori fashion, the cards set is very useful as a set of nomenclature to introduce, isolate, and reinforce learning about the different flower parts.

The set also provides opportunities for matching names to parts, as well as matching names to definitions, all of which reinforces the intended learning.  There is also a small booklet in the set that provides a summary of the reproductive function of the flower.  After reading it, Tiger identified a small error on page 3 of the booklet that needed correcting: where it is written "Pollen from the anther collects on the stamen.", it should be "Pollen from the anther collects on the stigma."

Labeling the flower parts in a diagram summarised everything we learnt in this session:

In the process of learning about the process of pollination and the flower parts that are involved, we found it fascinating to note how similar the process is to human reproduction.

This took us off our flower trail for a little while as we spent some time discussing the similarities and differences between:

1. the male parts of the flower (stamen) and the male reproductive organs of a man;
2. the female parts of the flower (pistil or carpel) and the female reproductive organs of a woman;
3. the time frame of the reproduction processes of a flower and a human; and
4. the process of fertilisation of a flower and a human.

Who would have thought that a study of flowers would lead to a study of the human reproductive system?  Such connections certainly would not have been made in the school curriculum.

We then decided to dissect the flower to see the various parts for ourselves.  In our effort to be a little less amateurish in our scientific pursuits, we watched the following clip to make sure that we dissected the flower properly:

The dissection video got Tiger so interested that he decided to take down notes on his computer while watching the clip.  It was interesting for me to see Tiger starting to develop the skill of note-taking of his own accord.

Once Tiger was happy with what he has learnt from the clip, we proceeded with taking the flower apart.  We first took apart a 'normal' daffodil flower.

We used a clear sellotape to stick the various parts of the dissected daffodil in Tiger's nature journal:

Dissected parts of a normal daffodil.

The details of the male part (stamen = anther + filament) and female part (pistil or carpel = stigma + style + ovary + ovule) are just too fascinating not to look closely in detail:

 

We then decided to check whether the 'mutant' daffodil flower is any different, so we repeated the process with the mutant flower:

We were not surprised to observe a number of differences in the mutant flower when compared to the normal flower:

• there were more petals on the mutant flower;
• the corona appears to have mutated into an extra layer of petals;
• we didn't find the male part (stamen) of the flower;
• the alignment of the ovules were different from that of the normal flower;
• there were fewer ovules in the mutant flower

Dissected parts of a mutant daffodil.

I had Tiger fill in the worksheets from here based on our exercise.

During dissection, it would have been a perfect to observe the pollen grains and the various flower parts under a microscope.  However, since we do not own one, we resorted to looking up the relevant information in a book that provided us with superb photographs of what we would have seen under a microscope, along with detailed explanation of the subject.

To round up what we've studied so far, we played the matching games using the cards printed off from  here.  It is basically a slightly simplified game as the one we played earlier using the Montessori card set.

This is part of our flower study series known as:

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 4/1/14
2. Entertaining and Educational - West Africa Study
3. Collage Friday: Como Se Dice?  Dad's in Honduras
4. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One In Which Spring Sprang... or Is It Sprung?
5. The Homeschool Mother's Journal (4/5/14)
6. Science Sunday: Blood Type activity for kids