Wizard and Wand

After all these years of dressing up, Tiger is still fond of doing so (although I suspect not for much longer).  At Halloween, he often dresses up as a wizard, this year being no exception.

He has been fascinated by magic and wizardry so has been practising magic tricks using a few books and a "Magic Tricks Box" that I picked up from the charity shop.

While this is all just fun to a very imaginative boy, I have a strong aversion to conjurors and magicians as I find the idea of deception, a principle on which most 'magic' we are shown is based on, rather objectional.  Therefore, I tried to redirect Tiger's fascination with wizardry to more 'useful' outlets, such as studying the entire Harry Potter series using the related issue of The Arrow for discussion and other English-related work.

We were at King's Cross station the other day, so we went to look for platform 9¾ where Harry Potter boarded the Hogwarts Express for the first time in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The station was refurbished a few years ago so it is now very bright and spacious, nothing like the dark and slightly dingy King's Cross station that I knew and missed from more than a decade ago.  The station is now almost too modern, cheerful and well-managed for the setting of the story.  While back in the dark and dingy days anyone could walk up and down the platforms freely and tried one's luck at running into a wall without bothering anyone else, there is absolutely no chance of doing that now without looking like a total fool to everyone in the station since there are now no dark corners in the station where one can hide in shame or embarrassment.  Moreoever, new and shiny electronic barriers are now up in front of all the barriers so there is no way to even walk between the actual platorms 9 and 10 to look for platform 9¾ unless you buy a train ticket beforehand.  In short, more progress but less spontaneous fun.

The station authorities have no doubt thought about the station's significance in the Harry Potter story, so a few feet away from platforms 9 to 11 is a wall dedicated to being the famous platform 9¾ , where tourists and fans can pose for photos and visit the shop.

As a result of our dislike for the commercialised aspect of the story, Tiger is adamant that he would not watch any of the Harry Potter movies despite my repeated encouragement.  I thought he might enjoy the movie's special effects so I started watching the first movie.

Tiger watched for 10 minutes and decided that, "The movie has left out too many details.  The book is better."  So that put an end to movie-watching.  Consequently, we need not go to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour too, which saves me a small fortune.

We used the time and money saved from not watching the Harry Potter movies and not going to the studio tour on some real magic, where Tiger made an electronic wand by soldering bits and pieces of resistors and other electronics bits to create a programmable wand using binary codes.

I have not captured the video very well, but the wand was programmed to display the word "bye".  Apparently the wand is able to be programmed to display different six-character words by changing the codes, but I don't really know how the wand works or how to programme the codes to change the word display.  Luckily Tiger paid attention in class and knows how to work it.

 

Where's the Pumpkin?

Last year I made an attempt to wean ourselves off the neigbourhood trick-or-treaters by making it a low-key event that involved just us, indoors.  I neither put our pumpkins outside nor put any decorations out.  Still, they came knocking on our front door, and I had to tell many small, disappointed English witches/wizards/ghouls/zombies/vampires that I was not celebrating Halloween.... I felt like a total villain by the time I said that to the tenth junior vampire who appeared outside my front door.

This year, to redeem myself, I decided that we would be better prepared for the trick-or-treaters.

We started preparing our pumpkin yesterday.  I used a marker pen to draw Tiger's chosen template onto the pumpkin before he proceeded with carving it to the music of Mussorsky.

I must say that we are very pleased with our pumpkin this year.  We think it really captures the essence of the spirit of Halloween.

After we had enjoyed the roasted pumpkin seeds, I put the Jack-O-Lantern out while Tiger decorated the front porch in preparation for night fall.  My husband even donated his car for a few hours to let a skeleton sit in the driver's seat, which totally scared a little four-year-old witch who refused to let go of her mother's neck when she spotted it.

All went really well this evening.  We were graced with visits from over 30 young English witches/wizards/ghouls/zombies/vampires, resulting in the sweets being nearly all taken.  We were all enjoying giving the sweets away when, about 20 minutes after nightfall, I noticed that our pumpkin had disappeared! 

I thought it might have rolled off the front step -- which is quite impossible to begin with since it is huge and heavy -- so I looked for it all out at the front of the house, but I could not see it anywhere.  Since I was not expecting anyone to take our pumpkin away, I only bought one this year.  For the rest of the evening, we had to rely on our milk jug ghost to annouce to the neighbourhood children that we are playing Halloween this year.

How bizarre it is to have a Jack-O-Lantern stolen on Halloween night!  This has never happened before so we are all quite perplexed by the incident.  Who would do something like this, and what can anyone do with the pumpkin after tonight?  The pumpkin is neither expensive nor particularly difficult to carve.  Our conclusion is that the foxes living in the nearby woods must have carried it off to their dens to have their own Halloween celebrations, or maybe the cats might have done so...

Much Ado About Slime

Halloween has always been associated with the darker archetypes of human consciousness.  As such, I often find that whenever I think of science activities related to Halloween, I will end up looking at something quite revolting or disgusting.

Our Halloween dinner.

We first tried out a science kit that I acquired at the charity shop for 50p, and did a few of the experiments from the attached booklet.  However, apart from the initial fun of stretching at the ready-made polmorphic slide, making our own slime ball, and playing a game of chase with the ready-made bouncy slime ball, I didn't think we have learnt much from the kit so I took it back to the charity shop.  Maybe the next person will have more joy with the kit.

We realised that we learn best by actually making the slime/gloop/oobleck ourselves, in the old-fashioned way, using the tried-and-tested cornflour and water mix:

It is one of those cheap-and-easy way to keep a child entertained for a long time, and to have a hands-on experience with the intriguing transformation of polymer chains, which certainly beats just reading about the properties of polymers from here and here.

From our little success above, we wanted to know what would happen if we scale up our experiment (from using 1 cup of cornflour to using 7 boxes of cornflour).  We filled two-thirds of our tub with oobleck, let it settle for a day and rest a glass bottle on its surface.  The glass bottle tipped to one side after a few minutes, but did not sink further into the mixture:

We then redid the test with a few marbles, one of which promptly sank into the suspension while the others took a little while longer to do so, but all eventually sank in and we had to fish them out with our fingers.

While the sinking of the materials was fascinating to watch, it was the fishing out part that really demonstrated the dilatant (the mixture moves slower when an external force is applied to it) quality of the suspension.

If we had a bigger container (such as a small paddling pool), we would have made a non-newtonian fluid pool that we could walk on, like the one shown below, but we understood the principle behind it from observing what happened to the marbles in the above experiment:

What other gloopy things can we make with cornflour and water?  Silly Putty, of course!  It is really a mixture of white glue, borax powder, water, and cornflour.

Borax is vital to the stiffness of the Silly Putty (as opposed to the simpler oobleck mixture) as borax facilitates the formation of cross-links among the polymers, which in turn creates longer/bigger and stronger/stiffer polymer chains.  Hence, the bounciness of the Silly Putty.

Finally, we turned out attention to the humble meringue, which is essentially made up of sugar and egg white.  Did you know that egg white is about 88% water?  The rest of it is almost all proteins (polymer).  The act of whipping the egg white unfolds and stretches the protein strands (the process is called denaturing), which gives rise to the network of bubbles we see.  As we further whip the egg white, the protein chains will overlap and form a long, stretchy surface, resulting in the stiff peaks that we look for when we make meringues.

We made four different batches of meringues to compare the differences in result when we made a slight variation each time:

1. egg whites at room temperature + cream of tartar + half a cup of white sugar
2. egg whites from the fridge + cream of tartar + half a cup of white sugar
3. egg whites at room temperature + cream of tartar + 1.5 cups of white sugar
4. egg whites at room temperature + half a cup of white sugar

The results are shown above:

1. the typical meringue: crunchy, slightly brown, with some air peaks, holds its shape well
2. similar to the results in (1) except that it has more air peaks
3. very white in colour, extremely crumbly, no air peaks, more like cookies, does not hold its shape well.
4. very sticky and flat, does not hold its shape at all.

Tiger writing his science report.

After such hard work (actually, our oven worked much harder than we did on that day with 4x90 minutes of non-stop baking), we relaxed by watching a documentary that explains how various materials such as ceramics, metal, and plastics work.


This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday #1: Chemistry Lessons
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 11/4/14
3. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 36
4. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #90 
5. My Week in Review #12
6. Collage Friday - Hands On, Field Trip, and Fine Arts Learning
7. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one that was a lot less stressful

Scaring Ourselves Silly

This week we have been indulging ourselves scary stories.

Individually, Tiger has been reading horror stories written separately by Ted Hughes and Brian Jacques,
 

while I have been enjoying reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and following the book discussion that took place at the AO Book Discussion (which can be found by joining the Ambleside Online Forums).

W also let ourselves be entertained by more-humourous-than-scary Victorian ghost stories,

and making a not-so-scary skeleton puppet (named Jonathan by Tiger, in honour of a friend he made at last year's science class):

We also read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow together.  I first read the story to Tiger as a bedtime story a while ago but I decided that we ought to do a little bit more than mere reading to learn more from the story.  Therefore, this week we shared the reading of this story by reading alternate paragraphs to each other and writing down every word that we were unsure of.  We filled both sides of four A4 sheets by the end of the story!  We then looked up each word and satisfied ourselves that our vocabulary has increased through this process of slow reading and not skipping over words that we haven't fully understood.

Following the word study, we discussed the story using the lesson plan here and also watched an animation of the story, which met with little enthusiasm from Tiger due to its inevitable abridgement and adaptation:

I agree with Tiger that much of the beauty and nuance of the language in the original written story has been lost in the film adaptation, even though the above is one that I found to be least offensive in this regard.  Tiger is still annoyed by last year's experience whereby the film version of The Witches made several alternations to the original story, which he found to irritate more than entertain him .  I think that means we shall stay with reading the original books rather than watching film adaptations, suits me just fine.

Although I did not succeed in getting Tiger to enjoy the animation of the story, we did, however, got quite excited when we came face-to-face with the headless horseman!  Unlike Ichabod Crane who could not wait to get away from the headless horseman, Tiger and I gazed at him and walked around him several times (I would have touched him to find out where his head was, if I thought that was appropriate), admiring him and our good luck at meeting him. I certainly didn't know he was going to be there!

We were at the Warwick Castle's Halloween event when we chanced upon the horseman.

At dusk, we entered "The Haunted Hollows" and were greeted by three talking pumpkins:

We took our time and walked the trail twice just to admire the various Halloween decorations that were put to good use.

The event was very well organised, especially after it got dark, where the lighting was used to create a very spooky atmosphere.   We took the "ghostly castle tour" where we were told stories that happened within the castle related to:

1. apparitions of servants who used to work in the castle and atristocrats who used to live there appearing in certain rooms in the castle;
2. the links between Aleister Crowley and the practice of Satanism to Warwick Castle;
3. the secret corridor that led to a flight of stairs where a servant girl, impregnated by an aristocrat, was murdered to prevent the scandal from emerging;
4. the organ in the small chapel that sometimes plays by itself;
5. a room where another servant girl was bricked up alive.

Suffice to say, it is all rather grim.

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/28/14
2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 35
3. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #89
4. Collage Friday - Developing the Habit of Attention in Your Homeschool
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with gymnastic team practice, prodigal cats, and car problems

Care to Join Us for Scary Tea?

It started with our grocery shopping at the supermarket this week.

Although Halloween isn't traditionally celebrated as such in Britain, the modern festival has its origins from the Celtic/Gaelic practice of Samhain.

There are so many pumpkins and Halloween-related items in the supermarkets that one cannot walk past without knowing that Halloween is around the corner.  I don't intend to make a big deal out of this festival because: (1) I don't like what the festival represents and its associations, and (2) I don't want to encourage the increasing commericalisation that comes with it.  However, we do mark the festival in a small way at home every year, so we bought three small culinary pumpkins with the intention of making the most of them, as we did last year.

I made pumpkin soup and roasted the seeds with sea salt.  The boys vehemently refused to touch the pumpkin soup, so I had the pleasure of having the whole pot to myself (over two days).  I just looked through last year's post and realised that the boys have been very consistent with their dislike of pumpkin soup, and I have been persistently trying to feed it to them every year!  In this household it's often difficult to determine which one of us is the most stubborn: is it the boys, for flatly refusing to taste the soup every year, or is it me, for trying it on every year?  It's hard to say.  Anyhow, nobody backed down, as usual.  Maybe I'll give up trying to get them to like pumpkin soup next year.

After the unfortunate pumpkin soup saga, we moved on to the more agreeable activity of pumpkin carving.  Tiger and I spent some time looking through the different pumpkin carving templates before deciding upon a goofy face, a scary face and a ghost (both templates came with the pumpkin carving kit we bought).

Since the pumpkins we have are small, I had to draw the patterns onto the pumpkins with a marker pen instead of pinning the templates directly onto them.  In the process of drawing, I realised that our pumpkins are too small to show the ghost pattern clearly, so I persuaded Tiger to change that to the Hissing Cat, which I think has simpler outlines which make for easier carving.

Once the outlines were drawn, I passed each pumpkin to Tiger for him to do the carving, but not before watching the instructions from Lucinda's daughter and from the following clip to get some ideas of how to do it perfectly:

 
Each year as we carve the pumpkins, Tiger is able to take over more of the process.  This year, he did all the carving using the small serrated saw from the pumpkin carving kit.  Now the three pumpkins are used as a centrepiece on our dining table.  They look alright in the day, but they look best at night.

Tiger then said that he wanted to make some scones for tea, for he suddenly realised that it has been a few months since he last cooked.   I reckon we would have starved to death by now if he were in charge of cooking in this household... Since we're working with pumpkins, we decided to make pumpkin seed scones by adding some pumpkin seeds to this traditional recipe before putting the scones in the oven.

Master Chef has been advised that his credibility will increase when he can spell correctly!

When the scones were baked after 20 minutes, and the table was set, we were ready for our Halloween Tea Party!

Would you like to have a closer look at what's being served for tea?

 This week's special:
1.  homemade pumpkin seed scones (see above)
2.  roasted pumpkin seeds (see above)
3.  liquorice tea (only because it comes in a purple box, which fits nicely with one of the Halloween colours)
4.  homemade fig jam (It's so easy to make that Tiger asked why we hadn't done it before.  I forsee more homemade preserves this winter.)

5. tarantula eggs

For accompaniment, we have a good few spiders and centipedes (plastic ones, of course) crawling about the table, with a fair number of tiny spiders crawling along the cobwebs on the wall and on our chairs.  Marvellous.

Tiger did all the decorating, by the way.

Then, it's time to await the grand entrance of the boy wizard, who flew in on his homemade broomstick,

but not before zooming around the room to the music of Mussorsky:

Normally at poetry tea here, we sit around to eat and drink, and take turns to read out a few poems to each other.  This time, we listened to the recitation of The Highwayman a few times instead:

This particular poem has been specially chosen to go with our Halloween Tea for its haunting theme, and atmospheric rendition of a fatal situation.  The poem is a long one and it requires careful listening to appreciate its beauty and rhythm.

As an aside,  some of you have asked me how much effort it takes for me to pull all the various themes together.  Well, the following situation answers the question:

When Tortoise came home from work and saw our Halloween Tea Party arrangement, he was very impressed and commented on how much effort it must have taken to put it all together.  Tiger replied casually, "Oh, it took no effort at all!  We decided this morning that we wanted to have tea, so we went to the supermarket, got a few bits and threw them together.  There's nothing to it."

There you have it, folks.  According to the boy who's with me almost 24/7 and who witnesses how everything gets done around here , apparently it takes little to no effort at all.  Thus, in my son's eyes, I'm indeed a lady of leisure.  Splendid.


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/21/14
2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years #34
3. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #88
4. Collage Friday - Cultivating Beauty and Wonder In Your Homeschool
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: Ancient Egypt, Blue Hair, and Plant Dissections

Looking at the Weird Sisters

This term's drama study ties in well this year's Halloween theme of witches -- the children studied another Shakespearean work, Macbeth.

We first visited the V&A to attend a workshop on Elizabethan England, with an emphasis on the theatre at that time.  During the workshop, the children learned about the development of the Elizabethan theatre as well as become a rowdy audience member (true to the South Bank crowd back then).  They also got to experiment with Shakespearean language, make stage sound effects and dress up as a performer in Elizabethan ruff.  Most relevant to our own study is when the children, with the help of a reenactor, rehearsed and staged the witches' scene (Act 1 Scene 1) from Macbeth.

That was a good introduction to Shakespeare's work in general, but as we knew we were going to study Macbeth in drama class this term, we came home to listen to the entire play and read it to prepare ourselves better.  There is also a BBC animated version of the play, which Tiger did not enjoy as much as he did with a few other plays produced by the same team that he had watched:

Being taught by the same drama teacher, the format of this term's study is very similar to that of the class on The Tempest.  Besides drama skills, the four-day course also covered the following:

• character analysis
• historical context of the play
• scene analysis
• nuances of the Shakespearean language as spoken on stage
• Shakespeare's dramatic techniques in context of how the play is divided into acts

We were extremely lucky to have caught one of the last performances of Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe this season.

Macbeth, as with all Shakespearean plays, is highly complex in terms of its themes that weave together human nature, history, propaganda, beliefs, and drama.  I studied this play for my O-levels and thought I knew a lot about it back then (since I got an A* for the exam), yet I find myself looking at the play now at a different level from my teenage self, with a deeeper understanding of the complexities of any given situation.  As such, even though Tiger has read the unabridged text and knows the general theme of the story, he is not expected to have the same level of appreciation of the complexity of human nature as a more mature audience would have.  Lessons that come from life experiences cannot be rushed.


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 11/5/2013
2. Entertaining and Educational - Nov 8, 2013
3. Collage Friday: 100 Boxes and a Comedy of Errors
4. Weekly Wrap Up: Dates, Drivers, and Divergent
5. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 9, 2013}

Make the Most of the Big, Orange Fruit!

Did you know that the pumpkin is a fruit?  We didn't until we watched this clip and learned some pumpkin anatomy.

Then we proceeded to the business of carving our monster pumpkin.  Tiger first searched online for a pattern that he liked, then drew it on the pumpkin with a pencil.  When he was happy with his pencil sketch, he went over it with a permanent marker.  After watching a clip on how to carve a pumpkin, I helped Tiger to cut out the top and the shapes, but left the scooping to him.

There was so much flesh and seeds from the pumpkin that made me want to make the most of the fruit, so I roped Tiger in to make the pumpkin pean muffins.

While Tiger was busy making muffins (he doesn't like how they taste in the end, unfortunately), I used up the rest of the flesh to make a warming soup (that I really like but the boys don't).  The only thing that everyone like was the roast pumpkin seeds.  I have been told to NOT cook anything that contains pumpkin ever again....

While we waited for the food to cook, Tiger and I decided to find out what else we could do with our pumpkin:

1) Exploding pumpkins - This is very cool but unfortunately we can't do it at home.

2) Oozing pumpkins

Now this we can do.  The principle of the above experiment is the same as the Elephant Toothpaste experiment that Lucinda did with her children, except that the catalyst used in the clip above is Potassium Iodine (not readily available) but the catalyst used to create a similar foam in the elephant toothpaste experiment is yeast (readily available).  We managed to get our own vomiting/foaming pumpkin, which impressed Tiger very much:

After wowing at our success at creating a disgusting-looking jack-o-lantern, we decided to be a little more scientific by trying to answer the three questions found here.

Q1: Does the amount of yeast affect the amount of foam produced?
We prepared two jars with exactly the same amount of solutions with the only variable being that one jar was added with one packet of yeast while the other jar with two packets of yeast.

 

It doesn't look like there is much different to the amount of foam produced from both bottles, but luckily I took a video of the experiment.  It appears that the amount of yeast affects the speed of the foam creation.

Q2: Does the experiment work as well with dry yeast that is not mixed with water?

At first it seemed that nothing much was going to happen apart from a little foam at the base of the bottle.

However, within 5 minutes we saw that the foam level has risen substantially.

I asked Tiger what he thought had happened.  He answered that the yeast was still causing a reaction with the hydrogen peroxide, but that the warm water was necessarily to "wake the yeast up".  It's not the most scientific explanation but he's got the gist of what was happening.


Q3: Does the size of the bottle affect the amount of foam produced?
We didn't have plastic bottles so I used three different-sized jars.  Everything else stayed constant.

It seems that size does matter, which surprises me.  I don't know why that is, so that's something for us to find out.

Being the boy that he is, Tiger couldn't help to add his own (messy) touch to the experiment when it was over.  He wanted to see whether the colours would mix, and they did, to a some extent.

3) Glowing Pumpkins

We used a glow-in-the-dark paint that we have to paint over the exocarp of the pumpkin, but it didn't work too well.  I am guessing that glow-in-the-dark powder probably works better for this.

Nonetheless, we had a fun Halloween.  Hope yours was good too!

This post is linked up to:

1. Entertaining and Educational - Letter Learning Obstacle Course
2. Collage Friday - Math, Friendship, Shoeboxes & More
3. Creative Learning On Friday #19
4. TGIF Linky Party #100
5. Weekly Wrap Up: The One with the Solo Drive
6. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 2, 2013}
7. Science Sunday: I didn't get it all done
8. Hip Homeschool Hop - 11/5/2013