A Week of Duality

It has been a week of:

1. being at home and going out; and
2. learning about two very different cultures

At Home with Chinese
We spent most of this week at home focusing on Chinese. 

As the school year is coming to a close, Tiger has to prepare for his end-of-year Chinese exam and to complete the end-of-term projects set by his Chinese teacher.

There are six projects to complete, which contribute to 20% of his yearly assessment:
1.  to draw and label various parts of the body;
2.  to construct sentences using specific words;
3.  to translate a Chinese nursery rhyme into English;

The nursery rhyme that we chose to translate is a traditional one to Chinese children, in much the same way as Jack and Jill is to a Western child.

4.  to make a greeting card based on a traditional Chinese festival and write appropriate greetings inside the card;
5.  to research and write about a traditional Chinese festival;
6.  to research and write two sets of questions and answers about some geographical aspects of China.

Tiger wanted to make a Chinese New Year card because, being a typical boy who seeks the shortest way to get a job done, he finds that the illustrations of this year's (Year of the Horse) card can be easily done by a few brush strokes so that was what he did, using a reference photo from a google search and following along using gold paint.  The result turns out alright, as seen in the red card above.  The illustration shows a combination of the year 2014 with the word 'horse' in traditional Chinese character.

We decided to look into another traditional Chinese festival for our research project.  There are so many festivals to choose from, but we decided to learn more about one that has just passed (the Dragon Boat festival) quietly in our household because I couldn't get all the ingredients together to make the rice dumplings...

Note to myself: please stay on top of the festivals!

Why the dragon boats and rice dumplings?  Many traditional Chinese festive customs have to do with actual historical accounts.  It is no different on this occasion:

Outside with the Vikings
We just managed to catch the last bit of the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum before it closed.

Although we're not officially studying the Vikings at the moment, the flexibility of homeschooling has allowed us the opportunity to visit this rare exhibition -- the first Viking exhibition in England in 30 years -- and to see for ourselves the longest Viking warship that has ever been found!

Hence, even though Vikings are not on our current schedule, we feel it is certainly worth taking a little time out to refresh our memory about what we've learnt about the Vikings (we studied them two years ago) in addition to looking at real Viking artefacts that we hadn't seen before.

While we were at the exhibition, we were treated to additional interaction with the learning coordinators, both inside the exhibition and afterwards, who provided more directions and suggestions on looking at the exhibits to the children.

I wasn't sure whether Tiger remembers what he learnt from two years ago, but he apparently does, as shown by his enthusiastic and accurate responses to the quiz at the end of the visit.


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 6/24/14
2. History & Geography Meme #123
3. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the relaxing week at home
4. The Homeschool Mother's Journal (6/28/14)

Late Anglo-Saxon period: Ethelred to Harold

As we move closer to the late Anglo-Saxon period, ie about 300 years after Alfred the Great's death, we get to know the decline of the Saxon rule in England in the way they were less ready to fight the Vikings than before.  One particular king, Ethelred, seemed to have been gone down particularly bad in history, by being called "The Unready", although historians are divided whether that is an accurate translation of the Saxon title Ethelred was given.  Some historians think he should be more accurately called "The Ill-advised", given the circumstances surrounding his rule.

We went to another Saxon encampment (Tiger just can't get enough of reenactments) where they were recreating the year 1012AD.  We attended the court of Ethelred where we witnessed how crime and punishment were administered in three different cases: (1) a theft, (2) bearing a child out of wedlock, and (3) a neighbourly dispute.

 

We had a lot of time to look around the encampment, to talk and listen to the reenactors about their roles, their displays, and the period in which they are 'living' in.

Minting Saxon coins out of pewter.

There was a children's vike where they were "trained" to fight against the adults, after a few simple rules and instructions.  Naturally, the battle was over in a few minutes with all the adult warriors being unceremoniously defeated.

After a short rest, the adult warriors showed their true prowess by having a weaponry and combat display, which Tiger watched with much enthusiasm.

The finale was a huge battle between the Saxons and the Vikings, although you would not be able to tell who was who from the photographs, since their armour and helmets were so similar.

The turbulent late Saxon period finally came to an end with King Harold losing the kingdom to William of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings, the reenactment of which we attended at the actual site last October.  We have studied this event so many times before that it needs no further work, apart from the very glaring error we found in SOTW2 that really bothered us, which we feel we must point out here: we have never heard of King Harold being called "Harold the Unfortunate" by anyone in England, and there definitely isn't an inscription of this kind on his tombstone, see evidence below:

King Harold's tombstone at Waltham Abbey

A stone plaque at Battle that marks the spot where King Harold fell.

I think many English still regard King Harold as a tragic hero rather than simply an unfortunate king who happened to lose a decisive battle.  The circumstances surrounding the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings are much more complex than how SOTW2 has depicted them.  The way SOTW2 has oversimplified (and errorneously reported) events that we happen to be very familiar with makes us question the credibility of the book.  It is nonetheless useful for Tiger to acquire a healthy sense of skepticism to information presented by "popular textbooks" and "experts".

Middle Anglo-Saxon period: Alfred the Great

The Viking and mid-to-late Saxon periods in British History overlapped much.  It has been an interesting experience to revisit this period again, now that Tiger is able to identify much discrepancies in the "facts" presented by the various information sources that we are consulting in our study.  For example, we have been spotting and discussing quite a few not-so-accurate parts in the SOTW2 version of British History, which has been very useful for Tiger to understand an authentic study of history requires comparison of different interpretations, inquiry, research, critical assessment, and continual questioning of what we think we knew.  I am very pleased that we are able to enter into such discussions, which is only possible due to the wide exposure to different information sources as well as Tiger's strong interest in history.

The turbulent middle period of the Anglo-Saxons (around 800 AD) was plagued by frequent Viking invasions as well as internal tribal conflicts.  We started with books and articles in history magazines:

We attended a lecture held at an university about warfare, medicine and development of the modern English language from the Saxon language which intermingled with the Old Norse language and finally developed into Old English.

The greatest English king of all, and the only one to be called "The Great", was Alfred of Wessex.  We learnt about him from various folklores about King Alfred's Cakes (a type of fungus), and from various documentaries, most notably an old documentary from Michael Wood.  We also found a more recent and generic but detailed introduction to the Saxon period by David Starkey to be very useful:

In the footsteps of the Northmen

We had studied the Vikings before, last year specifically, as part of our British History, but this year as the topic is covered in SOTW2 again, we are revisiting a familiar topic with slight variation to how we are learning about it.

To re-familiarise ourselves with the Vikings, Tiger read the following books:

and watched the documentary:

I made a "Viking stew", which was basically a thick vegetable stew, based on recipe found in the following book, but the boys thought it was too plain and uninteresting for them.

We then looked at what the British Museum had to offer in terms of information and collection on the Vikings, and found the Lewis Chessmen to be a fascinating item, so we decided to head down there to have a look at the actual chess set for ourselves:

While we were there, we attended a Viking demonstration by two reenactors who showed us various recreated Viking equipments and their uses, as well as clarifying a few popular myths about the Vikings, one of which was the the Viking helmets did not have horns attached to their sides.

We also attended an illustration workshop where we saw another demonstration, this time by an illustrator, who showed us how he drew a comic version of the chessmen:

The head of a longboat in the gallery sparked Tiger's interest to find out more about Viking Longboats.

We looked around the internet and found the following documentary to be quite interesting, as it also related to a very famous Viking battle that took place in England -- The Battle of Maldon:

We were able to get to the actual battle site in Maldon and spent a good few hours touring the site with a few local experts who told us fascinating stories about Vikings in general, the motivation of the Vikings to explore, disagreements amongst historians about the outcome of the battle.

We even walked along the coastway that the Vikings had crossed!

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.