Year of the Monkey

The Year of the Monkey started last Monday.  The celebration usually lasts 15 days so we have two weeks to mark this significant Chinese festival.

As with last year, Tiger and I found an Chinese New Year-related activity to do in London.  This time, the National Gallery had a short workshop on decorating the Peking Opera mask, so we went along and did that.

Although the workshop emphasised creativity, which Tiger exercised plenty of, his mask doesn't look particularly Chinese in colour or design, so I asked him to read the Origins of Chinese Art and Craft as well as Lianpu in order to look into the significance of the design and colours of the various traditional Peking opera masks to understand that they are not chosen randomly.  We also found the following clip useful to give us a better understanding of this art form:

From the National Gallery, we walked to Chinatown to buy a few special items in preparation for the Chinese New Year as well as to eat a hearty meal.  It is interesting to see that we have chosen exactly the same food as last year.

Once we got home, we started decorating the house by putting up various decorative items around the house, much like what people would do to decorate their homes for Christmas.

Many of the Chinese decorations have symbolic meanings that usually mean well-wishes and the ushering in of good fortune and prosperity for the family.  Unlike a child who grows up in the East who will understand the symbolism behind the various Chinese decorations through sheer exposure to the culture in his environment, Tiger does not have such luxury so he has to find out about the symbolic meaning of the various decorations through reading books.

This year's New Year's Eve dinner was quite special in that I bought the 'Yu Sheng' (鱼生) from Chinatown.

This dish is like a raw salmon salad that is only eaten during the Chinese New Year period, and is a tradition of Chinese living in Southeast Asia.  It is a dish to be eaten with family and friends as a way to welcome prosperity for everyone in the new year:

*Disclosure: some links are affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you click through and buy something.


This post is linked up to:

1. Finishing Strong #76
2. Collage Friday
3. Multicultural Kid Blogs
4. Hip Homeschool Hop 2/16/16 - 2/20/16
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one that started with an amazing Valentine gift
6. Practical Mondays Link Up Week #2

Countdown to Christmas: Week 2

It has been a difficult week.  Tiger has been very ill with high fever and severe headache all this time.  It took three visits to the GP to find out that Tiger has a middle ear infection, which most likely resulted from his weekly swimming lessons.   There is no a lot to be done apart from taking the prescribed antibiotics and waiting for the bacteria to be gotten rid of.  The infection is a nasty one, causing such a spliting headache for Tiger that he (and consequently, I) has been woken up by the pain several times in the night for the past week.  Hence, all external activities have been cancelled, with Tiger spending most of his time lying on the sofa.  He is only well enough today to play with LEGO and his train set.

Compared to how active Tiger normally is, this week has been very boring for him as all external activities have been cancelled due to his being ill.  With all my not-so-well-planned December plans out of the window, luckily we have been able to manage some continuity with the daily unwrapping of Christmas-related storybooks.

  and rewatching a Christmas classic:

When he felt well enough to get off the sofa, we continued to look through the RI space-themed advent calendar, watched the second week of the Angel Trail, and made tin can lanterns that turned out to be very pretty.

At the very beginning of the week Tiger felt really terrible so in order to distract him from the physical pain that he was experiencing, my husband had the brilliant idea of introducing Tiger to a classic movie that he (my husband) has always wanted them to watch together:

No, Tiger will not be getting any Star Wars-related presents.

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...

Looking At the Same Moon

The Sunday that has just gone by was the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节）.  For the Chinese, it was a time for contemplation and family togetherness.  I cannot find any better clips about the festival than the ones I found last year, so Tiger and I watched those for review.  After all, a tradition is such because it has been observed and practised consistently for over a millenia, so there is no need to watch a new video every year because the legends and practices associated with the festival are the same.

I found myself panicking in the middle of last week, having realised that I did not have sufficient traditional paper lanterns and mooncakes for the occasion.  Luckily, I was able to order them on the internet and receive them just in time!

I wanted us to make a simple craft to mark the occasion.  Since we have made paper lanterns before, we decided to paint appropriate motifs onto glass jars and turn them into glass lanterns by putting a tealight in each.  While the motifs turned out well, the effect was not as good in the evenings with the tealights in them.  I am going to add more colours to the glass paintings to see whether that helps to transform the glass jars into votive candles.

In addition, Tiger is learning a new classical Chinese poem for the occasion.  Last year he learnt the poem，Contemplation on a Quiet Night 《静夜思》, by the Tang dynasty poet, Li Bai (李白）.  This year I have chosen another poem related to the festival, again by the same poet.  This year's poem is titled The Ancient Moon Recital 《古朗月行》.

The original poem has eight lines but Tiger is only learning the first half of it, i.e. the first four lines.  The reasons for that are: (1) the use of language in the second half of the poem is more complicated, and (2) the tone of the second half of the poem is infused with sadness as the poet alludes to the political instability of his time.  

Summer is Not Over Yet!

We are still officially on our summer break, and I have made a deliberate effort to stop ourselves from signing up for too many of the tantalising summer courses available.  However, as I look at what we have been doing since we got back from Cornwall (that was a real holiday), it seems that we are on the go again!

We have been spending time in nature,

spending time in the garden,

Tiger's current interest/obsession is anything and everything nautical, so he has been reading up on this topic.

Fiction and non-fiction books.

As he read the books, Tiger became intrigued by how boats and ships work.  He then decided the best course of work is to build a model boat that would float.  After he figured out what materials to use for his model boats, we went to the craft shops and got balsa wood and some fabric (for the sail).  Tiger has been obsessively designing his models, cutting the various pieces out of wood, testing his models, and redesigning them in the sink.

Once he was happy with his final designs at home (after several unsuccessful ones initially), he asked to launch them at a pond to see how they would respond in the 'real world' (as opposed to the sink at home).  Tiger brought a net to catch his boats before they floated too far away from the edge of the pond.

Even with his new area of interest, Tiger is still very much engrossed in the study of military history, reading books, play acting, and resuming the mini lectures.

Recently, he has been playing around with PowerPoint by himself and is using it in his mini lectures, progressing from his previous use of the whiteboard for his presentations.

While I managed to stop myself signing Tiger up for a multitude of summer classes, I did take him to an electronics class, only because he got to solder his own circuit board and learn about its various components, which I have absolutely no interest in or knowledge of.

The end product is a small bug-like machine that responds to different light intensities.  That is pretty cool.

It looks as if we have started 'school', doesn't it?  Our days before or during the summer don't look any different, except that many of the regular classes that Tiger attends are on a break at the moment.  I expect our days to be much more hectic come September, in view of the various classes that are currently being organised for the new academic year. 

For now, I am still enjoying the relatively slow pace of what's left of the summer, while watching our diary gradually being filled up with activities for the new term.

Busy Bee

We saw our first bee of the year (back in April)!

It was one of the rare sunny and warm day when we were enjoying the warmth of the sun in the garden when Tiger spotted the lone honey bee busying collecting nectar from flower to flower.  As it was a little dopey, we were able to observe it very closely such that we could even see its body being covered by pollen and it carrying its pollen basket on its hind legs!

As is becoming quite a (good) habit for us now, we decided to have a go at drawing a bee in our nature journal.

We later learned from the delightful little book shown below that we have drawn the queen bee, with its curved sting.

As we felt quite hungry after concentrating on our drawings, Tiger went into the kitchen and made a honey cake while we listened to a rather appropriate (even thought it's about bumblebee rather than honeybee) piece of music over and over again.

As wonderful as the piece of music is, I won't recommend doing that (i.e. listening to the same 3-minute piece over and over as we did) because now I can hear the music in my head all the time, as if there were a real bee buzzing around inside!  My propensity to hearing buzzing noise is not helped by us looking at the first 21 days of a bee's life while learning about the composer, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Tiger and I took more than six weeks(!) immersing ourselves in the poetic, meditative yet scientifically acute observational prose of The Life of the Bee, by the end of which we both learned a great deal about the fascinating behaviour of the bee and the intimate life within the hive.  The scientific accuracy of the prose that was written over a hundred years ago is validated by a more current documentary.

I got hold of a beeswax candle making kit for Tiger to have a go at feeling and smelling beeswax while making a few candles with the instructions in the kit.  The candles are incredibly easy to make and, according to Tiger, "very satisfying".

All is good until we started looking more into the current problems of honeybee survival.  It seems that the bees have been in trouble for at least 10 years now, and if the trend continues, the entire food chain is going to be aversely affected.

Easter Eggs and Dark Chocolate

We don't always do much for Easter.  The last time we did anything for it was two years ago, so it's time to decorate the eggs again!

We tried a few different methods of dyeing our eggs, with mixed results:

1. direct painting with food colouring - didn't work too well
2. direct painting with coloured pastes made of food colouring and bicarbonate of soda - didn't work either
3. marbling with nail polish - worked ok but very messy
4. marbling with ink - worked ok but the marbling ink stinks
5. soaking cracked eggs in coloured water - worked!

Needless to say, we were slightly disappointed to get little success compared to the amount of effort we had to put in to get a few half decent-looking eggs!  However, since I had the marbling ink out, Tiger then went on to do some 'proper' marbling on watercolour paper.

Tiger found the texture of the ink and the semi-random (one can manipuate the patterns made by the ink to some extent) patterns that it makes fascinating.  We both found the smell too strong and unpleasant though, so the pieces of marbled paper were left to dry outside for a few hours to get rid of the smell.

Since our dyed eggs haven't turned out too well, we thought we might have better results drawing them.

While we were drawing, Tiger wondered what the connection is between the chocolate eggs and Jesus.  We had talked about this before but he obviously needed some reminder, so I pointed him to the videos that we had watched two years ago.

As we watched the video about how the festival of Easter has evolved from the fertility goddess of ancient Mesopotamia through to the Anglo Saxon times, Tiger was intrigued by a piece of obscure information about an ancient manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus. 

He then took it upon himself to look through the ancient Greek text on the British Library website, and spent the next hour and a half attempting to translate it from ancient Greek to modern English.  I did suggest to Tiger that he has a better chance of success at translating ancient Chinese texts since I can give him a hand at that but I can't help with ancient Greek.  Despite my offer, Tiger decided to have a go at translating the Codex anyway, and he got as far as translating the first stanza in 1.5 hours.  It was a slow, long-drawn process by the looks of it, but I think he's off to a good start.  In the process, Tiger taught himself much about ancient Christian history and theology, translation techniques, texts comparisons, and language rules (grammar, syntax, sentence structure).  It is all quite fascinating to watch.

Once he has had enough of translating, we resumed our happy research on Easter chocolate eggs and how they are made in the factory:

From the consumer perspective where we see chocolate eggs stacked along the shelves of supermarkets, we then moved slowly along the supply chain and traced the source of the main ingredient, cocoa beans.  What we found is not a happy situation at all:

Tiger was slightly upset -- as any naturally uncorrupted human being would be -- by what he saw in the documentary above, but I think it is important for him to start becoming aware that our relatively safe, first-world existence is not to be taken for granted, and that many people suffer injustice and exploitation every day.  Although we may not be able to offer a solution, at the very least we should not become part of the problem by sheltering ourselves in apathy and igorance.

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

Victorian Arts and Crafts

While we seem to be very artsy lately, and having to continue with studying the Victorians, we decided to look more into Victorian art:

Of the many interesting artists who featured prominently in the Victorian times, we decided to focus on William Morris and the arts and crafts movement.

First, we looked through a book on Victorian Art that gave us an overview of how the arts and crafts movement developed in Victorian Britain.  Then we looked specifically at a few examples of Morris' wallpaper and textile prints to understand how and from where he got his inspirations from.

We learnt that William Morris got his inspirations mostly from nature, so I gave Tiger five pieces of post-it cards to design different patterns on.  Tiger was inspired by birds and the leaf patterns of a potted plant.

When the designs were made, we scanned each of Tiger's design onto the computer for him to work on each to create various patterns from each using the principles of either tessllation or overlaps.

Next, I asked Tiger to think of how he would create a poster for an exhibition of William Morris' work.  We brainstormed a few ideas together before Tiger decided that he wanted to have Morris' portrait as the main subject with a changing background to show Morris' versatility in various craft forms.

To achieve that, Tiger first traced the portrait of William Morris onto a sheet of tracing paper.  Then, he attached different sheets of nature-patterned craft paper behind the traced portrait.  Lastly, Tiger stuck a few Victorian-inspired embellishing pieces onto the tracing paper.  The end result is that there are three layers to the poster:

1. the Victorian embellishments
2. William Morris' portrait
3. changeable nature-patterned paper

Tiger felt that the three layers are important to convey William Morris' style of work where Morris often used three different layers of patterns in his textile and wallpaper designs.

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/10/15
2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 46
3. The Virtual Refrigerator
4. History and Geography Meme: Magyars and Bohemians
5. Collage Friday: Faces of American History
6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the learner's permit!
7. My Week in Review #28