Begin at the Beginning

One of the things tha I try to do in our homeschool is to go through history in a chronological order.  In the elementary grades (Cycle 1, according to some factions of the Classical education model), we started from the ancient world.  Now that we are in the middle grades (Cycle 2), I want to start at the beginning again, but this time I want to start at the beginning of life, i.e. prehistory.

One can go as far back as the Big Bang Theory, or the birth of the earth, but that, to me, is stretching too far into science so I decided that we will just start from the evidence of life, i.e. fossils.  It is very handy that our patio is laid with natural stones that contain fossilised plant imprints, so that is a very good place to start.

It doesn't take much to pique Tiger's curiosity so I directed him to the relevant books to acquire the necessary background information,

before breaking out a fossil-making kit to make plaster casts of various fossils.

Tiger also made a scaled-down cardboard model of a Hibbertopterus, which is a two-metre long prehistoric sea scorpion whose trackway (made 330 million years ago) was found preserved in sandstone in Fife.

In our typical fashion of homeschooling, we wanted to see whether we could find any real fossils ourselves so we visited a quarry in Gloucestershire to try our luck.

There was a whole lot of stone-staring that day... we were at a quarry after all.

Take for example the following: do you see anything special about these stones?  Are they just some rocks?

How about now?  Can you spot the fossilised mollusks embedded in the stones?

Once we knew what we were looking at/for, thanks to the very helpful geologists with whom we tagged along on the trip, we started finding fossilised bivales everywhere on the site!  If they were not exciting enough, I'd just like to mention that they are from the Jurssaic period (205 - 102 million years ago) too.

I don't know about you, but I personally think it's very cool to actually find something that is hundreds of millions of years old.  That got us to contemplate the geological changes that have taken place on earth through the ages, such as the simple fact that the land that we were standing on was once the sea floor where these prehistoric creatures dwelt in.

We brought two big bags of fossils home with us that day.  Once they were thoroughly cleaned and dried, we identified each one using a fossil identification chart.  The most interesting one that we found was the gryphaea, commonly known as the devil's toetail from Victorian folklore.

After identification, Tiger made notes in his science notebook to record his observation by a variety of methods that include drawing and taking rubbings.

Below are a few samples from his notes on fossils:

We watched First Life for review, and to check whether we had any gaps in our knowledge so far.  While we have learnt much from books and especially on the field trip, there is nothing quite like watching a good documentary to bring the prehistoric habitats to life.

The link from the study of prehistoric fossils to present day is that of fossil fuel, which we read about using the following books.

However, the greatest outcome of our study so far has been that Tiger is now the proud owner of his own sizeable collection of fossils, which he is only too happy to talk about all day to anyone who'd listen.  I therefore have been on the receiving end of a much-needed education on the various fossils that include:

• their identification
• where they were found
• the geological time period in which the original creatures existed

  

* This post contains affliate links to products that we have bought and used ourselves, and that I recommend.  I earn a little bit of money, at no extra cost to you, when you make a purchase through the link.  Thank you for your support.  :-)

This post is linked up to:

1. Finishing Strong ~ Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years #74
2. Collage Friday: A Day in the Life of Our Homeschool
3. Weekly Wrap-Up: The last one before Texas
4. Hip Homeschool Hop: 2/2/16 - 2/6/16

In Hot Pursuit

Following our recent study of Sherlock Holmes, Tiger and I decide to keep up the interest in all things mystery.

I chanced upon a company that sells various themed mystery/treasure trails around the country.  The trails look quite interesting and challenging, and appears to offer a fun day out, so we tried out the one that is set in Convent Garden area.

Tiger was keen to take the lead for solving the mystery.  The trail is designed such that we are only told the starting point (this particular trail started outside the Leicester Square tube station), and have to find our way around by following the clues given in each step of the trail, which are in turned only revealed when we solve each cryptic code accurately.  We thought it would be very easy, but we realised that we were totally lost after three hours of walking around the side streets and narrow lanes in the Soho/Convent Garden vicinity and finding ourselves barely halfway through our trail.  The guideline on the trail says that it should take 1.5 to 2 hours to complete the trail.  Ooops.

Feeling very hot, bothered, and utterly defeated, we gave up for the day and went home to rethink our strategy for solving the mystery. 

We returned to complete the trail the next day, this time better prepared, both mentally and physically.

There must be something about wearing the Yorkshire flat cap that invoked Tiger's inner detective, as we were much more successful on our second attempt to complete the trail and hence solve the related mystery.  It took Tiger less than an hour to this time, and as we ended up in Convent Garden Market where there are many interesting sights to be seen, we spent the rest of the day congratulating ourselves for being super sleuths and rewarding ourselves with fantastic food found in the market.

Encouraged by our success at the Convent Garden trail, we then spent another fun day solving a second murder mystery, this time at Bankside.  I chose this location thinking that we would have a greater success because it has a shorter completion time of 1.5 hours, and that having been to that area many times we ought to know most of the places there.

Not wanting to take any chances this time, Tiger started studying the trail and working out the most efficient route once we got on the tube to get our first destination.

Our starting point this time is outside the London Bridge tube station, near the Southwark Cathedral.  This proved to be very interesting for me because we had mostly hung out on the St. Paul's Cathedral side of the river, so starting the trail from Southwark is an opportunity for us to explore a few new places.

And exploring and discovering new places we certainly did!  The trail took us through many significant, new-to-us landmarks that we did not know about or had not visited before.  Seeing new places is always exciting, especially when it is done in conjunction with delicious food, as we found when we were led to Borough Market.

It was Tiger's first visit to Borough Market, and the sights and sounds of the market fascinated him.  More importantly, we found a stall that sells Thai desserts and mango sticky rice which we both love to eat!

The trail gradually led us towards the side of the Thames that we are more familiar with, whereupon we walked past the Clink Prison Museum and Tiger wanted to go in to take a look.

I knew about this museum but did not take Tiger here for a visit when we studied Medieval England because I thought: (1) it looked more like a commerical attraction than a real, historical accurate museum, and (2) the content may be too gruesome and hence inappropriate for a young child.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only are the exhibits and artefacts historically accurate, the representation of this gruesome aspect of medieval history is not unnecessarily gory.  Tiger was fascinated by the exhibits, while I was slightly appalled by the inhumane use of certain instruments of punishment.

As we approached the end of the trail, we were brought to 'theatre-land' (at least in Tudor/Elizabethan times) and came upon the original site of the Globe Theatre, which was burned to the ground.  Although Tiger and I have visited the current Shakespeare's Globe theatre many times in the past, we have not been to the original site until now.  It is interesting to see that the site is now part of a compound inside a housing estate.  Not far from it stands the Rose Theatre, which was the first purpose-built theatre on Bankside (predating The Globe Theatre) in Tudor time.

We walked the trail at a very leisurely pace, so it took us nearly a whole day to complete it but we stopped and enjoyed our discovery of many previously unknown-to-us places as the clues took us down side streets or made us look closely at certain architectural and historical features along the way.

Finally!

We woke up in the middle of the week to this:

It was not a lot of snow, only about an inch, but Tiger had been waiting for this snow for two years (we didn't get any snow last winter), so he was adamant that he was to play outside.  Being the understanding and sympathetic mother than I am, I let him have his way.  Tiger is a lucky boy, considering what some school children have to contend with given the same weather.

After an hour or so outside, Tiger came in to warm himself up with a hot drink while reading a few books to get himself in the right frame of mind to start our lessons.

 

While we have done a little study on snow before, I figured it wouldn't hurt to do a little review,

before we did a little experiment on insulation whereby we wrapped one same-sized ice cube in a different material (e.g. flannel, paper bag, cling film, baking paper, aluminium foil, etc).

We checked for signs of melting (which would reveal how well the particular material is for insulation) every 15 minutes.  At 30 minutes we saw this:

After an hour, we saw this:

Our result showed that the three least insulated materials are:

1. aluminium foil
2. nappy bag (big surprise!)
3. dish cloth

The materials that provided the greatest level of insulation are:

1. brown paper bag (another surprise)
2. flannel
3. J-cloth

Even though we had very little snow this time, some parts of the country has been experiencing snow storms since the beginning of 2015:

Across the Atlantic, the east coast of America was also experiencing blizzards, on a much larger scale:

The various degrees of snow conditions got us curious to find out the differences among sleet, hail, and snow.  It is quite amazing to know that all of these different conditions came from the same source, water:

As we learned about avalanches from the documentary above, we did a simple experiment to show how larger objects in an avalanche will tend to drift to the top of the heap.

We put several small objects of different shapes and sizes (e.g. a lego man, a round lego shape, a red lego rectangle, an eraser, a small metal stick) into a jam jar and poured rice into it to cover the objects.  As Tiger shook the jar each time, different objects surface to the top, except the metal stick which never did.

As the snowfall was such a rare event and was the first time that it has settled enough to allow for some play, we decided to put it in our Calendar of Firsts for the week as "first settled snowfall" and drew a little snowflake to mark the occasion.

There are many different ways to draw snowflakes but we really like Shoo Rayner's friendly and approachable style so we have been learning a lot from him lately, including how to draw a snowflake easily:

This was followed up by the end of the week with my first sighting of our grey squirrel.  Tiger had seen the squirrel since the beginning of the year, but I hadn't.

That probably just means that I haven't been looking out of the window as much as he has, because the grey squirrel is a regular visitor to our garden.  If you're wondering why my squirrel looks more like a red squirrel than a grey squirrel, that's because I was practising using crayons by following the instructions here:

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/3/15
2. Virtual Refrigerator
3. Fininshing Strong #41
4. My Week in Review #23
5. Collage Friday: Our "Classically Eclectic" Homeschool Week
6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one in which I'm hoping for an early spring
7. Science Sunday: Muscles and Movements in Other Organisms
8. Keeping Company: February Link-Up

When Storms Get Too Much

For some reason, I had never understood the difference between a tornado and a hurricane, until now when we actually look into the matter.  I knew that both have something to do with strong winds and rain, but that was about it.

The other thing that I was very confused about was the difference between cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes.  It turns out that they all refer to the same thing; the only difference lies in where the wind originates.

We did a few experiments to coincide with what we were learning.

The first experiment has to do with seeing how wind movement varies depending on where it is within the hurricane.  What we did was basically to tie a paper clip to a piece of string then drop the paper clip into the outer edge and inner part of a small glass bowl of whirlpool.

Our bowl is too small so our observation only lasted a few seconds.  However, we did observe that the paper clip moved much faster when dropped in the inner parts of the whirlpool compared to when it was dropped on the edge.

The next experiment has to do with testing different strengths of wind using a "wind tunnel" made out of a cardboard box.  We placed a few items made out of different materials (e.g. pewter, plastic, paper) and had a fan blow at them at three different strengths.

Wind strength 1:

Wind strength 2:

Wind strength 3:

Since changes in weather are ultimately caused by a change in air pressure, we decided to make a simple barometer.

The idea is that it should work like this:

We dutifully placed our homemade barometer and measuring strip outside to wait for the changes in atmospheric pressure, only to find that the strip would not stay on outside due to exposure to the wind and rain.  It is no good placing the barometer indoors because the air pressure inside is not going to change enough to cause the marker to change.  In view of that, we made another barometer, this time placing it inside a bigger jar.

The reason for placing the barometer in a bigger jar is to enable us to observe how the barometer actually works by changing the air pressure inside the bigger jar by pushing and pulling on the balloon cover that enclosed the jar.

 We also learnt a fair bit about air pressure and its relation to temperature from the following documentary:

To understand the scale and destructive potential of a hurricane, we looked at what happened when Hurricane Katrina landed in New Orleans a few years ago:

This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday #14
2. Collage Friday: A Typical Week in Foundations
3. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with sunshine, emerging routines, and vocabulary cards
4. My Week in Review #22
5. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/3/15
6. History and Geography Meme #152
7. Fininshing Strong #41 

Blow, Wind, Blow!

We decided to extend our weather observation from last week by looking more closely into various aspects of the storm more closely.

First, we looked at wind.

Then we opened the two (I don't know why we have two, but we do) boxes of weather experiment kit and built a better rain gauge than the one we made last year, as well as two anemometers.

Why two anemometers?  Well, because the manual one is obviously not good enough so we had to build a fancier, bulb-lighting one.

We soon realised that the low-tech one is a lot more practical, because we could stick it in the middle of the lawn and watch the wind cups turn while we had to run out into the blistering wind to put the bulb-lightning one to good use... The lesson for us is obviously not to be seduced by flashing lights.

We then looked into the very sudden, few minutes of strong wind and thunderstorm last week and found that it might have been part of the mini tornado that took place in Harrow, Wales, and Cornwall.

Now, that explains the strange weather!  Even though UK does not normally get the full strength tornadoes like the ones in America,

we have been getting increasing numbers of them year-on-year.  Apparently, there was a sizeable occurrence in Birmingham ten years ago:

So what causes a tornado to form?

 The following documentary does a really good job of explaining it:

Inspired, we conducted a few very simple experiments to help us understand convection currents (the interaction between warm air and cold air that happens in thunderstorms) a little better.

For the first experiment, we filled a glass tray with tap water.  When the water is completely still, we put a few coloured ice cubes at one end and pour a few drops of red food colouring at the other end.  The aim is to observe that the warmer colour (red) rises to the surface of the water while the colder colour (blue) sinks to the bottom.

The second experiment is to simulate the convection cycle to show the movement of warm and cold water that is similar to the interaction between air masses with different temperatures.

Basically what we did was to fill a large jar with cold water, and a plastic cup with very hot water mixed with red colouring.  The plastic cup was then covered with cling film which was held in place by a rubber band.  The plastic cup was lowered carefully into the jar before a slit was made to the cling film with a sharp knife to allow the coloured water (hot) to rise through the cooler water.

After a while, the hot water will cool down and move back closer together, then drift down through the larger jar's water.  This movement shows that hot air rises and cool air falls.  It's very straightforward, isn't it?

Just for fun, we made our own super-easy-to-make mini tornado in a jar.

This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday: What You Have Been Doing
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/27/15
3. History and Geography Meme: Feudalism and Manorialism
4. Collage Friday: A Typical Week in Foundations
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with sunshine, emerging routines, and vocabulary cards
6. My Week in Review #22

It's Wild Out Here!

When we started our Calendar of Firsts, I expected our lists of sightings to thin out quickly and they sure did, when compared to our initial records.  From our lists in the past week:

• a flurry of snow

• lightning
• thunderstorm
• hail storm

 Listen to the noise and see how much hail accumulated on the window sill!

• very strong wind

• iced-over water droplets by 5pm

All quite wild (by UK standard), if you ask me.

Looking through our list for the week, I asked Tiger to choose what he would like to draw.  His first choice was to draw the hail storm, which both of us thought was the most interesting thing that happened, weather-wise.  However, I could not find any instruction to draw hail storms, so we settled for capturing the essence of the sudden flashes of lightning in the middle of the week and the thunderstorm that followed immediately afterwards.

As you can see from our entries below, we have taken a fair bit of artistic licence with our Calendar of Firsts.  Our entries probably won't pass the rigourous test of 'Charlotte Mason-style authenticity' (to whom the idea of Calendar of Firsts has been attributed) but doing it our own way has kept our interests up and more importantly, made us feel happy that we have remained true to our (my son's and my) uniquely defiant, non-conformist selves.  I realise that we will probably never become flag-bearers for anyone else's system, no matter how much we admire or are inspired by it.  Luckily, we are very comfortable with adding our personal touches to things/methods so what you see is more of a norm than an exception here!

As before, we noted the first sightings of nature occurrences in our books.  At the end of the week, we chose one or two items from that week's list to draw.  The first item we drew was the lightning, because that the most dramatic natural phenomenon for the week - this says it all, doesn't it?  We actually lead rather placid lives.

Then, Tiger wanted to draw some trees on fire, although we didn't see that happen here, thankfully.  By his logic, lightnight sometimes strikes trees which causes trees to catch fire, so drawing flames would be a suitably relevant addition to our entries:

The last thing we drew was the "Bang!" graphic.  Obviously, any self-respecting real, serious artist would not draw sounds in his/her drawings, but we are not that serious around here so it's ok to add visual sounds to our drawings, and we did hear the loud cracking noise of thunder so I'd consider the visuals as our attempt at a realistic representation of what we heard:

For someone who is looking to replicate exactly the Charlotte Mason-style Calendar of Firsts, our example here would probably 'lead you astray', so to speak.  However, it is an approach that keeps us interested and brings us joy, so it works for us.




This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday #12
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/20/15
3. The Virtual Refrigerator
4. History and Geography Meme: Introduction to the Middle Ages
5. Collage Friday: Homeschooling an 8th Grader
6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the first week of workbooks
7. My Week in Review #21

Queen Victoria and Her Empire

Two summers ago, we spent a day visiting Queen Victoria's holiday home, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight.

We finally come to properly studying the Victorian period this time round.   There is so much to learn about this period that I foresee us spending much of this term learning about the various aspects of this significangt time in history.

We started learning about Queen Victoria through various books and documentaries.

Having had some idea of the Victorian times, we looked through some source information on Queen Victoria before I asked Tiger to write a short narration from a two-page spread from our copy of History: The Definitive Visual Guide, and to practise tracing the map of the UK using the relevant outline map from this book.  The idea for map tracing comes from another homeschooling family.  Tiger really enjoys drawing maps so the activity is a good fit for him.  We have since made map tracing a regular activity.

One of the most significant aspects of Queen Victoria's reign was her enormous empire.

We attended a one-day workshop on The Impact of Empire, with the morning session starting at the Museum of London where the children were introduced to how the British empire developed from the Roman times to the Victorian times.

This was followed by an afternoon session at the Museum of London Docklands where the focus of the session became one of trade across the empire and the lives of sailors (mostly from India) living in the Docklands at that time.

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/13/15
2. History & Geography Meme # 149
3. My Week in Review #20
4. Collage Friday - Homeschool Moms: Are We Equipped to Handle the Hard?
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the major curriculum change