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.

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.

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

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

Look Up!

From time to time, it pays to look up from what we are doing and see what we can see in the sky.  Guess what we saw when we did?  A Black Kite!  The bird, not the toy.

It is one of the rare birds of prey in UK, and a cousin of the equally rare Red Kite.  Kites (the bird) are easily identifiable by their size (they are bigger than other more common birds of prey such as the kestrels and the sparrowhawks), their circling motion in the sky, and their forked tail.

Our luck in spotting relatively rare birds seem quite high lately as Tiger saw a grey heron fly over the house the following day.

As both birds present rare sightings to us, I chose to draw the kite into my Calendar of First while I wondered whether Tiger would draw the heron.  He drew an Airbus A380 instead.

How relevant is this to our Calendar of First?  Not a whole lot, but Tiger drew it at the same time as I was drawing the kite, and both the plane and the bird can be found flying in the sky, so maybe there is a connection here, if we push hard enough.  At the very least, I just like Tiger's drawing and the fact that he has been practising.

While we were at it, I thought it would be sensible to review what happens to animals in winter, and to look into how birds of prey survive in the urban landscape (since we saw the kite in an urban area).

This post is linked up to:

1. Keeping Company: January Link-Up
2. Virtual Refrigerator 
3. My Week in Review #22
4. Collage Friday: A Typical Week in Foundations
5. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/3/15 
6. Fininshing Strong #41
7. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one in which I'm hoping for an early spring
8. Science Sunday: Muscles and Movements in Other Organisms

New Year Firsts

After two weeks of complete rest, and a wonderful New Year's Day breakfast, I thought everyone would be as eager as I was to get back to work.  Apparently not.

Monday was a flop.  I tried to get our routine back in order and was met with a mutiny whereby I was told that it was very unreasonable to start lessons on the first Monday of the first week in a new year.  With such a start, the rest of that day was pretty much a gonner.   I was furious, to be it mildly, but there was very little I could do to force the issue, without causing a permanent damage to our relationship, so I directed my excess energy at tidying up the living room and Tiger's bedroom instead. Well, at least something positive (clean rooms) came out of a negative situation!

Tuesday was not any better, for a different reason.  Tiger was (more) ready to start work but our boiler broke down that day, which meant we had neither hot water nor central heating.  It was one of those timely experiences (since we are studying the Victorians) that we would rather not have, especially when outside looked like this:

The plumber was only available the following day.  With the temperature inside the house being not much higher than outside, and feeling rather ridiculous walking around the house in three or four layers of clothes to keep ourselves warm (just like the Victorians), we decided we might as well be outside.

The rest of the week (or what was left of it) was spent mostly outdoors, observing nature.  It was my way of easing ourselves back to a full workload -- hopefully, that means next week -- and to get reconnected back to ourselves and with nature.

Nature study was sorely lacking last term because I thought we would concentrate on other aspects of science.  I did not think that we would miss it too much, but all of us felt less grounded for not being in nature enough in the past few months.  This year I want to be more intentional about making more time for nature study.

With that in mind, as well as being influenced by a book that I have been reading, I introduced Tiger to the idea of keeping a Calendar of Firsts, which is a list of things that we record as we observe them for the first time in nature.  The idea is that, after a consistent practice of doing this over a number of years, the child would begin to develop an awareness for, or start to identify, certain patterns in nature.  In the middle of this page is a clear example of a Calendar of  Firsts.  Ours are less fancy -- we used the simple slim week-to-view diary that can be bought from anywhere that sells stationery.

Our process for this is very similar to that of keeping a nature journal:
Step 1: take a walk or look out of the window;

Step 2: identify on the spot the plants and animals that are familiar to us;

1. mallard
2. moorhen
3. coot
4. budding snowdrops
5. Canada goose
6. berry-bearing holly
7. budding crocus

Step 3: take photographs of those that we don't know of;

A few unusual guests at the pond.

• Photos 1 and 2: These two birds are obviously related to the mallards, but we cannot be sure of their specific names, although we are guessing that they might be a male Gadwell (photo 1) and a female Gadwell (photo 2).
• Photo 3: The tufted ducks are seldom seen at the pond but there were more than 10 when we visited.  Also very unusual were the hundreds of common gulls there
• Photo 4: We saw a lone Egyptian goose for the first time.  Its markings are unmistakable, now that we know what it is.

Step 4: identify them at home using guide books or the RSPB bird identifier;

Step 5: put an entry in the Calendar of Firsts.

It started off as a simple list, and the photos above show our record for the past nine days (since January 1st).  Tiger's list and my list are slightly different since our rule is to only record things that we have actually seen/heard by ourselves rather than listing down what someone else has seen.  For example, Tiger saw a Yellowhammer out of his bedroom window this morning, but I did not, so it is on his list and not on mine.

Our lists look very full because it is the beginning of the year, and we are listing everything we see or hear for the first time this year.  I expect our list to thin out as the weeks go by, but it is still amazing to note how much wildlife there are around us, if we actually take notice:

• weather conditions (thick fog, heavy rain, thick frost)
• primrose flowers in blossom
• fallow deer
• robin
• badger sett
• pheasant
• jay
• pigeon
• blackbird
• green woodpecker
• dunnock
• great tit
• grey squirrel 
• magpie

Once we completed our list for each two-page spread, I thought our pages would look prettier with drawings on.  For each spread, I let Tiger choose which animal or plant from the list to draw.  He choose ducks and robin.  Not wanting to turn this into a full-blown nature journaling exercise, we decided to keep our drawing time to under 10 minutes each, by following along the video:

While I drew my pictures in the spaces in my Calendar of Firsts, Tiger drew his in a separate sketchbook:

To each his own is the name of the game, especially around here.


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/6/15
2. Virtual Refrigerator
3. My Week in Review #19
4. Collage Friday: Learning About the Civil War
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with all the Painting
6. Science Sunday #11: Vegetative Reproduction
7. Keeping Company: January Link-Up