Everything is a Mystery

If I remember correctly, the first mystery series that Tiger read was The Boxcar Children, when he was about six years old.  We started with the first book of the series, and Tiger enjoyed the story so much that we bought him the first set (books #1-4), followed by the second set (books #5-8).  Over the next few years, he has read and reread the children's adventures many times over, and I often wondered how I could bring the story more to life.  Imagine my excitement when, on one of our walks, we chanced upon a disused railway carriage, much like that found in the Boxcar Children!

We went close to the carriage, but didn't explore it because although it looked disused, it didn't look abandoned so we figured it might be in the process of being restored by train enthusiasts so we had better leave it alone.  Nonetheless, it's not everyday that we come up close to a disused train so stumbling upon it was quite an adventure in itself.

That set off Tiger's interest in books about adventures and mysteries, so we moved on to the Enid Blyton series, starting with The Secret Seven, followed by The Mystery Series, The Secret Series, and finally The Famous Five series that Tiger has read over and over again, even today.

With his strong interest in all things mystery-related, he took it upon himself to learn all about being a detective and how to solve mysteries...

while I busied myself searching through library catalogues for mystery stories.  Luckily, it seems that everybody loves a good mystery, so I didn't have to look too hard to find suitable stories for Tiger to read.

As I started paying attention to mystery-themed learning opportunities, I found that they are in abundance!  Almost anything can be turned into a mystery!

Take geography for example.  Tiger has had no problem working through the Great Map Mysteries where map skills were learnt through solving mysteries:

Even music-making can take on a mystery theme, as we discovered at a 'musical mystery' workshop at Wigmore Hall, where the children were first introduced to the idea of musical motifs and combinations of notes before they had to compose their own motifs in their own groups and putting the various motifs together at the end of the day into a combined composition.

The workshop was led by a few professional musicians who were assigned to each group to guide the children in creating their musical themes, in part to ensure that the final product didn't sound too "unmusical".

As we explored more into the realms of mysteries, we found ourselves getting drawn into the darker world of crimes and murders...

A small exhibition about crime fiction at the British Library

It was at The British Library that Tiger got a first real taste of hunting for clues (by following a trail that took us to various palces at the library) and using the information he collected to reduce who the real culprit was.

Encouraged by Tiger's crime-busting, mystery-solving enthusiasm, I started to look for more mystery-related materials for our normal lessons at home.  In our homeschool, theme-based lessons often provide the necessary variation and "sugar coating" required to get some of the fundamentals done.  Maths is one of them.

Tiger tried out the above data handling murder investigation with much keenness.  When given a purpose (the "why") to solving a numeric problem, Tiger is often more motivated to learn the skills required (in this case, data analysis for Year 9) than if I were to ask him to learn a maths concept without him understanding how that concept has any real-world applicability.

While Tiger needed more help with the above, he is currently happily working on his own through a more manageable set of maths mysteries (see below).

I am aware that there are different schools of thought with regards to the necessity of themed studies.   Some theorists love the idea of using themes to connect all the diverse and seemingly disjointed areas of learning, while others oppose the idea on the grounds that having the teacher organise all the learning opportunities into themes will rob children of the initiative to make the connections themselves.

While I don't go out of my way to organise themed studies for Tiger, I don't oppose to the use of themes either, especially when the learning opportunities happen quite naturally and with little effort on my part.


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/14/14
2. Finishing Strong Week 33
3. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #87
4. Collage Friday: Homeschooling When Dad is Away
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the Frog Guts

The Magic of Roald Dahl

I'm not sure whether it's because of Halloween that has just passed or because we're approaching the end of the calendar year with longer nights, but there seems to be something quite magical about this time of the year.  It therefore seems natural to follow the magic that was started at the end of last month from our study of The Witches to get to know more about the world of Roald Dahl.

Although Tiger has read every.single.book written by Roald Dahl several times, I still think we can do a little bit more with some of his books.

The one we picked was George's Marvellous Medicine.  There is no particular reason for choosing this book over any other of Roald Dahl's books, except because we were able to catch a theatre production of it in a nearby town:

Instead of making potions based on the book, Tiger found a group to do shared-reading and discussions with (very similar to a book club).

After the discussion, Tiger made the scene of grandma popping out of the roof using paper and a cereal box:

We find the following autobiographies to be particularly helpful for getting to know the author:

So is the following three-part documentary:

After working so hard to learn about someone, wouldn't it be a shame not to not follow up by going on a related field trip to, say, The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre?

The museum is as interesting inside as is the trail outside.

Inspirations for Roald Dahl's stories are dotted all around:

Replica of the interior of Roald Dahl's writing hut.

"Fantastic Mr. Fox"

"The Enormous Crocodile"

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" - the door to the gallery is made to look and smell like chocolate bars!

The BFG's enormous sandal and the row of houses opposite the museum that was the inspiration for Sophie's house.  The BFG peered through one of the windows into Sophie's room.

"Boy" - Roald Dahl's autobiography of his childhood.

"Matilda" - We saw Miss Honey's classroom, the nearby library where Matilda went by herself to read, and the road sign that points to where her mother would have gone to play bingo every afternoon.

"Danny and the Champion of the World" - the petrol pump that Danny's dad would have used in his garage.

It is quite an amazing and magical museum for children, with many activity station to engage the children in their imagation and to encourage creative writing.  Tiger spent most of his time in the museum dressed up as a leopard, costume courtesy of the museum.

A short walking distance away is Roald Dahl's grave.  It is located at the top of a quiet hill, and has the BFG's footprints leading up to the grave stone.

This post is linked up to:

1. Entertaining and Educational - Nov 8, 2013
2. Collage Friday: 100 Boxes and a Comedy of Errors
3. Weekly Wrap Up: Dates, Drivers, and Divergent
4. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 9, 2013}
5. Hip Homeschool Hop - 11/12/2013

Different Ways with the Water Cycle

Our river study naturally leads to learning about the water cycle.

A 50p charity shop find of a strategy game based on river tides.

It is truly amazing to discover the interconnectness of various seemingly random topics, but somehow we have been able to stretch our themed study of The Wind in the Willows further and further.  The rest of the series can be found here.

Desk Learning
We started off by printing off the water cycle exercise from here.   First, Tiger matched the labels to their definitions, followed by labeling the diagramme.

Since we had not covered water cycle formally before, I wanted to use the exercise above to gauge how much Tiger knew or didn't know, so that we could focus our efforts on learning new things rather than unnecessary repetition.  When Tiger needed a bit of clarification on the processes, we watched the clips here and here.

Finally, we worked through the section here for review and to test our understanding of this topic.


Hands-on Experiments
Enough of table-learning!  Time to get some hands-on work done so we did a few experiments related to our topic.

1) The classic experiment

Procedure:

1. Bring a pan of water to boil.  Observe the air bubbles in the pan and the steam (photo 1).
2. Put a few ice cubes in a foil tray and hold it above the steam - be careful not to get burned by the hot steam! (photo 2)
3. photo 3: Observe the moisture that forms at the bottom of the foil as the warm air meets the cold foil surface. (photo 3)
4. As more steam/vapour gathers on the bottom of the foil, the water molecules gather to form bigger drops which eventually fall. (photo 4)

2) Water cycle in a bottle

Procedure:

1. Cut the neck of the bottle and screw the cap on tightly.  Pour a cup of warm water into the bottle and place the top of the bottle as shown.  Use cellotape to seal the space where the two parts of the bottle meet.  Place the bottle under direct sunlight for 5 minutes.  Think about what will happen to the air temperature in the bottle as it is exposed to the sun.  Observe the inner surface of the bottle and the bottom of the funnel (we observed some condensation on the sides of the bottle but none on the funnel). (photo 1)
2. Put some ice cubes in the funnel and observe for 10 minutes.  Think about what's happening to the air temperate around the bottom of the funnel. (photo 2)
3. After 10 minutes we observed condensation on the bottom of the funnel as well as on the sides of the bottle. (photo 3)

3) How raindrops form

Another simple and potentially safer way (compared to experiment 1) to observe "raindrops" forming.  This simple experiment is done by pouring enough water into a jar to cover the bottom, then place a few ice cubes on the inside of the lid and put it over the mouth of the jar.  After 10 minutes you'll see water droplets forming on the underside of the lid.  It works on the same principle as experiment 1: water vapour (from the room-temperate water at the base of the jar) rises in the jar then condenses as it touches the cool underside of the lid.


4) How water droplets gather in clouds

This experiment expands on the previous one (experiment 3).  Tiger first squeezed many separate drops of water onto the inside of a plastic lid, then quickly turned the lid over.  He then used the tip of a pencil to move the tiny drops of water together.  What he observed was the drops seemed to pull one another together to form larger drops.  When the drops are quite big, they fell.

The attraction of the water droplets is due to water molecules having a positive and negative side, similar to how magnets attract each other at opposite poles.


5) How the Water Cycle Purifies Salt Water

Procedure:

1. Stir 1 tsp of salt into a glass of clean water.  Dip your fingertip into the salt water and taste it. (photo 1)
2. Add several drops of food colouring (we used red, blue, and green) into the salt water and stir it well. (photo 2)
3. Put the cup in a ziplock bag and zip the bag up.  Place them in the sun.  Observe the bag every 5 minutes for any changes. (photo 3)
4. After 15 minutes, we observed some colourless condensation inside the bag.   We also tasted it and found it to be tasteless. (photo 4)

Field Trip
We attended a workshop at a water treatment plant where the children were given a quick overview of the water cycle.  As the workshop was conducted at a water treatment plant, the water cycle exercise included an extended part about how water is collected and treated before becoming clean enough to come out of taps in people's homes.

The children also spent some time investigating changes in the types of organisms found in rivers and water supply due to changes in the level of pollution/industrialisation over time.

Next, it was time to head outside for a tour of the premise. 

A disused filter bed.  You can still see the water tank and pipe from Victorian times.

Much of what we saw were historical -- what the Victorians used for filtering the water supply to London.  For example, we went to an area called the Central Wellhead, which was where the cleaned water (after flowing through the pipes onto the filter beds from the surrounding reservoirs) was stored before being pumped into the water mains.

What I found to be most interesting was seeing an area of preserved filter beds.  The centre has allocated several beds to be preseved in different stages to show they changed over time.

Open Water - This filter bed looks much as it did when it was actively being used.

5 years on - When the filter bed was abandoned, the water level began to drop.

10 years and more - As more sand and gravel was exposed, the plant cover become more densed.

Deeper water - Not all the water drained away from the filter beds.  Tall water plants like reeds will grow where deep pools of water are retained.  Reed beds create a different type of habitat for birds.

25 years and more - Much of the water would have drained away, causing a wet meadow to develop.

30 years on - If the filter beds were no longer managed in any way, ash, willow, and elder trees would eventually grow on them, thus creating a woodland habitat.

The children were shown a simplified version of the filtration process using soil, bottle and water.  I wanted Tiger to conduct the experiment himself rather than passively watch someone else do it, so we did the same experiment when we got home:

Procedure:

1. Use the same bottle as in experiment 2, but this time remove the lid and cover the inside of the funnel with a piece of coffee filter paper. (photo 1)
2. Fill the coffee filter paper about 3/4 ways to the top with sand. (photo 2)
3. Dampen the sand with some clean water. (photo 3)
4. Mix soil and water together a jar. (photo 4)
5. Pour the muddy mixture through the sand carefully. (photo 5)
6. Observe the clean(ish) water being filtered into the bottle. (photo 6)

By conducting this simple experiment at home, we could see the filtration process up-close.  Even though we knew what result to expect, we still found it fascinating to see muddy water become clear water collected in the bottle.

This post is linked up to:

1. Look What We Did
2. History and Geography Meme #92
3. Collage Friday: Signs of Fall
4. Entertaining and Educational - Sept 27
5. Field Trip Friday Link Up
6. Homeschool Review and Resource Link-Up
7. Weekly Wrap-up: The One with a Little Encouragement
8. Science Sunday: Learning about Muscles
9. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/1/13