Our Island Adventures: Lord of the Castle

Where have we been this past week?

We were out at sea very briefly, on board a ferry to the Isle of Wight, an island off the south of England.

The day we set off was glorious.  I even saw a hovercraft!  Tiger and I had made model hovercrafts for a science experiment a few years ago but I hadn't seen an actual craft before so it was very exciting for me to see one.

We were on our way to stay at Carisbrooke Castle!  Yes, you've read it correct.  We didn't just visit the castle, we actually lived inside the castle for the entire duration of our stay on the island.

Everyone was really excited about our stay in the castle.  For Tiger, it was a dream come true.  Eversince his fascination with knights and castles started a few years ago, he has been wondering about the possibility of actually living in one.  Now he was going to stay in one for a few days!

Throughout our stay Tiger volunteered to be the "gatekeeper" who locked the gates each night and opened them each morning.

The castle is significant in many ways, with a very long history.  It has changed hands many times, from being a Saxon fortress to the summer residence of Queen Victoria's daughter.  I suspect that is why most parts of the castle have been kept in a very good condition.

Not only the outer buildings were well kept, much of the inner parts of the castle was also well preserved.

There were many guns positioned at different parts of the castle, signifying its use as a fortress for defence at different times in history:

Other than the very impressive structure of the castle, there is also a very well organised museum within the castle grounds, in a house that part of a series of buildings that were formerly home to lords and governors of the island.

Part of the museum was dedicated to the English Civil War, showing the causes of conflict as well as the different armours worn by soldiers on both sides of the conflict:

The relevance of the English Civil War to this castle is due to Charles I being imprisoned at the castle for a short while during the conflict.

The bedroom in which he slept in was preserved:

 

It seems that Charles I wasn't treated too badly during his imprisonment at the castle, as he had a bowling green built especially for him during his stay!

Charles I was later executed in London, following his defeat at the Civil War.  A chapel was built inside the castle as a place of remembrance for him.  A copy of his death warrant, signed by Oliver Cromwell, was on display on the wall in the chapel.

As we were staying in the castle, we had the run of the grounds after it was closed to public after 6pm.  During our stay we spent every evening walking the grounds, just to feel the atmosphere of being in a castle after dark.   We had close-up looks of a few interesting nocturnal creatures:

The most fascinating creature we saw must have been the common glow worm.  Tortoise noticed them first along the castle walls but Tiger was the one to identify them.  We had not seen them before in the open, so this was another exciting first for us:

Being the ever-curious homeschoolers that we are, Tiger and I felt compelled to learn more about the  common glow worms from the BBC Nature website and from reading a short article about them.

The common glow worms can be found just about anywhere in the UK, but I have never seen them before this -- probably because we don't go looking for them after 10pm, which is the time that their glow is most obvious.  While we were at it, we also learned a little about bioilluminescence. 

It has been a fantastic stay at the castle for all of us, but we also spent much time exploring the Isle of Wight.  I shall share about our other island adventures in later posts.

This post is part of a series about our summer holiday on the Isle of Wight.  You can read the entire series here.


This post is linked up to:

1. History and Geography Meme #84
2. Hobbies and Handicrafts - July 26
3. Collage Friday - From the Mountains
4. TGIF Linky Party #86 
5. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {July 27, 2013}
6. Science Sunday: Snakes
7. Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/30/13

(My) Ideas for Summer

It has taken me about two weeks, since I first mentioned our summer plans, to put my ideas into words.  Here they are.

My vision for this summer consists of four parts, in no particular order of importance or timing:

1. Lots of time outdoors, taking part in sports and being in nature
2. Theme: The Wind in the Willows
3. Theme: Mystery
4. Art

1.  Outdoors, Sports, and Nature
When you live in the UK, you have really got to make the most of the weather, especially when it gets warm and dry.  For us, summer doesn't count unless we have spent time on the coast so heading out to the beach is a given.

I also intend to consciously make sure that we don't spend too much time indoors because we have a lot of indoor time to look forward to in winter and spring.

My inspirations for nature activities come from these sites:

• 150 free things to do this summer (Woodland Trust)
• Summer of UK Wildlife (BBC)
• 50 things to do before you're 11¾ (National Trust)

I have resisted signing up Tiger for classes this summer.  Having run around a fair bit in the academic year, I would like us to have a restful summer rather than spending too much time running to and from classes.  However, Tiger has begged to do archery lessons so he will be taking two classes at the local sports centre.


2.  The Wind in the Willows
This book is on Ambleside Online's Year 2 booklist.  Tiger has read it a few times on his own but I think we can get more enjoyment out of the book by doing a few activities loosely based around the theme of the book.

What I have in mind for this theme are to:

• share the read aloud together
• start looking at the literary elements using the corresponding back issue of The Arrow
• learn about river as a geographical feature as well as a habitat
• learn about the four main characters of the story - toad, badger, rat (water vole), and mole
• learn about the water cycle
• do some "wet science" experiments
• grow cress to put in sandwiches
• have a picnic by a river
• make a model boat and a model car
• play a board game
• go on field trips

3.  Mystery
Tiger has enjoyed mystery stories for a long time, starting with the Famous Five series.  He read these several times over, then proceeded to do the same with The Secret Seven series, and the excitement of solving mysteries.  So, he has also read through The Adventure series,  The Five Find-Outers Mystery series, and The Barney 'R' Mysteries series.

Two years ago, we did a Famous Five Summer Adventure Week where we basically just had fun doing activities based on the series.  Since then, Tiger has been looking for mysteries to solve eversince, even writing a few scenarios of his own to solve.

What I have in mind for this theme are to:

• play board games and jigsaw puzzles
• solve puzzles/mysteries in the areas of maths, art, geography, music, language arts, and science 
• try our hands at writing mysteries
• read the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes
• look at the literary elements of The Hound of Baskervilles using the corresponding back issue of The Boomerang
• go on field trips

4.  Art
After looking around and working out the true cost of attending a week-long art summer school to be around £400 (totalling fees, travel and food costs), I have decided to do it in-house using the following book:

The book is has five distinct sections, which works out nicely to fit a five-day summer school format.

1. Drawing
2. Painting
3. Printmaking
4. Paper
5. Mixed Media

Each section has 10 to 11 activities or "labs" so there is plenty of variety to choose from.  Rather than assigning specific number of activities each day, I am thinking of focusing on one section per day and see how much we get to do by the end of each day.  My goal is for us to explore and enjoy the process of making art rather than to produce a certain number of output each day.

So, that's my plan for the summer.  Most UK schools start their holidays in the final week of July so we are going to beat the crowd to it by starting our summer now and going somewhere to escape the current heatwave.  In fact, we have already started last week with rockpooling!

Have a fun summer, everyone!


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/16/13
2. Hobbies and Handicrafts - July 19
3. Collage Friday - Accomplishments and Interests
4. Weekly Wrap-Up: The Share Your Curriculum Edition
5. The Homeschool Mother's Journal - July 20, 2013

Rock Pools are Cool

It seems that summer has started for us as we found ourselves by the coast.  Since it was low tide, we had a good look at the rock pools.

Can you guess what we found?  Lots of life!  As this was an unplanned find (I hadn't planned for us to go rockpooling), our 'field work' consisted of finding the creatures, observing them, and taking many photographs.  The specific identifications were done later at home using the following book:

1.  Sea anenomes, specifically, the beadlet anenome.

2.  Common starfish

As the tide had just gone out before we arrived at the rockpools, most of the starfish we saw were still alive and trying to stay moist.  If you look closely at the clip below, you can see the starfish moving very slowly.

3.  Seaweeds (mostly kelp, but also red and green seaweeds)

4.  Shore crab

5.  Limpets and acorn barnacles

6.  Common periwinkles

7.  Mussels

 

8.  Evidence of lugworms

Excited by what we saw, we watched the following clips to learn from a marine biologist:

We also hopped on to the BBC Nature website to learn all about rockpools, then read a few books related to the subject.

We didn't see any hermit crab, but it seems to be the most exciting subject to be found in the rockpool, as shown by the clips about:

1. life in a rockpool,
2. rockpool animals,
3. what you can find in a rockpool, and
4. rockpool villains.

The following documentary also spends some time on the hermit crab:

We then decided to make an entry into our long-neglected nature journals.  I have always envied natural journalists who are able to record their sightings on the spot, so I tried to replicate that plein-aire experience by limiting the time we spent drawing and painting from the photographs.  Each drawing/sketch was done in five minutes, afterwhich each painting took about 10-15 minutes.

We also read a few more related articles from a nature magazine that is unfortunately no longer in publication.  The purpose of reading these articles is to give us some idea of what to write in our journals.  It works a little bit like a narration, in that I asked Tiger to recall and write one or more interesting facts about each drawing.

To motivate Tiger to stay with the project, I made my entries alongside him.  I find that he is more motivated and interested to draw and write more when I am participating in the same task.  It also gives me an opportunity to model research skills, attention to detail, page design, and patience (although the last skill is very much work-in-progress for me as well).

Another benefit of making journal entries together is that we learn loads together.  For example, when we were writing about the common starfish, we discovered that the starfish larvae floated freely in the sea.  Since we had no idea what a starfish larva looked like, we looked it up and found this fantastic page that tells us all about how a starfish grows.  Absolutely fascinating.

Tiger's journal entries:

Mine:

If you live in the UK, you might consider going to one of the many great places for rockpooling this summer.  There is a lot to discover!


This post is linked up to:

1. Hobbies and Handicrafts - July 12
2. Collage Friday - Music Camp
3. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the First Week of School 2013
4. Science Sunday: learning how to use a microscope
5. Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/16/13

Summer plans: 2013

I am so looking forward to the summer.

It seems a little strange to be pining after summer because:

1. we are a home-educating family so our holidays are not restricted to the school calendar;
2. we are increasingly autonomous in our approach so we don't have any specific curriculum to complete before we can declare the 'school year' to be over;
3. what we have been learning in the past year has been interest-led so it is not as if we have to wait for the summer to do fun things.

This is going sound like "year-round homeschooling", but I can't really tell the difference between our summer learning and our rest-of-the-time learning.  I suppose that is a good thing, as it probably means that learning is very much integrated into our normal day-to-day life that we don't have to make special distinctions between learning and non-learning activities.

Still, summer is a special time so we try to do things a little differently from the rest of the year.  We plan to start summer proper at the end of July.  That will give us time to tie up some loose ends from Year 3's work, and give me time to prepare.

I have certainly started planning -- with the help of cake and coffee!

I have a few grand plans for the summer but I don't know yet whether I will be able to pull everything together.  It would seem a bit silly if I were to lay out my super-duper plans only to find myself spending most of the summer lying on a beach somewhere -- although I must admit that the idea of lying on a beach for the most part of summer is very appealing.

The ideas are still floating around in my mind, so all I can say about this year's summer plans for Tiger at the moment are that they will, in some ways, involve the following:

Intriguing, isn't it?  I shall share more of our summer plans when they become more concrete.

This post is linked up to Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/2/13.

The Italian Experience: Ready to Depart

I haven't expected us to be spending so much time just learning about Italy.  It has been four months since we first started with Marco Polo and we haven't even left Italy yet!

Luckily our current approach to home education gives us the flexibility to study a topic in depth without having to rush through it.  However, I think we have had enough of Italy by now so I am happy to report that we are finally wrapping up at a suitable place - by the coast.

We were at Canterbury over the weekend where we walked along the Roman city wall.

We were on our way to see the Reculver Towers and Roman Fort.  It location is stunning and right by the coast.  Very appropriate for a departure by sea (as Marco Polo did when he first left Venice), don't you think?

Before we departed, we had a very delicious meal at an Italian restaurant.  The food was so good that I completely forgot to take photos of them until we had finished eating... Fortunately, the restaurant has a shop section that sells food-related items from Italy so I took a few shots of the wide variety of food stuff there:

Since we have been all over the place (in time), reading the historical fiction recommended by Julie from Highhill Education has been very useful to take us back to 13th century Venice.

We are going to take a break from The Travels of Marco Polo for now and resume his journey in the autumn.  You can read all of our Italian Experiences with him here.

This post is linked up to:

1. June Culture Swapper
2. History and Geography Meme #80
3. Hobbies and Handicrafts - June 28
4. Collage Friday - Being Intentional About Doing Nothing
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with Gymnastics Camp
6. Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/2/13