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

Out of Love

I'm falling out of love with Fred.

Two summers ago, we spent a few weeks working through the Life of Fred elementary series books A to G.  I wasn't overly keen about it in general but Tiger was tickled by its humour so we decided to keep the last three books (H to J) for this summer.

We worked on Book H a few weeks ago but I am even less impressed with it now than I was two summer ago.  The format of the book is still the same as before, the humour is still the same, so my guess is that the change in my opinion of this series is due to a combination of my increased leaning towards a "living maths" approach and an increased understanding of how Tiger learns.

Two instances in the book stood out for me: the first was when we made a pile of multiplication quiz cards based on Book H's suggestion, to be used at the beginning of each lesson/chapter as a quick mental review.  Making index cards to be used as pop quiz is a fine idea but it doesn't work for us for a few reasons:

1. Tiger already knows his times tables so this step is redundant.
2. There is no clear derivation of how a x b = c.  It becomes another bunch of maths facts to memorise, although the book takes a longwinded way of storytelling to have you memorise those facts.  I hate memorisation, as does Tiger.
3. Tiger learned multiplication through understanding the relationships between quantities, rather than memorising sets of facts, so we are not thrilled about flashcards.

The second is how the book introduced long division.  While the reader gets a clear example of the steps to long division, the concept behind carrying and remainder isn't clearly explained.  I felt increasingly uncomfortable at teaching Tiger the steps to long division without having him understand why that is so.  The lesson became less of discovery and more about memorising a formula "first do this, then do that, followed by this".  Memorising yet again.  Sure, Tiger can now do long divisions on demand, but I am not happy that he is learning maths through memorising.

Some people might wonder why I am making a fuss here, given that Tiger has no problems doing long divisions whatsoever.  My objection is directed at the way it is being taught, that the method reminds me too much of rote learning, albeit a glamourised one.  I'm sure we can do better than this.

The remaining two books of the elementary series are being put to the back of the shelf.  We might use them next summer, or we might not.  We certainly aren't missing them.

Looking at the Weird Sisters

This term's drama study ties in well this year's Halloween theme of witches -- the children studied another Shakespearean work, Macbeth.

We first visited the V&A to attend a workshop on Elizabethan England, with an emphasis on the theatre at that time.  During the workshop, the children learned about the development of the Elizabethan theatre as well as become a rowdy audience member (true to the South Bank crowd back then).  They also got to experiment with Shakespearean language, make stage sound effects and dress up as a performer in Elizabethan ruff.  Most relevant to our own study is when the children, with the help of a reenactor, rehearsed and staged the witches' scene (Act 1 Scene 1) from Macbeth.

That was a good introduction to Shakespeare's work in general, but as we knew we were going to study Macbeth in drama class this term, we came home to listen to the entire play and read it to prepare ourselves better.  There is also a BBC animated version of the play, which Tiger did not enjoy as much as he did with a few other plays produced by the same team that he had watched:

Being taught by the same drama teacher, the format of this term's study is very similar to that of the class on The Tempest.  Besides drama skills, the four-day course also covered the following:

• character analysis
• historical context of the play
• scene analysis
• nuances of the Shakespearean language as spoken on stage
• Shakespeare's dramatic techniques in context of how the play is divided into acts

We were extremely lucky to have caught one of the last performances of Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe this season.

Macbeth, as with all Shakespearean plays, is highly complex in terms of its themes that weave together human nature, history, propaganda, beliefs, and drama.  I studied this play for my O-levels and thought I knew a lot about it back then (since I got an A* for the exam), yet I find myself looking at the play now at a different level from my teenage self, with a deeeper understanding of the complexities of any given situation.  As such, even though Tiger has read the unabridged text and knows the general theme of the story, he is not expected to have the same level of appreciation of the complexity of human nature as a more mature audience would have.  Lessons that come from life experiences cannot be rushed.


This post is linked up to:

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

Make the Most of the Big, Orange Fruit!

Did you know that the pumpkin is a fruit?  We didn't until we watched this clip and learned some pumpkin anatomy.

Then we proceeded to the business of carving our monster pumpkin.  Tiger first searched online for a pattern that he liked, then drew it on the pumpkin with a pencil.  When he was happy with his pencil sketch, he went over it with a permanent marker.  After watching a clip on how to carve a pumpkin, I helped Tiger to cut out the top and the shapes, but left the scooping to him.

There was so much flesh and seeds from the pumpkin that made me want to make the most of the fruit, so I roped Tiger in to make the pumpkin pean muffins.

While Tiger was busy making muffins (he doesn't like how they taste in the end, unfortunately), I used up the rest of the flesh to make a warming soup (that I really like but the boys don't).  The only thing that everyone like was the roast pumpkin seeds.  I have been told to NOT cook anything that contains pumpkin ever again....

While we waited for the food to cook, Tiger and I decided to find out what else we could do with our pumpkin:

1) Exploding pumpkins - This is very cool but unfortunately we can't do it at home.

2) Oozing pumpkins

Now this we can do.  The principle of the above experiment is the same as the Elephant Toothpaste experiment that Lucinda did with her children, except that the catalyst used in the clip above is Potassium Iodine (not readily available) but the catalyst used to create a similar foam in the elephant toothpaste experiment is yeast (readily available).  We managed to get our own vomiting/foaming pumpkin, which impressed Tiger very much:

After wowing at our success at creating a disgusting-looking jack-o-lantern, we decided to be a little more scientific by trying to answer the three questions found here.

Q1: Does the amount of yeast affect the amount of foam produced?
We prepared two jars with exactly the same amount of solutions with the only variable being that one jar was added with one packet of yeast while the other jar with two packets of yeast.

 

It doesn't look like there is much different to the amount of foam produced from both bottles, but luckily I took a video of the experiment.  It appears that the amount of yeast affects the speed of the foam creation.

Q2: Does the experiment work as well with dry yeast that is not mixed with water?

At first it seemed that nothing much was going to happen apart from a little foam at the base of the bottle.

However, within 5 minutes we saw that the foam level has risen substantially.

I asked Tiger what he thought had happened.  He answered that the yeast was still causing a reaction with the hydrogen peroxide, but that the warm water was necessarily to "wake the yeast up".  It's not the most scientific explanation but he's got the gist of what was happening.


Q3: Does the size of the bottle affect the amount of foam produced?
We didn't have plastic bottles so I used three different-sized jars.  Everything else stayed constant.

It seems that size does matter, which surprises me.  I don't know why that is, so that's something for us to find out.

Being the boy that he is, Tiger couldn't help to add his own (messy) touch to the experiment when it was over.  He wanted to see whether the colours would mix, and they did, to a some extent.

3) Glowing Pumpkins

We used a glow-in-the-dark paint that we have to paint over the exocarp of the pumpkin, but it didn't work too well.  I am guessing that glow-in-the-dark powder probably works better for this.

Nonetheless, we had a fun Halloween.  Hope yours was good too!

This post is linked up to:

1. Entertaining and Educational - Letter Learning Obstacle Course
2. Collage Friday - Math, Friendship, Shoeboxes & More
3. Creative Learning On Friday #19
4. TGIF Linky Party #100
5. Weekly Wrap Up: The One with the Solo Drive
6. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 2, 2013}
7. Science Sunday: I didn't get it all done
8. Hip Homeschool Hop - 11/5/2013

Bewitching Tales

Since Halloween is just around the corner, we did some work based on the book, The Witches.  We started off using the corresponding Read & Respond activity book to aid in our study, but soon abandoned it due to the activities being too 'schooly' for us.

Instead, we read the story through once, listened to the audio book version (where Tiger pointed out quite a number of omissions from the original book), and watched the classic film based on the story.

I had never watched the film before so I was more interested than Tiger to watch Angelica Houston's wonderful depiction of the Grand High Witch.  However, Tiger was somewhat irritated by the numerous alterations or as Tiger called it, "inconsistencies", in the film (he's a purist when it comes to being "true to the original story") because he has read the story so many times that he can memorise it.  As such, my film recommendation didn't go down well with him at all.

After the unsuccessful start, we moved on to more the productive activity of research.  I asked Tiger to read as many books on witches and witchcraft as he could get his hands on.

Part of our research into witches consists of watching the following documentary, which Tiger didn't mind:

After the research, I asked Tiger to illustrate what he thought a witch would look like.  I thought his drawings show the sense of innocence and lack of horror in the pure heart of a child:

The witch disguised as a normal-looking woman carrying a handbag.

The witch in her real form: a hideous non-human creature.

You can hear the description of a witch from the Roald Dahl himself:

Tiger also made a few items that are commonly associated with witches: foam spider, spider web (made from paper plate and yarn), and a multi-eyed creature.

He then decided to complete this study by making a few spells of his own, after looking into it using The Guide to Wizards of the World.  I don't know what his spells are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were about having more fun days and field trips.  Life can be very hard when your mother puts you to work all the time.

This post is linked up to:

1. Look What We Did!
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/29/2013
3. Entertaining and Educational - Letter Learning Obstacle Course
4. Collage Friday - Math, Friendship, Shoeboxes & More
5. Creative Learning On Friday #19
6. TGIF Linky Party #100
7. Weekly Wrap Up: The One with the Solo Drive
8. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 2, 2013}

Autumn Through His Eyes

The days are getting shorter and the temperature has certainly fallen.  Autumn is undisputedly here.

What does autumn look like where you are?  This year autumn has been very wet so we haven't been out for walks too much.  Instead, we spent much of our time indoors anticipating autumn while waiting for the rain to stop.  When we couldn't wait any longer, we headed out to the woods in the pouring rain.

Walking in the autumn rain is quite an experience.  I recommend everyone to do it at least once in their lives.  The ground is wet and muddy, the air has a very distinct smell, the sound of the raindrops beating on the leaves and the ground is can be defeaning.  The forest looks very different in the rain.

When we had a day that was bright and sunny, Tiger and I went for our 'official' autumn walk, i.e. the one that marks the beginning of our autumn nature study.  This year, instead of having him just walk and observe the signs of autumn, I asked Tiger whether he would like to record his interpretation of autumn using a camera.  He gladly agreed.

The mandate that I gave Tiger was to record autumn using his camera.  I wanted him to show me his interpretation of autumn.

When we were in the woods, I reminded Tiger what he was there to do, i.e. to take photographs to show what he considers to be signs of autumn, we got on with our photo-taking individually and separately while staying close to each other all the time.  I didn't want to influence his choices.  At the same time, I was curious to know how he sees the world.

Tiger took many photographs, which we then came home to look through.  As we looked through his photos, we talked briefly about why he chose certain scenes or angles (that's about as much as I know about photo-taking) before he chose which ones he is happy to show.

Here they are:

This exercise has been interesting to me in another way:  I realise how different my son and I see the world.  We were at the same place at the same time, but while he seemed to focus more on the 'bigger' atmosphere of the forest, I found myself looking at details such as the close ups of leaves and nuts:

This post is linked up to:

1. Look What We Did!
2. Nature Study Monday
3. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/29/2013
4. Entertaining and Educational - Letter Learning Obstacle Course
5. Collage Friday - Math, Friendship, Shoeboxes & More
6. Creative Learning On Friday #19
7. TGIF Linky Party #100
8. Weekly Wrap Up: The One with the Solo Drive
9. Country Kid - Half Term Fun
10. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 2, 2013}
11. Science Sunday: I didn't get it all done