Christmas crafts was chosen as this week's project as we had a busy week of groups and meetups, so we didn't want a huge project, and one of the home ed groups had suggested giving the children an opportunity to sell some Christmas crafts at one of the meetups.
We got ourselves in the Christmas spirit with some Christmas films, and then focused on making some Christmas tree decorations. We took inspiration from itallstartedwithpaint.com for our 3D Christmas trees, and did some laced-trees following some examples on Pinterest.
World War 1 was chosen to coincide with Remembrance Sunday. We last touched on World War 1 in Project 52: Battles, unsurprisingly this project was a bit less Fortnite centred!
World War 1 is one of the few subjects that the local library actually has books on, so there was plenty of reading material for this week's project.
Reading material from the library
We watched Sgt Stubby (the most decorated dog of WW1), which the whole family enjoyed, and the Horrible Histories Frightful First World War Special.
We visited the Imperial War Museum, which had an extensive WW1 exhibition,
including a tank and a bi-plane. The children particularly liked the computer game where you had to protect the cargo ships, and the trench with the periscopes.
First World War at the Imperial War Museum
We looked more closely at some WW1 war poetry, with particular attention to In Flanders Field using a Twinkl worksheet, and the children created their own poppy pictures with pastels and their own poppies with another Twinkl worksheet.
This project was chosen because we had both a children's book on the Great Fire of London and an opportunity to visit The Monument.
As well as reading non-fiction books on the Great Fire we also read Fire! Fire! by Stuart Hill, a short historical fiction story about Samuel Pepys servant boy during the fire.
This Week's Reading
We also watched a classic time-travelling episode of Magic Grandad where they travel back to 1666.
Of course the advantage of home education is that you are not restricted to books and videos, but can go out and about. We climbed to the top of the Monument (all 311 steps), built to both commemorate the event and act as a science lab, and were pleased that even the 3 year old managed the climb without making a fuss (which is more than can be said for some of the other puffing and wheezing tourists!).
The Monument
We also visited the Museum of London which has an exhibition on the Great Fire (although the diorama accompanying the video didn't seem to be working properly on this visit).
Museum of London
Finally we got them to create their great fire pictures with black paper and coloured tissue paper.
This was one of the few projects where we've broken from our usual one-project-per-week approach, and spread it over two weeks. This was because we had a six day trip to the kids' grandparents planned, and wanted to make use of some more of the North East museums. As Joseph Swan, one of the inventors of the light bulb, came from Sunderland, we decided to make Light this week's project.
As well as the usual pages from the encyclopaedia and science dictionaries, and watching YouTube videos we visited two museums with light related exhibits. The Light exhibition at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle provided an interactive area for engaging with the properties of light, including an infinity mirror, a black mirror, a polarised light spinner, prisms, and cabinets showing the evolution of the light bulb.
Light at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle
The miner's safety lamp display at the Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens provided another, more practical, perspective on our changing relationship with light over the years.
Safety lamps in Sunderland
The project also provided us with the opportunity to do our own experiments with the reflection and refraction of light:
Refracting light with a glass of water
By far the most visually impressive experiment was splitting light with the prism we bought:
Every now and again we like to do a project focused on a single book*, and for this week's project we decided on one of the few Roald Dahl books for children that the children hadn't read yet: Boy-Tales of Childhood. The book is a series of anecdotes from Roald Dahl's childhood almost 100 years ago, and with tales of caning, fagging, and boarding school, it is a very different world to our children's home education.
As well as reading the book, we introduced them to a few of the more traditional sweets they hadn't come across before from the Sweet Barrels in Loughborough (including aniseed balls, liquorice and pear drops):
Some old fashioned sweets
We filled out another country profile on Norway (where Roald Dahl's parents came from), and got the children to write some anecdotes from their own childhood: Monica wrote about our summer holiday in Great Yarmouth (Project 91: The Seaside), while Solomon chose to write about a trip to the London Transport Museum he went on with his Dad:
Worksheets and anecdotes
Finally, we made our own sugar mice, in honour of the real mouse Roald Dahl put in a sweet jar when he was a young boy:
Sugar mice
There are also plenty of lesson plans for Roald Dahl books on the Roald Dahl web site, although unfortunately we didn't get to do as much as we would have liked as Solomon was a bit poorly for a couple of days. We will have to revisit one of his other books on a future occasion.
As it had been the Harvest Festival service at the cathedral at the beginning of the week (Sunday 22nd September), it seemed a good opportunity for a harvest project: being thankful for the food we have, thinking about where it comes from, and how plants grow.
We considered where some of the foods we have in the cupboard came from, and marked them off on a map. Unsurprisingly, following the recent project work on the environment (Project 99: The Earth), there was a lot of discussion of food miles. The children were far happier than the adults with the suggestion that we should stop buying coffee!
Mapping some of our food miles
We also looked more closely at the growing of plants and the topic of DNA, following some videos and worksheets on extracting DNA from some strawberries. We had first tried extracting DNA from an onion, back in Solomon's first year (Project 35: Biology), but the strawberry experiment was much more successful.
This week's project was prompted by the local Stamford Georgian Festival (although we didn't quite make as much use of the festival as we had planned).
We started the week with the usual collection of videos and readings about the Georgians, including our Ladybird Histories: British History, which gave a nice overview, and some of the Great Stories of British History. We also watched two 'films' associated with the period - the Gulliver's Travels mini-series (starring Ted Danson) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.
Gulliver's travels was picked as it was written at the start of the Georgian period. Both the children really enjoyed the mini-series and Usborne's abridged version of the Lilliput part of the story, but unfortunately the unabridged version is a bit beyond them for now (although Monica was game enough to give it a go). With so much to the book, beyond that of a simple adventure, we will definitely return to the full version when they are a bit bigger.
While Modern Times is not a film set in the Georgian period, it nonetheless reflects the impact of the industrial revolution that was heavily discussed during the week. It's always good to watch non-Disney films with the children and broaden their viewing habits, and they both really enjoyed it (although admittedly the 'nose-powder' drug scene isn't typically classed as family-friendly viewing these days).
We also explored Joseph Wright of Derby's 1768 An Experiment on A Bird in the Air Pump, using the book Old Masters Rock: How to look at art with children, and then got the children to write a short piece about the picture.
Old Masters Rock
Unfortunately, towards the end of the week everyone came down with a bug, so the only part of the Georgian festival that we managed to attend was The Georgian Sense-O-Matic Show, which according to Solomon's scathing review was about "1% Georgian" and repeated much of the work we had done the week before in Project 103: The Five Senses.
