Solomon also wanted to put some satsuma pith under the microscope, and repeat the extraction of DNA from the strawberries experiment we did last year (see previous Project 105: Harvest Festival).
Orange Pith
Extracting Strawberry DNA
We also compared the browning of a generic Tesco's 'sweet apple' with one of the supposedly non-browning Opal apples. Unfortunately in this case both apples browned at the same rate, albeit extremely slowly. Both looked perfectly edible after an hour, the photo on the right was after 6 hours!
Opal Fruits
The children also had to draw a fruit of their choice, and explored the artwork of Giuseppe Arcimboldo using Twinkl resources. In a nice coincidence we watched The Tales of Despereaux this week, which also had an Arcimboldo style character.
Kiwis and Fruit Portraits
Next project: World Book Day and 1,001 Arabian Nights
This week's project needed to coincide with a trip to the North-East, and as there was a workshop at the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens on designing a portrait through collage, we decided that 'the Face' should be the subject of this week's project.
The workshop was inspired by one of the art works in an accompanying exhibition about lifelong creativity. The children had lots of fun rifling through various magazines and putting together their portraits.
Collages at the Museum
They completed a number of Twinkl worksheets: labelling parts of the face, expressing emotions, and drawing self portraits.
Twinkl Worksheets
We watched Wonder to instigate a conversation about what it might feel like to look different:
And finally they were asked to create a Brickheadz self-portrait:
This week's project was prompted by a family quiz night at the local church - unfortunately the quiz night was cancelled, but the children wanted to go ahead with quizzes as the week's project anyway.
The week started with a lecture on the history and variety of quizzes, and was followed with watching TV quiz shows and playing general knowledge board games.
As well as watching clips of University Challenge, Mastermind, and the Weakest Link, they enjoyed episodes of Bullseye, Blockbusters, Pointless, Eggheads, and the time their aunt appeared in the 1980's classic Worldwise:
We also played plenty of quizzes, including Bookchase, Pointless, Bullseye, and two versions of Trivial Pursuit:
A Pointless Bookchase
Bullseye and Trivial Pursuit
The Bullseye questions were a bit tricky for the kids, so we used questions from an old Puffin Quiz Book. Trivial Pursuit was a big hit, although Solomon preferred the 1990s kids version to the more recent family version, as he thought it was now too easy to get wedges.
The children also had to create their own quizzes for each other. Solomon had to give Monica questions on a story from Shakespeare, while Monica had to give Solomon questions on a Dickens story. The quizzes were based on the highly recommended Usborne Complete Shakespeare and Usborne Complete Dickens, and it turned out to be a really good way to get them to engage with the texts.
Solomon's Hamlet Quiz:
Who is the main person?
Who was the main baddy?
Who drowned?
What does rumour say about what killed Hamlet's father?
What the dead jester's name?
Was Hamlet attacked by pirates?
Who is Hamlet's fellow student?
What is the queen called?
What did King Claudius do to make the duel unfair?
Who is Ophelia's father?
Monica's Old Curiosity Shop Quiz:
Who is Nell's friend?
What the names of the two Punch and Judy men?
What has Grandfather taken to?
Who is Fred?
What does Nell and her Grandfather shop sell?
What does Quilp exult to do as well as make people fearful?
Who lives in a caravan?
What had Nell brought with her when she left the city?
What did Nell sell?
Who is Sampson's new clerk?
Solomon managed to get 8.5 out of 10 on Monica's quiz!
They loved making quizzes, and made others during the week on their own initiative. We will endeavour to include quiz-making as part of the learning process in future projects.
This project was prompted by a home education workshop at the local museum about the illustrator Nick Sharratt.
The workshop involved drawing pictures to illustrate a story they made up themselves, completing a workbook which encouraged the children to read and engage with the content of the exhibition, and making a pop-up elephant.
Nick Sharratt exhibition and workshop
We explored the role of illustration in a wide range of picture books, and classified them as symmetry (where illustrations mirror what is written in the text), augmentation (where illustrations add something extra to the text), or contradiction (where illustrations show something contradicting the text). The children then added their own symmetry, augmentation, and contradiction illustrations to an extract from a book of their choosing.
Symmetry, augmentation and contradiction
Finally we looked at the different styles and techniques different illustrators use for making their pictures, and we got the children to choose a Mr Man character to do in different styles: Hargreaves, Tenniel, Blake, and Child.
Mr Clever (Solomon) and Mr Happy (Monica)
Finally they had to choose their favourite illustrator and write about why they liked them. Solomon picked Quentin Blake, Monica picked Lauren Child.
As it is our third year of home education, we've found projects start to emerge as annual events. This not only includes religious festivals (e.g., Christmas and Easter), but also competitions (e.g. 500 Words) and coordinated citizen science. This was our third year taking part in the Big Garden Birdwatch (see also Project 20: Local Wildlife and Birds, Project 68: Birds of the World).
The week started with our hour bird-watch, and as with previous years, we saw very little. Just one robin this time.
Waiting for the birds
We had a more successful bird watch walking around the local nature reserve, and Solomon was pleased to identify a bullfinch with the help of the bird book.
Spot the Bull(finch)!
We also went to two bird-centred events (one at a home ed group and one at The Green Backyard), so ended up making three different bird feeders this week!
The children also had to fill in a country profile for Scotland (previous profiles have been done for Norway and China), and pick a Scots word for an animal and draw it.
Of course you can't discuss Scotland and Robert Burns without some haggis, so we had a trip to the local Wetherspoons, as well as cooking some ourselves. Solomon was a big fan of haggis, whereas Monica was a bit more wary. Unfortunately there was a distinct lack of 'neeps' in the local supermarket, which was a shame.
All things haggis - including a burger with haggis.
The big difference this year, in comparison to last, was how easy it was to get them to sit down and write a draft version - they may not enjoy the rewriting and editing, but they can now at least be left alone to write a first version without any help.
As well as writing a story, they completed some of the 500 Words worksheets, and watched the Live Lesson.
Writing their own comic strips
Live Lesson on the big screen with more worksheets
Monica's entry: The Land of Colourful
goes Grey
In the land of
colourful, everything is colourful. The grass in the land of colourful isn’t
just green, it is all the colours of the rainbow! Houses in the land of
colourful aren't made of bricks, they are made of bright colourful crayons! One
day, everything went grey and everyone was sad. Nobody knew why everything had
gone grey except one little girl called Maddy. Maddy was seven, had
blonde hair, and liked sweets and the colour red. Maddy had a special magic
rainbow crayon that wrote messages to her to tell her when anyone had done
something bad in the land of colourful. The next day Maddy
told everyone the reason why all the colour had gone, and it was because a
witch had cast a spell to get rid of all the bright colours. The witch’s skin
was grey all over, she wore black clothes from head to toe, and her pants were
grey and black, and she hated colour. She especially hated orange, pink, and
red. So she cast a spell to change all of the colours to grey. Maddy wanted to try to
reverse the spell, because she knew that everyone else was too scared of the
witch. So that night Maddy stole the witch’s wand from the witch’s house in a
cave when the witch was asleep. Maddy then tried to take the spell back by
waving the wand around in a circle but it didn’t work. The witch started to
stir, and then grabbed the wand from Maddy shouting, “One little girl isn’t
powerful enough to reverse my spell!!” Maddy ran out of the cave. Maddy realised that it
would take the power of two people to reverse the witch’s spell, so Maddy persuaded
her friend Melody to go back to the witch’s cave with her the next night. This
time the girls did a counterspell together and they waved the wand around in a
rectangle and shouted “colouricious!” All of a sudden the colour started splatting
back onto everything and the witch woke up and she was very angry so Maddy and
Melody ran away with the Witch’s wand so she couldn't do any more mean spells.
Everyone in the land of colourful was happy again to see all of their favourite
colours back. They celebrated by baking the biggest rainbow cake ever!
Solomon's entry: The Family Kidnap
Caper
In the morning there
was a knock on the door. My sister Monica went to answer the door but there was
a vicious pirate standing there. The pirate had a cutlass and a dagger and a
big black beard, and he kidnapped Monica! Me, my brother Sam, and my Mum and
Dad chased after him, but he captured Mum and Dad too and stuffed them all into
an old sack which he slung over his shoulder before running down towards the
beach. Me and Sam chased him towards the beach, but we knew we needed to try to
find a weapon. All we could find on the way to the beach though were some
measly plastic spades, so we bought one each with our pocket money. We then saw
a pirate and secretly followed him, but when he turned around we realised he
didn't have a big black beard, and so wasn’t the pirate we were after. In the distance we saw
Black Beard getting onto a pirate ship and setting sail, so we knew we needed
to get a boat. We ran to the nearby harbour, and as we didn’t have any pocket
money left, we decided to borrow a boat instead. We set sail and sailed for 10
days through big waves and ferocious storms, and the strong winds blew us to an
island with lots of monkeys on it. The monkeys started to attack us, so we
attacked them and won. We started to dig in the sand to make a shelter for
ourselves from the strong winds, and when we were digging we dug up Monica as
the pirates had buried her there on the Monkey island. We still hadn’t found
Mum and Dad. We searched the island and couldn’t find a single trace of the
pirates. We set sail again and saw Black Beard’s pirate ship through some rocks
next to another small island nearby. We sped up and the boat and lost control,
and accidentally crashed into the rocks. The damage to our boat was making it start
to sink, but we leapt off just in time. We threw ourselves at the pirate ship
and clambered aboard. Sam tried to free Mum and Dad while I fought the pirates
with the spades we had bought. I killed the Captain by poking him in the eye
with the tip of the spade, then, the rest of the pirates jumped off the ship as
they were so scared of us. We eventually got Mum and Dad out of the sack which
had been tied shut with rope, and when we freed them they said that they would
give me and Sam £20 each for being so brave. Once we had sailed
home we always remembered the valuable lesson we had learnt from the pirates,
and that is to always look out of the window first before you unlock your front
door.
