just another morning here

The children have been asked to sing something at their choral evening in a couple of weeks (argh why do all exams and concerts happen in the same fortnight period?!). It should preferably be something with harmonies, on the vague topic of love and friendship. Serious suggestions please, as I don’t have a clue!

Blogging while at swimming lessons again, treating myself to medicinal chocolate during my 20 mins when the kids arent here to see (one gone to get ready to go in, the other two getting out and getting changed). Chocolate became necessary after an excruciating 5 minutes trying to extract THOUGHT out of one of the children. No prizes for guessing which one Who would know that 27 divided by 6 was so difficult to work out?! It was so bad that one of the other mums here comiserated with me afterwards!!

Music practice in the morning/piano lessons this afternoon: one of Abbie’s G3 piano pieces is the theme tune to Top Cat, which she has never seen, so we had to hunt it out!

And this morning, she disappeared off to school but not to school – instead she caught a lift to a maths day held by the South West HEI Excellence Hub – a day of doing, thinking, and talking maths. She loved it and came home buzzing, ready to try out lots of mathematical tricks on me. And she’d apparently found out that 13 x 7 is 28

At the beginning of term Josiah decided he’d like to do a project and lapbook on the Romans, so this is a round up of the things we’ve done.

Firstly we went to the library and picked up as many books on the Romans as we possibly could. Josiah particularly enjoyed reading Usborne’s ‘The Story of Rome’ himself, it was just the right level.

I confess to having cheated slightly; while googling for Roman Lapbooks I found an Ancient Rome Lapbook pdf pack at the HomeschoolEstore.com, and figured I might as well save myself the hassle of planning the lapbook out for myself so I bought the pack. I must say I was fairly impressed with it, it was very comprehensive and I think both of us benefited from not having the think up the ideas for things to do in the lapbook! It helped us to break the project down into manageable study chunks, too – as we did each section (food, clothing, specific people & places, etc) we learned about them separately. We didn’t do all of it, but we used the sections that we fancied learning about, and Joe’s lapbook turned out really well.

Steve took Josiah to the RAMM museum in town, and they inspected lots of Roman things (coins, mosaic pieces, games etc.), dressed up, learnt some Latin words [wasn't impressed at the suggestion of learning more Latin though!] etc.

We had a trip to the Roman Baths in Bath, which was great.

We took a trip to a rather lovely mosaic shop in town, Opus Mosaic, and bought ourselves a few tiles to make a mosaic with. Actually the lady in the shop (its owner) was really helpful and it turned out that her teenage daughter had been home educated so we had a lovely chat about that as well! Abbie enjoyed helping with this – and it was a great opportunity to bring in some maths and ‘planning’ skills as Josiah mapped out his design on squared paper before doing the tiles. Still need to get some grout to finish it off!

We’ve touched on a fair bit of maths; not only with Roman numerals which Joe enjoyed doing, but also due to discussing the timeline and calendar we ended up talking about negative numbers a fair bit, and adding/subtracting them. Josiah looked at a few of the Roman emperors in his lapbook, and worked out their ages from their birth/death dates, some of which were fully BCE, some were CE so easy to work out, and some crossed the change between BCE and CE. Can’t quite get the hang of this BCE and CE thing, I kept slipping into BC and AD by accident. Anyway, I digress – he got on fine with the maths of it!

The project and lapbook were pretty much finished by half term, then we discovered that during half term week the museum were putting on some Romans activities so we went and did some of those, which was a great end to the project. I think Joe would say he’d enjoyed most of it, well all apart from the writing, anyway! He is such a reluctant writer, he must have actually written about 10 sentences at most.

Weblinks we used:
History For Kids Rome Links
BBC Schools Romans
Roman Empire – children’s section
The Romans in Britain

Joe and I spent a while on pentominoes this morning, Josiah had obviously been inspired by activities while he was away last week … we printed some out to play with but they were deemed ‘not as good as Gaffer’s wooden ones’, so then we downloaded this Polyominoes program and played on that for a while. Then came violin practice and some more Romans bits and bobs before lunch, interspersed with a few games of Scrabulous on Facebook – really enjoying that at the moment even if I am fairly rubbish at it.

After lunch we went into school for more momo-making … the third week out of five, so we’re over half way. One day I will get round to making some at home too, including the sweet version!

Abbie’s class are apparently going to see one of the free films for schools next week. This has left me wondering what the point is, really. They’ve chosen ‘Night at the Museum’, which has been out on DVD for ages and my kids have already seen it twice. They sent home a letter all excited about the free film then asked for contributions of £2.30 towards a coach. Call me Mrs Silly, but wouldn’t it have been cheaper and easier to rent the DVD and show it in the hall on the school projector? Honestly, I don’t think going to the cinema with the class is that much of an educational experience; I only ever did it as a HEor because it was free – and this time round Joe and I aren’t going to see any of them as they’re all films we’ve seen before anyway! The educational activities that follow may well be based on the film but don’t need the cinema experience as well, really – the class will just annoy the HEors there, watch out anyone local who’s going to see that film! Don’t know why I’m getting uppity as £2.30 isn’t that much and I’m sure they’ll all have lots of fun but it just seems a bit daft, all things considered.

Anyway, other stuff happened – cello lesson for Anna, while she was there we went and bought a new washing machine as on further investigation ours is well and truly broken, dinner, then I went over to do washing at a friend’s while having a church small group mtg. Now more scrabulous … and some sleep …