just another morning here

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

These were on my list as two separate activity days for half term but we ended up amalgamating them in real life so they might as well get lumped together in a blog post as well. The muddling of them happened mainly because we ended up wanting to go to town twice for various things at the museum.

So, yesterday … we got ready and went into town first thing. Anna had a shield (that she won from a music festival back in the spring) that she wanted to get engraved, so we did that en route to the museum. Then realised why there are so many years left out on the shield as it was expensive! I didn’t realise and had agreed to the engraving already, but I am not surprised that some people haven’t bothered to put their names on it.

Anyway. Went via a couple of estate agents to the museum where there was a ‘Meet the Romans’ activity on – there were a couple of Roman soldiers in the museum alongside a table of various artefacts so we spent a while there, and then opened the Romans activity box in the next room. That was a bad idea, as everyone who visited the soldiers then came next door and pounced on the activities too – no problem with that in itself but as designated key holders for the box we were trying to keep track of everything and it was really busy – I think we lost one of the dressing up outfits but it was nigh on impossible to keep an eye on it all! Thankfully the museum people were very understanding.

We went home for lunch, and then had a crafty afternoon – well the girls and I did, anyway. Josiah wrote a thank you note and sealed the envelope with a special wax seal from a set he had for his birthday, and that was about all he could manage, he then slumped in front of the tv for a while. Everyone here has been slightly under the weather with colds/general tiredness and he was worse yesterday so tv and honey & lemon drinks were the order of the day for him. Nothing really bad, just that sort of illness that comes out as being really on edge and easily upset, not great when you are part of a family and other people are likely to annoy you all the time!

Meanwhile I helped the girls plan and start stitching little cross stitch bracelets that we’d picked up in a craft shop in town, so that was a nice afternoon. Reminded me how much I used to like cross stitch, haven’t really done any for years, I might finish Josiah’s birth sampler one of these days!

Emma, Robyn & Lola came round to play for a bit and have tea with us, so that was a nice end to the day.

The kids watched Ren & Stimpy before bed – got an old video from a friend who was chucking it out and we used to love Ren & Stimpy years ago so a good chance to reminisce, there!

Today we did some cooking in the morning. I made chicken & veg soup from yesterday’s leftovers, cheesy Shepherd’s pie for tomorrow’s dinner and some Chocolate Orange Potato cake. Josiah made an Apple & Apricot crumble with very little help. Then they watched tv and the girls got their stitching out again, all felt very relaxed and lovely.

Then we headed into town after lunch for a craft workshop at the Museum. They’ve had Roman things on every day this week I think, and today was Mosaic Making. We’d arranged to meet friends there too so spent a pleasant hour or so roaming the museum with them as well.

After that came a violin lesson for Joe, some house viewings with my parents who were down for the day, and then a lovely meal out with everyone in the evening. Managed to meet two lots of friends in the pub as well which was quite amusing.

Tomorrow is ‘mystery trip’ day – oooh exciting! And mysterious!

Fine names for guinea pigs, yes?

Best not to ask just why and how we have managed to end up with guinea pigs in addition to a hamster and a fish. Anna says I am working up in pet sizes and that one day I’ll manage to convince Steve to have another baby! (I think not.)

Not much else going on here other than the excitement of the guinea pigs. A couple of music lessons and a bit of music practice, but other than that we’re still on holiday so have been doing nice things like baking, seeing friends, etc. Although the other day Anna did get so bored that she picked up a spelling workbook and started doing it! She is the world’s worst person at finding herself something to do

The other two are very happy bimbling about together, lots of games of Scrabble (great for spelling practice and maths too!) and Mindbender going on, and drawing, and other bits and bobs.

Last night Joe’s violin teacher measured him up with some bigger sized violins and pronounced him ready for a 1/4 size so he’s excited about having a new violin. I’m jolly glad that from the 1/10 we were able to skip the 1/8 size and go straight to the 1/4, as it will last for a good 2 – 3 years and therefore make it worthwhile buying one.

Today we had one of Anna’s friends with us, and took her into town to do a drop-in craft workshop at the museum. We had to wait a while so spent the time doing one of the museum quizzes in the Egyptian Mummy section, so that was interesting. Back down to the activity room – Abbie’s choice of the workshops on offer this week was felting, and all three girls came away with great felted pictures. Joe opted out and sat doing jigsaws in the museum instead.

Followed that with sausage rolls from the bakery eaten on the Cathedral Green. I love our Cathedral Green, it is always packed out with people sitting around on a beautiful day like today, and such an eclectic mix of people – from those sitting outside the cafe of the poshest hotel in town, students, business-people on their lunch hours, mums and dads with buggies and small children, to the Big Issue sellers and today some drunk person singing very loudly entertaining (or not!) the rest of us. And there is something about the cathedral being right in the middle, accessible to everyone … I dunno, I just like it! You can almost always meet someone you know there as well. And for some reason the children love it too. Just another part of my ongoing love affair with this city …

On Sunday afternoon we went to visit a couple of the kids’ favourite places, the House of Marbles and Cardews Teapottery, at their request. Took a number of photos which are all pretty much the same as the last lot I took there – kids painting pots, and kids in the play area – all pretty boring if they’re not your own kids really. Thankfully no-one fell off any swings this time though

Came home and played marbles, and the children had a crazy idea to play with cornflour gloop as well, so they did that, and successfully covered the kitchen and downstairs loo in it as well

Monday was a non-event of a day really, although Joe and I did defeat one big bad boss in Sonic at teatime so that was good (only one more to go now!). We did some maths and music workbook pages, and also played with pattern blocks and talked a bit about symmetry, reflections, rotations and translations. Reading and comprehension activities over the past couple of days have taken the form of hint guides and walkthroughs for Lego Star Wars and Sonic!