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

All three children have done nice things today; Anna had orchestra and then a friend’s birthday party, while the other two went to Crealy with Grandma and Robyn, making it a nice end to the week for all of them. Steve and I have painted a wall and snivelled our way through the day with help from Lemsip. Looking forward to a curry and Saturday night tv tonight, then a relatively quiet day (might do a second coat on the wall) tomorrow before school starts again on Monday.

A couple of weeks before half term Josiah decided that he’d like to go back to school again. Not sure what changed his mind exactly, but I have to admit that in some ways I was relieved. So he is going back to school on Monday. I’m probably feeling more anxious than he is at the moment, and slightly disappointed all over again about not home educating any more, but at the same time I’m quite pleased, as it has been such hard work for us to have a foot in both camps. So that’s our news.

We are loving Spy Dog at the moment. I think it is the first time ever that Josiah has got hold of a book and pretty much read it from cover to cover (rather than skimming it and looking at the pictures!). Lovely to see him reading and really enjoying it.

He’s got this one and Spy Dog 2, plus Spy Dog Unleashed. I’m hoping to read them too, to see what’s so great about them, after he’s finished … later today I expect!

I am going to gloss over the fact that today is going *really* badly, the boy is in his room and I feel that blogging about the lovely day we had yesterday will be a much better idea than paying any more attention to today.

So, we went on a home ed group trip to Cookworthy Forest yesterday, where they have a Celtic Roundhouse and run educational stuff as well as the working forest, and had a fantastic time.

The morning activities consisted of: leaf/tree identification, an un-nature trail, pretending to be bugs with ‘sky eyes’. Then came lunch, including cooking over the fire for some people – bacon, dampers, and marshmallows.

After lunch we went back into the forest for the ‘meet a tree’ activity, and then making micro-nature trails in the deer meadow.

All in all it was a great day out, as usual tinged with slight regret for me that the girls were stuck in a classroom rather than enjoying it with us, while on a normal day I still struggle with Josiah being on his own, I really don’t know how much longer I can carry on with both approaches to education at the same time in our family, roll on half term.