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

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 …

Okay, I know this is a rubbish picture, but bear with me and read the story.

A couple of weeks ago in Josiah’s maths workbook we were doing some weighing activities, including guessing the weights of various objects. One of the pictures was of a duck, at which point Joe said “I’m not doing that one, I don’t have a clue how much a duck weighs, how old is that duck anyway, is it a duckling or a grown up duck?”

Thinking that those were very valid points to make, we skipped over that part of the question, but then decided to email Pennywell Farm to ask if they could weigh a duck for us! Had a lovely email conversation with someone there and we ended up visiting yesterday. Joe got in for free as we’d collected activity stamps last time we went

The staff on the desk hadn’t actually heard anything about our little mission, but the lady who was doing all the children’s activities that day was more than willing to help us out.

So, around lunchtime (well, after the story time, egg collecting, goat milking, lamb feeding and goodness knows what else we did!), we found some scales (hidden under the bucket in the picture) and Josiah weighed this month-old duckling. He held it first, and made a guess of 600g, then we put it in the bucket, and lo and behold it weighed almost exactly 600g! I say almost exactly as the duck didn’t really want to sit still in the bucket to be weighed so it was a bit difficult to read the scales, but it was pretty damn close. We didn’t bother trying to hold a fully grown duck still to weigh that as well, although I suppose that would be an interesting question to ask/answer, but fairly irrelevant at this point in time!

Anyway, it was fabulous that Pennywell were so accommodating (I knew they would be, they are so lovely there), we had a great day. Joe did all the other activities and really enjoyed himself (Robyn and I literally just followed him around!), and he was pretty chuffed to have estimated the duckling’s weight well too.

Well. I don’t think I can keep up the twittering … as I said in a comment in the post below, the obsessive side of me just can’t bear my last twitter to be out of date so then I compulsively have to update it, which is just stupid. I don’t need it as a form of communication, although I can see its uses … and I will probably keep it going on a random basis. Maybe. If more people were on it it would be nicer though – I am the sort of strange person who likes getting texts about what her friends are doing. Makes me feel as though I have a social life!

Having said that, twitter did keep me amused today, when otherwise I might have gone stir crazy. Josiah is suffering from ‘my sisters have just gone back to school’ syndrome, he misses them and doesn’t really know what to do with himself without them around. He then relies on me for entertainment, yet of course doesn’t want to do any of the things I suggest. So today has been particularly hard work. I think I suffer from the same syndrome, if I’m honest. I know I shouldn’t but I do find it boring to be at home with one child, especially compared to what feels like the norm of having 3 (and often more!) kids around. Not quite sure what the answer to that one is!

Over the past couple of days we have done a bit of maths, through Trilemma (mental maths game) and some workbook – which did spin off into a weighing session where we weighed things from tubes of toothpaste to all the apples in the fruit bowl. Went to Sainsbury’s and bought ourselves a new mixer (ours blew up about 18months ago and cakes have been hard work ever since!), so when we got home Joe made a chocolate cake.

We’ve done some music, the usual practices as well as a supposed piano lesson but I am going to delegate that to Laura (the girls’ piano teacher) asap because somehow I think it will work better. And we went to the library; Josiah read a few picture books while we were there, then chose a Star Wars comic strip book but refused to bring anything else home.

This afternoon we played with the MGears set and Joe made a stunt plane which took him ages, but even that felt like hard work … following that with the usual Wednesday music lessons … I needed that quick drink at La Tasca in the middle of it all!

I have sent them all to bed with DSs and told them to talk to one another on Pictochat if they need to talk, as I am off duty and need some peace and quiet. Looking forward to the Apprentice tonight and then must think of something cheap to do to get me/us out of the house tomorrow.

Oh, and Anna brought home the absence authorisation from school for our Kessingland week, so we’re officially allowed to come!