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

It was grey and misty for most of the day, then rained in earnest early afternoon – we braved the rain for a while but having got wet and cold we decided to head home for cake (the orange chocolate potato cake is great btw) and a film!

Had a fantastic day though, the children loved it. Anna played photographer during the day, having been inspired by the exhibition of wildlife photography (these images) that we saw at the museum yesterday, although even she realised that a few snaps around the zoo were never going to be as amazing as some of the images we’d seen. Here are the best of hers, anyway … and a few of mine and Steve’s here and there – and a couple more on flickr for anyone who’s never seen an elephant wee!

I just liked Abbie’s expression in this photo, taken while we stopped for a hot chocolate at the Double Locks pub yesterday. Cycling is always good if there’s a pub along the cycle route

Laura our music teacher is having a fancy dress Christmas party for all her students this evening … this is Anna’s outfit

added later: she won! yippee, the prize was one free piano lesson!

blog-break? yeah, what a stupid idea, I can’t do it!

In the afternoon we took Robyn and Joe down to the Quay, Steve was around and wanted to try out his latest camera (:roll: no comments please) so we thought that might be a good place to go. Josiah brought bread to feed the ducks but as it turned out there were only Huge Killer Swans or Flappy Seagulls. Neither of which are particularly pleasant! I think swans are beautiful, but when they’re standing right next to me I am petrified of them (I’d forgotten quite how scared, actually ). The seagulls were so greedy they would practically swoop down on to you to grab bread from your hand! So we chucked bread at lightning speed and went to the park instead.

Steve and I were sort of having a competition to see who could come back with the best photos – I had the old camera and he had the new one. I think I won, although annoyingly this morning he had more views and comments on his pictures than I did, so now I’m blogging mine because I expect that will tip the balance

… later on …

Just pootling along here, lots of reading after a trip to the library yesterday, a bit of workbook maths – Joe’s decided he likes the MEP books and we still have plenty of those left at his level so that’s fine. Bit more music theory, some cooking and today we’ve had a lovely time out at Crealy with Robyn.

PE racing around a soft play area has got to be one of the best sorts

Best of all – we met one of Joe’s classmates from school! Spotted his mum first, and I said to Joe ‘there’s your friend’s mum, but I expect she’s just here with his little brother, as it’s school time’, but as it turned out he’d been on holiday and got home really late last night, so was having an extra day to recover. Josiah was over the moon (as was I, otherwise *I* might have had to go in the soft play!) and they went off and played together, while I sat and chatted to his mum for an hour, which was really nice.

Had to leave way too early in order to be home for the mid-afternoon end of school , and as we left she gave me her number and we parted with ‘let’s get the boys together in the holidays’, so we will definitely make an effort there, as I’m aware that playmates his own age are something Joe could miss out on if we’re not careful. Not that he’s desperately bothered about it, but it was lovely to see the smile on his face when he met his friend today

Nice to see the girls at the end of school as usual, although Abbie was sad as lots of things had managed to go wrong for her today Still, she came home and pottered around making more jelly sweeties so that sorted her out. Anna’s gone to ballet and still has homework left that’s due in tomorrow, so she informed me on the way there Does that sound like anyone you know, grandparents?!

Anyway, here you go, Anna, copy and paste away, darling

And just thought I’d post the link again if anyone else was interested in joining/adding any photos. Although it is very difficult to separate photos of home ed from photos of general life, in my opinion!