Little Star Homeschool

Stuck for something to do indoors while the rain continues to keep us from any outdoor activity I went looking for something for Robert to do...

Coloring Pages Website - Coloring Pages, Dot to Dot and Free Kids Drawings

I'm thinking of building an ark if this continues.

An average Monday spent cleaning, washing and generally rearranging the chaos left by the weekend when neither John or I have the time to do so much as think.

Robert has been continuing his writing, concentrating very hard on getting it right. He found my knitting bag (has it been that long since I picked up the needles and yarn?) and asked me if I could knit him a jumper. So I have started knitting again.

Lisa phoned with various questions concerning Harry. He has a rash. "What's a viral infection?" she asks John. "The doctor says Harry has a viral infection." I can see his blood pressure rising from across the room "doesn't she know what a viral infection is?!". Lisa's health visitor has enrolled her on the Sure Start programme, John and I sigh, look at each other and hope she gets through the latest drama unscathed. We worry but each time Lisa and Harry visit we can see Harry is thriving.

Robert found concrete poetry on the Woodland Trust website and made a tree poem. He's been practicing his writing, copying out his favourite passages from his Charlie and Lola books. He said to me "I am going to do writing for a whole week!" I guess we have been focusing on maths and science for a long time now so he's ready for a change.

Robert has also found this game from the Environment Agency very useful. Build your own interactive city garden, meadow or pond.

He has also started to take an interest in history recently. So we are looking at some timelines to tie in with science looking at when things were invented and when famous scientists lived.

Robert is such an avid reader. He looks over my shoulder for as while to see the pictures then gets me to read aloud from my current book. So I am reading to him while reading ahead to filter out any content I deem unfit for young ears. So much for a relaxing read!

This weeks book is The Home Front: Civilian Life in World War One

World War One continues to fascinate but little has been written on the civilian's war. From bombing to rationing, from civil defence to war work, the face of Britain was radically changed as a result of the conflict. More than once Britain was almost brought to its knees by unrestricted submarine warfare and by the end of the war German Zeppelins and Gotha bombers had managed to bomb many parts of Eastern England, while in 1914 the German High Seas fleet bombarded the East Coast destroying buildings in places as diverse as Hartlepool and Lowestoft. The First World War was the first war to have a huge impact on civilians and few were safe from attack. All endured hardship as rationing came into force. What was life like during the war for the civilian population? What hardships did they endure? How did they live? What was the feeling of those who stayed at home? Peter Cooksley tells us the true story of civilians at war on the Home Front.

So airships are the current topic. Huge balloons with engines...it doesn't get much better than that!

Yesterday we went to the Tramway Village at Crich. We have been before when Robert was three to see Thomas the Tank Engine. This time we just went to adore the trams....


Ride on trams...


Have a picnic...with my mum's old picnic bag which she passed on to me because it has Tardis qualities and I am sooo into vintage stuff at the moment. The bag has been to Crich before in the 70's.


Discover new and wonderful creatures....giddy up.


Puzzle over things...


Get lots of fresh air and exercise...up hill an down dale.


Study architecture...


Flop down exhausted....waiting for the bus home.

The good news...it may be fairly expensive to get into the museum (£24 for the three of us) but now because I gave them my details for Gift Aid I have FREE ADMISSION for the rest of the year (excluding Bank Holidays and Special Event Days.) Wow.

Robert and I have had a baking day today. We have made lots of yummy food for a picnic on Thursday. In between baking and chores we watched the bees on the London Pride in the garden.

Yesterday we made collages from old magazines on the theme of 'Our House' rather than our actual house I ended up making a picture of where I would like to live. Mine was a cottage by the sea with an abundant garden. Robert's was a composite image made of woods, fabrics and coloured textures with both indoor and outdoor features....and a car of course.

Later we played Microsoft Train Simulator on the PC and tried to get the Flying Scotsman from Settle to Carlisle in one piece.

Sometimes I have days when my feet barely touch the floor. I do too much I am sure, homeschooling, gardening, going out to work and working from home.... So about once every few weeks we fall back on takeaway food. I know its bad for us but what choice do I have when I am exhausted.

Well now I have a choice and a very good one. Real food, healthy food I can order in over the internet and it works out cheaper for a family meal than Dominos! And they deliver nationwide using a network of local suppliers. How cool is that.

Wiltshire Farm Foods extensive menu has something for everyone – from hearty, traditional favourites such as roasts, pies and stews to more exotic dishes like Duck in Brandy Sauce, Coq au Vin and Fillet of Trout with Prawns.

And if you fancy something sweet, a huge array of delightful desserts await to tantalise your taste buds…from crumbles and puddings to cooler, refreshing choices such as cheesecakes and trifles!

Choose from more than175 delicious dishes and enjoy great food as often as you like, every day, or as a special treat – the choice is yours.

You can enjoy scrumptious dishes like hearty Beef and Stout Pie, tender Lamb Steak with Ratatouille and creamy Coronation Chicken.

Each dish is balanced, nutritious and full of flavour, with carefully controlled levels of salt, sugar and fat.

They can provide details of meals ‘free from’ nuts, dairy, onions etc and also cater for a range of special diets. Look for the colour-coded symbols indicating diabetic, lower fat, reducing, moderate salt, gluten free and vegetarian options.

Convenience is one of many advantages of Wiltshire Farm Foods. Meals are so very easy and quick to prepare. Meals arrive frozen, in sturdy plastic trays, ready to put in the freezer. When you fancy something to eat, it couldn’t be easier, you simply heat your meal from frozen in a matter of minutes and enjoy.

John said to me today quite wistfully "Robert's nearly six, theres only 10 years left 'til he's sixteen."

10 years!

Is that all?

We have only got 10 years to teach him EVERYTHING.

10 Years to teach Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Maths, History, English, Geography, Geology, Economics, IT, Cookery.....AND all about how to survive life in the adult working world.

But we've hardly scratched the surface and in many subjects he's way ahead of his state educated contemporaries. How do they manage?!

*Takes a deep breath*

OK, easy now.....

On Tuesday Robert and I went to Tesco, he asked me to buy him a pineapple. They were half price so I agreed thinking I would end up eating it rather than him. He then asked me to turn this strange spiky fruit into homemade ice cream. I dug out the ice cream maker and froze the bowl. On Wednesday we chopped up the pineapple, blitzed it, added sugar and double cream and created the best ice cream ever! And Robert loves it.

Then Robert started asking me about gravity.

Gravity is a force which tries to pull two objects toward each other. Anything which has mass also has a gravitational pull. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull is. Earth's gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what causes objects to fall. Gravity is what holds the planets in orbit around the sun and what keeps the moon in orbit around Earth. The closer you are to an object, the stonger its gravitational pull is. Gravity is what gives you weight. It is the force that pulls on all of the mass in your body.

He has been experimenting over the past couple of days with various objects from a balloon to his own body weight in air and water. So I've added Dead Famous - Isaac Newton to my Amazon Wishlist.

I've found the perfect cure if you are feeling down in the dumps. And to celebrate the return of big Brother (which I vehemently loath and detest) a return to the good old days of innocent but mindless violence on TV.

We spent the evening making paper planes from the Paper Plane Kit that came with todays Guardian newspaper. Designs were contributed by Nick Robinson and Mark Bolitho. Here's one of Nick's designs if you missed todays Guardian, just click the image to see it full size.

I came home from work yesterday to find this strange concoction in the kitchen.



I wondered what it was and Robert was keeping quiet on the subject. An empty sugar packet was a clue. Then John came in and said he had wondered why Robert's hands were blue earlier. He thought it might be felt pen.

So here's the recipe - don't try this at home!

Half a packet of caster sugar (oh yes not just any sugar but my baking sugar)
Several drops or maybe a splash of blue food colouring (I don't know the exact amount)
Some seedless grapes (mushed up of course)

Mix well with bare hands and grin when its done.

Robert has spent most of today sleeping and watching a bit of TV because he is poorly. The usual symptoms, runny nose and sneezes yesterday and general malaise today.

Monday night I had a dream. I dreamed huge rabbits were flying, using their large ears as helicopter blades. They flew towards me through a beautiful field of daisies. On Tuesday I told Robert about this dream because I knew it would make him laugh. After the giggles subsided he said, "you know Mummy. You had the dream because you watched Curse of the Were-Rabbit and that had a giant rabbit in it and Sonic Heroes and that has a rabbit that flies with its ears in it."

Thank you Sigmund.

Bugguide is a great site for bug fans. Its focus is US and Canada insect life but worth a look at if your kids are doing a project on mini beasts.

Bugguide is hosted by Iowa State University Entomology and is easy to use when beginning to learn about species classification. The photos are high quality showing the detail you need when studying insects.

The community is run by an online community of naturalists who enjoy learning about and sharing our observations of insects, spiders, and other related creatures.

Robert's latest mathematical quest is to know the names of every 2 dimensional geometrical object. If you are curious too, here they are (courtesy of Dr Math):

1  monogon                  (Monogon and digon can only
   2  digon                     be used in rather special
   3  trigon, triangle          circumstances. Trigon and
   4  tetragon, quadrilateral   tetragon are alternatives to
   5  pentagon                  triangle and quadrilateral;
   6  hexagon                   the adjectival forms trigonal
   7  heptagon                  and tetragonal are more common.)
   8  octagon
   9  enneagon

  10  decagon
  11  hendecagon
  12  dodecagon
  13  triskaidecagon
  14  tetrakaidecagon, tetradecagon
  15  pentakaidecagon, pentadecagon
  16  hexakaidecagon, hexadecagon
  17  heptakaidecagon
  18  octakaidecagon
  19  enneakaidecagon

  20  icosagon
  21  icosikaihenagon, icosihenagon
  22  icosikaidigon
  23  icosikaitrigon
  24  icosikaitetragon
  25  icosikaipentagon
  26  icosikaihexagon
  27  icosikaiheptagon
  28  icosikaioctagon
  29  icosikaienneagon

  30  triacontagon
  31  triacontakaihenagon
  32  triacontakaidigon
  33  triacontakaitrigon
  34  triacontakaitetragon
  35  triacontakaipentagon
  36  triacontakaihexagon
  37  triacontakaiheptagon
  38  triacontakaioctagon
  39  triacontakaienneagon

  40  tetracontagon
  41  tetracontakaihenagon
  42  tetracontakaidigon
  43  tetracontakaitrigon
  44  tetracontakaitetragon
  45  tetracontakaipentagon
  46  tetracontakaihexagon
  47  tetracontakaiheptagon
  48  tetracontakaioctagon
  49  tetracontakaienneagon

  50  pentacontagon ...
  60  hexacontagon ...
  70  heptacontagon ...
  80  octacontagon ...
  90  enneacontagon ...
 100  hectogon, hecatontagon
1000  chiliagon
10000  myriagon

One of the things we like to do when we are not in the garden is to trawl round the net for any freebies we can find. Looking through the exhibitors for the Chelsea Flower Show this year we came a cross a charity courtyard garden. They are trying to encourage gardeners, especially children by giving away a free pack of pumpkin seeds.

The garden is based on a children's book called Where The Wild Things Are. This is one of those truly rare books that can be enjoyed equally by a child and a grown-up. If you disagree, then it's been too long since you've attended a wild rumpus. Max dons his wolf suit in pursuit of some mischief and gets sent to bed without supper. Fortuitously, a forest grows in his room, allowing his wild rampage to continue unimpaired. Sendak's colour illustrations (perhaps his finest) are beautiful, and each turn of the page brings the discovery of a new wonder.

The wild things - with their mismatched parts and giant eyes - manage somehow to be scary- looking without ever really being scary; at times they're downright hilarious. Sendak's defiantly run-on sentences - one of his trademarks - lend the perfect touch of stream of consciousness to the tale, which floats between the land of dreams and a child's imagination.

We took Robert for his first swimming lesson today. He was excited before we went, nervous when he first got into the learner pool and more relaxed as the hour progressed. He enjoyed getting used to the water and towards the end was confident enough to slide into the water from the edge without using the steps. John is an excellent swimmer so he is teaching Robert at the moment and we plan to go once a week. I am a non-swimmer unfortunately but I like to float near the side lol. Saying that, as little as I did my stomach muscles ached when I got out of the pool.

The lifeguard asked how old Robert was and then why he wasn't at school. So we explained about home education and had a moan about the state of our local schools, I guess they see lots of school kids at the baths. Indeed when we were in the cafe that overlooks the pool we had the chance to watch a class in action. Organised chaos was the word. Swimmers swam, non-swimmers floundered and those in-between messed about. Three adults supervised this group of a dozed or so kids. It took me back to when I had swimming lessons in the last year of junior school, I started out as a non-swimmer and as I said I still am. Another addition to my growing list of areas in which school failed me. I won't let this happen to Robert.

On the way home we chatted about swimming. John said to Robert, "Uncle Steve says he'll take you scuba diving when you've learned to swim." Robert replied, "I can't swim with SHARKS!"

Where did that one come from?

The weather seems a bit topsy turvy this year. April was hot and sunny like May usually is and May is wet like April should be. Well, I've always been the sort of person who can make the most of a bad situation so this week we made a rain gauge.

Its just a two litre plastic lemonade bottle cut in half. The top half inverted to make a funnel to catch the rain and prevent evaporation if the sun does shine. Insulating tape holds it together and also makes 10mm markers to measure rainfall.

We will plot rainfall on a graph weekly. With all this weather it should be a good experiment.

Yesterday Robert read about tornadoes in this book about Weather he wanted to know what tornadoes looked like in real life so off we popped to youtube to find clips of twisters. He was in awe of their power and quiet relieved we don't have them in England.

Today I mentioned to Robert how tall he was getting (122cm) he can reach all the light switches in our house now. His reply, "but I am not as wide as a bush."

Went into town yesterday to get a 3D graphics card for the computer and found a twin pack of Learning Ladder CD Roms for Robert, two discs - years 1 & 2.

We had to buy the graphics card so john could play his Call of Cthulhu game which he bought on Tuesday. On trying to run the game he discovered our onboard graphics chip just wasn't up to the job so he got a Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro

So a £19.99 game cost altogether about £95 to run. I said we could take the game back to the shop. John didn't agree, it was obvious the computer needed upgrading. Its got to be a man thing.

We stopped for lunch on the Thames Embankment, cheese and tomato sarnies and coffee in the fresh air you can't beat it.

We pointed out the OXO building, ST Pauls and I explained to Robert that this was where his Nana (my mum) walked to and from work and also where my dad courted her. That would have all happened in the 1940's.

The OXO Building

A relic of London's industrial past, the OXO Tower building has been inventively remodeled to engage with the busy cultural and commercial life of the city.

Once lined with grime encrusted warehouses, London's South Bank has gradually evolved into a modern cultural and commercial riverside strip. The stalwart functionalism of industry has given way to a heterogeneous assortment of buildings baying across the River Thames. Just east of the beton brut grandeur of the National Theatre and the execrable King's Reach Tower lies the Oxo building, preserved like an archaeological specimen as the sole reminder of the area's past life. Originally constructed at the turn of the century as a Post Office generating station, it was extensively remodeled as a meat warehouse between 1928 and 1930, acquiring, in the process, its famous Art Deco tower. Punctuated by a trio of glazed apertures that might look like innocuous noughts and crosses, they actually spell out 'OXO', the name of the British meat products company. Designed by A. W. Moore, this brazen appendage cunningly circumvented restrictions on advertising along the river and has now assumed the status of minor London landmark.

After a long period of uncertainty, the original building has now been inventively remodeled for mixed residential and commercial use. Five intermediate floors provide 78 flats for Coin Street Secondary Housing Association (occupied by people who either live or work in the local borough), while the lower three storeys have been refurbished to house designer studios and small speciality shops. On the second floor overlooking the dramatic sweep of the river from St Paul's Cathedral to Charing Cross Station, is a cheerfully demotic cafe designed by Apicella Associates.