Fail to plan and plan to fail (or some other b******s)

Of course, having an assignment deadline, and a house that desperately needs pre-christmas attention, I am focusing on home education instead.

I like to have plans this time of year, just as I like to start after Summer with a sort of 'Autumn plan' (years of schooling have instilled strange seasonal behaviours into my neural networks - like the desire to buy stationery in September). We never stick to these plans. They just give me some reassurance that we are organised and have direction. And they give me a damn good excuse to spend money on Amazon.

So my plans are...

To 'do' Story of the World Vol 1 with ds2 and dd. In my enthusiasm I have already written out a schedule for the first three months of 2012 with lists of weekly SOTW activities and possible outings...let's see if we get past the first fortnight, shall we?

Attempt the Intel Design and Discovery curriculum with ds1 and ds2. As always, when I discover a new resource on the internet, one that is free and comprehensive and hands-on I cannot resist. I give this one 3-4 weeks. That's if we get past 'design a new paperclip' without rolling eyes and groans. It could all fall at the first hurdle. If so that rainforest may have been pulped in vain.

Something Shakespearian or Tudorian (yeah, I know that's not a word). There's a Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum from summer 2012. It's a possible. Or I could just drag the kids to Stratford point at a few 'Ye Olde Barde livede here-e' and be done with it. But if we're doing ancient history with SOTW, then jumping into the Tudors might confuse things. But then again...do we EVER do anything in chronological order? Dinosaurs next then.

I downloaded this biochemistry module which we might start. Or we might not. We should, because I paid for it. But that's not always a good enough reason. I'm not sure how much it crosses over with Ellen McHenry's Carbon Chemistry. Perhaps we've already done too much chemistry and there will be mutiny among the troops. It'll be one of those 'suck it and see' things I think. Or a 'can I be bothered?' thing. Jury out.

And apart from that...

Er well of course my children will be knuckling down to their daily regime of hours of literacy and numeracy and latin and French, German, Spanish, Mandarin and Swahili, while studying for IGCSE's in performance arts and political history, and winning awards for essay writing, spelling, ice skating, dance and gymnastics. And then after breakfast...

Free Christmas Word Search (for non-confident readers)

Free wordsearch with a Christmas theme to download from the currclick here

Nice and simple, so ideal for younger children or non-confident readers. My dd (a just-started reader) has done two of the pages.

You probably need to make an account with currclick before you can download it, but after that it's pretty simple. There are other freebies on the site, plus they are having a sale at the moment, so you might just happen to be tempted...

Polaris Chronicles - reviewed by someone who owns a thesaurus

Progress so far on the Polaris Chronicles polar explorers box themed package that we downloaded here

We've started with the Natural History section and the kids have started to make and antique a box in which to put a blown egg (supposed to be a puffin egg but I suspect we'd get arrested climbing cliffs to steal puffin eggs, so an ordinary chicken egg will have to suffice).

The kids stick a mini cereal pack together for the box:


and paint it with acrylic paint



making fake fossils with air-drying clay:



'Antiqueing' pictures (which we'll later use to decoupage the boxes) with diluted cold tea. Actually we used a cat litter tray of barely diluted very hot teabags, but that was only because we were, as usual, impatient. Our impatience also stretched to drying our pieces of paper in the oven - a gas oven (naturally rather flamey). We managed not to set the house on fire, or even set off the smoke detector (must check the battery). A successful outcome methinks.


and finally finished, the Emperor Penguin, a cardboard cut-out downloaded for free from Canon Creative Park
He looks a little worse for wear. Probably something to do with small sticky hands, impatience, multiple clothes pegs and half a bottle of PVA.

So. The verdict so far on the currclick Polar Exploration thingimajig download?

Well, the art/craft activities are great. Quite inventive suggestions, reasonable instructions, and pictures supplied for activities such as decoupage (though I suspect most of these can be found online if I had half a lifetime to look).

However, the introductory info, the interesting background scientific information that is supposed to accompany the craft activities is appalling, I mean really badly written. It is as if someone has cut and pasted a few lines from Wikipedia and then thought 'Oh I'd better try and put it into my own words so I can't be accused of plagiarism' and has then randomly rearranged the words in the sentence without even a tiny thought to clarity or - perish the thought - grammar. The result, therefore, is not only weird, but incredibly repetitive [I think I counted the word numerous used 3 or 4 times in less than 2 sides of A4, and spelt incorrectly on one of those occasions. Hey, guys, what's wrong with the word many..? Are you guys too posh to say lots of..?].

But perhaps I shouldn't be so hasty to judge. It is possible that I have stumbled across something rare and original. Reading it to my children yesterday there was a moment when I truly believed I had, in my hands, an attempt at an English translation of Japanese MFI instructions for an iceberg.

Polar project: on your marks...get set...

Well despite the big plans we haven't got far with our polar project.

I've collected some links (I've added most to the side bar on the right), downloaded a polar explorer box theme thingy here from currclick and also downloaded a cardboard penguin for free from Canon Creative Park here to put together. (Dd actually requested a polar bear, but seeing as the polar bear is more complicated-looking and it's been down to me to put most of the penguin together so far, polar bear can wait.)

The kids have watched the first episode of Frozen Planet and our free poster has arrived. We now have several polar-themed posters up in the hall, replacing the milk and other company marketing board ones that were up while we were following Hugh Fearnley Whatshisface's book The River Cottage Family Cookbook.

We've started making fake fossils and I've bought some marine-themed paper for our decoupages. I promise photos of work in progress, just as soon as we get a table clear enough to get the tub of glue on.