Worldwide Culture Swap - Puerto Rico

Posting this up a bit late, but here's our worldwide cultural swap from Puerto Rico.

Lots and lots of lovely items,

including a Puerto Rico bag, pencil, pictures, photos, traditional wedding souvenir, postcards, two little maracas, sesame seed candy, a wonderful folder of photos and information, playing cards of the Puerto Rico flag, and a keyring and colouring sheet of the Puerto Rico mascot the Coqui (tree frog), a letter from our swap family, and more!

Photos below of the kids opening the package:

Doing a Space Theme, in true home education style.

Week 1 (ish):  Moon phases

• Bribe children with chocolate biscuits to watch this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/scienceclips/ages/9_10/earth_sun_moon.shtmlhttp://www.newtonsapple.tv/video.php?id=1671

• Look at our little plastic model of moon/earth and try to work out what the heck is happening. Or get dh to run around with a torch and a ball. (Definitely better to leave it to the physicist of the family)

• Start a lunar cycle chart: http://sciencenetlinks.com/tools/lunar-cycle-1-calendar/

(we started, saw the moon once, briefly, between clouds before it disappeared for three nights. How can the moon disappear? You'd have thought someone else might have noticed...

• Lunar eclipse: http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0812-lunar_eclipse.htm

Listen to dh going on and on and on about lunar eclipses while we wonder how soon we can get away and eat the rest of the biscuits.

• Orbital forces experiment: http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/education/activities/active19.htm

i.e.  swinging an eraser by a piece of string and letting go without maiming anyone. Yeah. They'll love that one.


Week2 (ish): Tides and craters

[Not sure why those things go together, but it works for me.]

• Tides:  http://www.ehow.com/video_5238520_moon-affects-changing-tides.html

• Make a crater:

http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/education/activities/active15.htm
(need map/pictures of moon/craters; deep tray and the patience of a saint while children spill stuff all over the house)

• Listen to Beethoven’s moonlight sonata 

and pretend that we are really a very culturally sophisticated family.


Week 3 (ish): The Sun

• Video about the sun:

(short, so the kids might actually sit through it)

• Make a sundial - e.g. printout the pointer and base here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/kids/summer_activities/make_sundial.shtml

then move to a country where the sun actually shines at a strength that makes a sundial useable.


Week 4 (ish): The sun, day and night, seasons and other sun-ish stuff

• Sit kids in front of this video  that shows a model of earth going round the sun while sneaking off to the corner shop to buy more chocolate biscuits.

http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/visualizations/es0408/es0408page01.cfm?chapter_no=visualization

• Seasons. (btw, someone should put in a complaint to the met office that Britain was due a summer between June and August and it didn't turn up.)

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/teachers/key-stage3/lessonplan-seasons/animation


Week 5(ish): Solar System

• Make a solar system mobile

http://play.powerhousemuseum.com/makedo/pdfs/Mobile_Solar_System.pdf

This is where I spend 2 hours cutting out fiddly little shapes and sticking them together while the kids wander off...probably to eat more biscuits.

• Discuss the position of the planets. Or point the kids towards a book and make knowledgeable noises. Watch parts of The Planets series that I recorded years ago anticipating this very moment. Or take note of the kids' rolled eyes and lengthy sighs and get them to watch the (much shorter) videos here:

Mercury here: http://science.discovery.com/videos/space-school-mercury.html
Venus: http://www.cosmolearning.com/videos/venus/
Earth: http://science.discovery.com/videos/space-school-earth.html
Mars: http://www.cosmolearning.com/videos/mars/
Jupiter: http://science.discovery.com/videos/space-school-jupiter.html
Saturn: http://www.cosmolearning.com/videos/saturn/
Uranus: http://science.discovery.com/videos/space-school-uranus.html


Week6(ish): More Solar System

• Take a solar system walk:

 http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/family/science-projects-for-kids-the-incredible-universe9.htm

(need ball about 8 inches in diameter(football); 2 pins with small round heads; 1 pin with very small round head;2 peppercorns; 1 small walnut; 1 acorn; 2 peanuts; Index cards; Glue or tape; Bright markers; yardstick; Large park and some maternal enthusiasm. Latter might be in short supply.)

• Listen to some Holst The Planets,

e.g. Mars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bcRCCg01I

or get a CD from library. Then acknowledge that none of the kids are interested but go through the motions anyway, because, after all, you are a home educator.

The End.

We don't do it. But it's looming.

Term time.

It shouldn't make a difference.

It doesn't make a difference.

Except that it does. Because the whole mad English world is geared up to that structure of 6 weeks on, one week off. 6 weeks of ferrying small people around like Kentucky Fried on skates, and then one week when you breathe ready to do it all over again.

It is a choice.

Of course it is a choice.

When I first started home educating I signed up for any HE activity or workshop on offer. Being at home with small (very small) inconveniently-boisterous children was like sensory deprivation torture. Or sensory overload. Either way, torture.

[Note: Just because I home educate doesn't mean I have to *like* children. I am not a I love nurturing little people type of  mum. No. I am a please, someone, tell me they can go to bed now because the day needed to end four hours ago and it still hasn't yet mum.]

Then as the kids got bigger and I actually really wanted to see the kitchen occasionally instead of living on jam sandwiches and hula hoops in parks and play centres, I chose to opt out of the many many and increasingly available activities.

I still try to keep the whole out-the-house-doing-stuff thing to a manageable load. I do.

But the age gap is widening. A teen and an eight-year-old are worlds apart.  One is just starting to learn to read; the other interacts with adults as, well, an adult. This demands that they are driven a billion miles in different directions at the same time on the same day to meet their particular social needs.

Ok, exaggeration. But seeing as my children have just learnt the word hyperbole, I feel permitted to demonstrate the point. Truth is, once term time comes, there will be few days when we are not supposed to be somewhere at some time. Regular commitment. It's like being married to home ed, without the bonus of a free toaster and a set of crystal champagne flutes and videoing your best mate do her drunk-at-wedding dance.

So. Catch me mid-term. Go on then.

Ask me whether my home ed children socialise with others.

I am likely to poke you in the eyeballs with index and middle finger.

Socialisation? Pah

The frugal seamstress strikes again

Three days ago I put my foot through one of our two double fitted sheets.

It had been looking sorry for itself for some time (three holes and a patch that was nearly a hole). But putting my foot through it confirmed its demise. The tearing probably had something to do with two years I've spent trying to squeeze a normal double fitted sheet over a super-thick orthopedic mattress (hey, what's a girl supposed to do?)

In our random mismatched pile of laundry - the one that's in the bike-helmet-sheets-n'-pillowcases-washing-powder-and-shoe-polish cupboard - we have two double flat sheets.

I don't like them.

Firstly, one is a remnant of the 1980s (or possibly 70s) and is the colour of pale coffee.

Or rather (once you've experienced the pleasure of children) the colour of post-coca-cola-party-child-vomit.

Although I don't like it, in the budget-limited state we are in at the moment, and having just wrecked one of our two 'good' sheets 'not liking the colour' isn't a decent enough excuse not to use it.

But I do have another reason. Our mattress is heavy. Flat sheets are tricky. Trying to get hospital corners, or tbh ANY corners using a flat sheet on our mattress requires hiring an Olympic shot putter with six arms (that's three to hold the mattress up, the other three to tuck the ends in). Average housewife-power just doesn't cut the mustard, particularly when it belongs to a weedy women with a bad back and a predisposition to loathing any form of housework.

Fortunately while browsing the internet for something completely different I came across this tutorial to make a flat sheet into a fitted sheet.

I already have a bag of random bits of elastic from our local scrapstore. My sewing machine is functioning and we are (for now at least) on reasonably good terms . (Admittedly it does sound like a bag of spanners being dragged by a tractor because I don't give it the tlc it requires, but we'll glide over that one). It even likes ONE of my reels of cotton (all the others, it eats) that just happened to be an ok colour, and the needle wasn't broken. We had lift off.

We came, we sewed, we conquered.

The tutorial worked. The maths was a bit iffy (surprisingly all those quadratic equations I did in my A level maths don't teach you how to turn flat sheets into fitted), and I didn't have a fancy cutting square measuring thingy (or whatever they say you need) and one sheet was much  bigger than the other, (so if you plan to have a go, DO measure your sheets and don't assume they are all the same size). But with a bit of botching it came right in the end.

I cut and pinned the four corners. Then I found it easiest (i.e. I learnt by my mistakes) to sew two neighbouring corners before doing a quick fitting just to check whether there is any need to adjust the other two corners to fit. Then I finished off with a sort of elasticky stitch on my machine that I didn't even know existed until my friend at Orange and Green gave me some instructions on how to sew stretchy material. I used longer pieces of elastic than the flat sheet tutorial showed, because to me 6 inches didn't seem long enough. [No. Don't go there.]

I was going to take a photo, but then thought what kind of nutter takes a photo of their bedsheets?
It was one of those sane days, so I didn't.

If interested, just google and you'll find plenty more tutorials online, (such as this one)

Today I am mostly making...

...hankies:

Made from a piece of material that I once bought to make a voile thingy for the dining room window. I bought this material in the days before...

a) ...children

b)...the nation realised that stencilling a bathroom wall, having a bowl of pebbles with a wee-like dribble on wooden decking and calling it a 'water feature', hanging silly bits of almost see-through material called 'voiles' in front of your windows and generally any of the ideas that came from the 1990s tv programme "Changing Rooms" were naff and pointless and probably a government-funded way of keeping frustrated stay-at-home women busy and off prescriptive anti-depressants. (Does anyone remember the episode where they stapled - yes stapled - the curtain to the wooden pelmet? Obviously no-one expected the couple to actually want to open or close their newly-hung curtains)

and

c) (following on from a) before I knew how much snot a child could produce and how far a snotty piece of tissue in the back pocket of a child's black pair of jeans will go when washed at 40 degrees in non-biological washing powder with twenty other once-black, but due to be dappled and fluffy forever, items.

So. There I was with this large (actually several large) pieces of material in the loft that looked not unlike door-sized hankies. And now after a quick scissor-and-machine treatment they are smaller and multiple and ready for the onslaught of winter viruses.

(btw. I could say that the variation in hanky sizing that you see in the photograph is purely a consequence of their rustic cultural origins. But actually what happened is that I got bored measuring them after a while and it's surprising how quickly a square can turn into a lopsided rectangle when you lose concentration hemming with a sewing machine.

Free Life Science course to download ('Elementary level')

Classic Science: Elementary Life Science 36-week Course here  as free PDF downloads.

The part I looked seemed fine for the secular home edder, but I haven't checked it all.

PDF download includes chapters on classification, life cycles, biomes, food webs, organs, cells, health and nutrition, etc.