For those children taking exams this summer...

Rocks and minerals: igneous rocks

We've been using a long-ago downloaded resource from Currlick to study rocks with dd (The title is Intellego Unit Study Soils, Rocks, Minerals and Fossils - I'm not sure that it's still available to purchase) . Many of the links are out-of-date, but it's been a useful prompt to watch videos and do a few experiments.

Here we are, using wax crayon shavings to replicate some of the processes involved in the rock cycle.

Erosion:

 Sedimentation (sedimentary rocks)

Pressure (stamped on the folded foil)

Heat:

Some of the intro videos we watched:

Intro to different types of rocks/rock cycle

http://www.neok12.com/video/Types-of-Rocks/zX616a577c597f7c784c720a.htm

http://www.neok12.com/video/Types-of-Rocks/zX750f7762705a694f5b636b.htm

http://www.neok12.com/video/Types-of-Rocks/zX466963500e710c067b7277.htm

Igneous rocks:

Video on identifying igneous rocks:
http://www.neok12.com/video/Types-of-Rocks/zX63086e417b587d05465e77.htm


This week we looked at pumice rock as an example of an extrusive igneous rock:

Pumice:
https://www.mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals/pumice
(you can get pumice at most chemist shops in the toiletries/bathtime section. We bought ours for around £1 at Wilkinsons.

Experiment with floating rocks:
http://www.education.com/science-fair/article/floating-rocks/

C14 robotics team return to help out at the FLL nationals in Loughborough

C14 Robotics team were invited by the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) to return to the First Lego League UK & Ireland finals as volunteers. In return last year's champions had a free hotel stay in a 4* hotel, a  lovely evening meal and free lunch (yes there is such a thing). It was fab to see them back as a team (albeit, minus a few members) and the boys had a lovely day. 

A few of us parents manned a stall, to answer questions about the robot, the team, their trips to America and Spain and all things FLL. We were busy all day! Congratulations to the West Linton team who are the new FLL Uk & Ireland champions!

The boys, posing :)

(Below) Getting together with Berrelium 6, previously known as the Dalton Brobots. The team met Dalton Brobots in Spain at the European Open, and again at the FLL nationals in 2015 and have stayed in touch. Berrelium 6 didn't get any awards at the weekend, despite all their hard work, but they remained cheery and it was wonderful to see them again. Perhaps next year?

C14, being 'busy'.

C14 helping out at the robot tables:

Summer geography: part 1 (structure of the earth)

Dd and a friend have been doing some hands-on geography over the summer. We started with the structure of the earth. Using plasticine we made globes in various coloured layers to represent the layers of the earth (there was a little bit of freestyle' involved, but I think dd got the gist). The girls also made cardboard 'earth dials' of the different layers. (I'll add the link if I can find it). We've been using The Kingfisher Geography Encyclopedia as a background read.



Making the 'earth dial'

Cutting the plasticine earth in half

Ta da!

Chemistry: Making a giant periodic table (with links for printable periodic tables)

The boys only have a few more (I)GCSE exams to take (in June), so I've been taking a small breather and trying to get back the rhythm of our old home ed. It's not easy when we've been totally focused on box-ticking and hoop-jumping for the year.

After several months of not-much-chemistry I'm picking up where I left off doing Ellen McHenry's 'The Elements" with dd. If you haven't checked out Ellen McHenry's website, please do. There are lots of fab freebie printables to download, as well as various downloadable curricula to purchase. We've used both The Elements and Carbon Chemistry (a follow-on programme) with my boys and I can highly recommend them. They are particularly ideal for that tricky pre-teen age, when children often seem to want a bit more of a challenge, but still want to do lots of hands-on learning. 

So, today we were back to the periodic table and learning about atoms by using Skittles sweets to show electrons in their orbits. Of course we use sweets for our demonstrations as much as possible. It gives me an excuse to go to the shop and buy chocolate for myself. Not that I need excuses ;)

Inspired by what we've learned today dd and I are now in the process of making a giant periodic table. The hope is to make one large enough that we can actually stick little bags of examples of the elements (the non-radioactive ones) onto the table. Or at least stick photos on. Well, that's the idea. 

Dogzilla not really helping with our giant periodic table

You can find various printable versions of the periodic table here. 

http://sciencenotes.org/printable-periodic-table/

(We have decided to use this totally blank periodic table so we can add our own pictures/samples and titles

http://sciencenotes.org/blank-periodic-table/ )

The files will print out to standard A4 size.

To print out a really massive version, on more than one A4 sheet:

1) Download the PDF of the table you prefer. 

2) Open up the PDF

3) Click on print. This will open up the various print options.

4) Select 'poster' (on my screen this is to the left of the print options, about half way down, and has a little picture of 4 sheets of paper)

5) Increase the size of the tile scale (I've just printed mine out at 500%). You might need to click in another box to refresh, but you should find a small image displayed showing how the pages will be arranged.

6) When you're happy with the size, confirm that you want to print.

7) Stick the pages together. You might find it helpful to click print again, put in the same tile scale and refer to the little preview to help you piece together the jigsaw of pages. 

C14 Robotics team: finally over the jet lag and now sitting exams

C14 team members had a week to recover from the excitement (and exhaustion) of the US before most of them sat their GCSEs. Ds1 has gone off this afternoon, having been ill all day yesterday, to sit English, his weakest subject. It doesn't bode well.

He needs to pass English or Maths to get onto the college course he wants to do. If today is a wash-out, we have 3 weeks to cover - again - an entire GCSE maths syllabus. When you're dyslexic and need to cover something 10 times to remember it and there's still no guarantee you won't have fog-for-brain on the day, exams can seem like some truly awful lottery.

To distract myself from the stress and worry I am going to post up some photos from the team's time away. It has been an amazing experience from them all, and even though they didn't come back with any awards, they are still the UK & Ireland FLL champions.

C14's pit area, decorated like a souvenir shop on Oxford Street

A brief moment to chill out

They took The Queen with them. She had to have her own pass.

Arriving late on stage (oops, overslept!) but just making it there for the medals

You wouldn't believe how many people came up and asked them what country they were from.
Maybe they didn't make it obvious enough?

Stress at the competition table

Selfies

More photos

Exploring St Louis.

C14 robotics team now have a fundraising site! http://www.charitychoice.co.uk/fundraiser/c14-robotics

C14 Robotics, First Lego League UK & Ireland champions, now have a C14 fundraising site to help get the team to the World Festival, USA, 22-25 April 2015.

http://www.charitychoice.co.uk/fundraiser/c14-robotics

The team have a lot to raise and a long way to go. I don't like to ask for money, but please give if you can, however little.

For more information about C14 and First Lego League check out the C14 website, 

Stay updated on their progress on their Facebook page. Every message they've got from you guys has given them a boost, so please do wish them luck!

C14 Robotics team are UK & Ireland First LEGO League champions!!!

C14 Robotics, a team of home ed teens from Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire, have won the UK & Ireland First LEGO League championship! 

From their press release:

"...The nine young budding engineers, now have to raise £10,000 to be able to compete in the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) World Festival in April 2015, alongside more than 100 other teams from all over the world. The event is being held in the St Louis, MO, at the Edward Jones Dome, seating more than 70,000 people.

The team comes from Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire and compete as the team “C14 Robotics” in FLL, a worldwide competition building and programming a Lego Mindstorms robot to complete a course of obstacles and tasks.

The teenage engineers won their place after being crowned the UK & Ireland Champions at Loughborough University on the 1st February, presented by Rt. Hon. Nicky Morgan, the Secretary of State for Education. C14 intends to follow in the footsteps of the last two UK teams to attend the World Festival, and once again bring back the winners trophy..."

More information about the team and First LEGO League on the C14 webpage . Follow their progress on their Facebook page  

Christmas is coming! (Apparently)

After weeks of nagging from dd I concede and get the Christmas tree out of the loft. The boys dont care either way. No, correction, ds2 is a willing participant once the 20 year old tree is assembled, but neither of my boys are quite the magpies us girls of the house are.

" Ooo shiny thing!"

" Ooo, another shiny thing!"

 It's no wonder three sets of our 'christmas lights' have remained hung in our house all year round for the past 4 or 5 years.

The shock of being removed from the box is, as usual, evident in the tree's response. I'm always surprised to find it still has needles each year I unbox it.

The gearbox on the van fails and I make Christmas decorations with dd. (There is probably some denial psychology going on there. )

Frugality (is that a word?) rules. Free fabric (from sample books thrown out of shops), buttons from our button jar, stuffing from an old pillow, ribbon from a tat shop at £1 a roll. Looking cute, even if I do say so myself.

Suli Breaks "I will not let an exam result decide my fate"

This was sent out on Facebook and struck a chord with me. So much so that I wanted to archive it here, on my blog, so I wouldn't forget it. If you search on YouTube for Suli Breaks 'I will not let an exam result decide my fate' you'll find several versions. But I love the graphic quality of this one :) Anyhow...I'll let you judge for yourself.

Biology: Eyewitness Science - Experiments on bones

We've been working through the Eyewitness Science Guide: How the Body Works by Steve Parker (Ours is  this edition from 1994). Like many of the Eyewitness guides it's heavy on the pictures and text-boxes, but we like that. 

Some of the suggested experiments in the book are ridiculously involved. I don't mind a trip to Wilkinsons to buy balloons, but I don't want to have to have to learn carpentry. At least not now. It's stuff like this that makes me balk at the more interesting books on my shelves. Was there ever a time when I might have attempted an experiment that required lengths of dowel and marine plyboard sawn to precise measurements?

Right now anything that takes a lot of prep, requires hard-to-obtain materials or requires a huge amount of parental input or time, is unlikely to get done. Sad, but we have slipped into the open-and-go-just-get-'er-done stage.  

We haven't done deliberate, intentional science for ages...For a science-focused household this is a bad state to be in. It needs to be rectified. 

To make the book more manageable I have scanned through, chosen one or more 'do-able' activities from each chapter for the first half of the book. I did draw out a rough schedule, but most importantly I put all the materials necessary for each session/activity in a zip-lock bag, labelled with the session number. Eight sessions' worth of labelled bags and a ready-to-go book with small text-boxes with lots of pictures has meant that for the first time in ages we actually get around to science.

 These are the photos of our 'bones' experiment, looking at how the tightly-packed, stratified inner of the bone adds to its strength.

When the inners (straws) of the bone are splayed, they are weak:

When they are tightly packed and linear, they are much stronger:

East Head Spit: Checking out the geography of the South Coast, August 2014

A few weeks back we took a field trip to the south coast to check out some seaside geographical features. Ds2 will be taking IGCSE Geography next year, so I took him to the same place we took ds1. East Head spit is a great place to see firsthand, a sand and shingle spit, salt marsh and sand dunes.

I confess it was nice to grab my old camera back from ds1 for a while and play with the black and white feature.

THAT MAD YEAR. A long break from blogging and here we are again.

I notice that my last post was sometime in June and related to World Cup activities. The World Cup? Oh how long ago that seems! There we were at the start of Summer trying to fire ourselves up for some hands-on learning and hours of fun in the sunshine.

Well. Good intentions and all that....

Summer has been and gone and we don't seem to have made the most of it, but that's ok. No, really, it's ok. I'll keep telling myself that.  Truth is, by June we were totally. burned. out. Despite a faint glimmer of strained enthusiasm not a lot of anything happened after that. We ate from the corner shop. I put diesel in the car. I stressed over my credit card bill.  I put more diesel in the car. I apologised a lot for forgetting things and being late and for missing stuff that I was sure I'd made a note of, but that somehow in the chaos had got lost. I put more diesel in the car. I fell over the piles of stuff in the dining room. Piles of stuff fell over me in the lounge. I climbed over the piles of stuff in the bedroom. I thought about writing hate mail to The Fly Lady and telling her to stop sending me stupid adverts for her feather dusters and come and spend her time more usefully cleaning at my house instead. I drank the homemade wine I'd intended saving for Christmas.

Actually, thinking about it, quite a lot happened.

So...needless to say we didn't get far with those World Cup activities. Was I really that optimistic? We did manage to get the world map up on the wall and find some of the participating countries before they got knocked out, so I guess that's geography ticked for 2014.

September 2013 to June 2014 I think should be known as That Mad Year by our family. A combination of having a child studying for IGCSEs (the international equivalent of GCSEs), alongside all three children doing competitive sport and two doing competitive robotics was the sort of 24/7 crazy life that you really shouldn't sign up for. Add in working part-time, running home ed workshops and trying to keep some sort of home and family life and it's not surprising we were all a bit loopy by the end of it. I now understand the term "work/life balance" more than I want to.

But...some good things have happened. Just in case I don't get to post about them in more detail, here's a summary of achievements. Please excuse me just a little bit of smugness.

• After a humungous amount of work, Ds1 achieved two more IGCSEs with good (one was ridiculously good) grades. He now has 4. This is the boy who two years ago couldn't write a sentence and had to seriously concentrate to even sign his own name. He can now spell photosynthesis, though I'm not sure how useful that's going to be.

• Earlier in the year Dd won the girls under-11 England Youth Championships, an amazing feat, particularly as she hadn't fenced for 3 weeks prior to the competition due to an injury. She's holding the coach to his previous year's promise of a year's worth of Haribo if the unlikely event of her winning.

• Ds1 and ds2 with their LEGO robotic team won the regional LEGO League competition, came in the top 8 of the Nationals (winning an award for innovation) and were one of only 4 UK teams invited to the European Championships in Spain. It was their first year doing LEGO robotics, their first year giving presentations in front of large groups of people, the first year ds2 typed, not just one, but three (three!) whole sides of A4 (for the research project) and the first time my boys had been on a plane or abroad :) Lots of achievements there!

• And as for my achievements...I spent the year running regular workshops at several home ed groups, got some lovely feedback, made new friends and learned a lot from all the children I've come in contact with. That's pretty good, I think :)

The World Cup as a geography project: Part 1 Resources and Links

Not being a fan of football, I've resigned myself to the fact that for the next few weeks I will be bombarded by football-themed *everything*.

But...a nifty home educator would never let an educational opportunity slip past them.

Here are some educational links which we are planning to use to turn the World Cup into an educational geography project. (Thanks to Sarah from alittlebitofstructure for some of the links)

World Cup chart (free download) 
(There are lots of these on the internet to pick and choose from, but this one seemed fine.)

If you want the poster larger than A4, save the PDF file from the link (click on the little floppy disc icon in the bottom right hand corner). Reopen the file in Adobe from wherever you have saved it. Click on print and under the heading page sizing and handling you should have the option to print it as a poster. Click on the 'poster' option. You can fiddle with the settings, but basically you'll end up with four sheets, each with a part of the poster on that can then be stuck together.

World Cup Group bookmarks from Activity Village
We wont be using them as bookmarks, but they make great headings for displays. We'll most likely use them alongside a world map (see below)

Megamaps - world maps to print out - poster size if you want
If you don't have a world map, this is a great place to print out outline maps. There are lots of options for different sized maps - from a single A4 sheet to maps spread over 64 x A4 pages!

World Cup for Kids (Activity Village)
Lots of football and country-themed activities and printables. We wont be using the football ones, but there are plenty of different things to choose from.

Country Passport (Activity Village) and My country passport study printables
For writing basic info about the countries studied

Alternatively, to save time, you can download Activity Village's World Cup flags bundle for the small price of £3.95 here which has all the 390+ free PDF files in one zipped file.

Brazil-themed activities for World Cup
Click on the link on the page above and it will download a PDF with lesson plans. Links within the lesson plan take you to various resources, including a powerpoint presentation about Brazil.

Brazil- issues about homelessness
More geared towards classroom activities, but might have a few useful ideas for discussion.

Brazil in the school
Brazil resources, PDFs and photos.

World Cup Project book (choose World Cup Project Book from the page of downloads)
Word document to fill in for each country.

A big year for Brazil
Not listing this particularly for the memorisation of maps, but rather for the mini videos that are here and because (if you scroll down) there are some good starting points for discussion about advertising, moral issues around the World Cup etc.

I'll be adding to these if I find any more geography-related links that will be useful. If you have any other ideas, please post them in the comments.

Kids discover - Free 'infographics' educational posters

Have found some lovely mini-posters to download and print on kidsdiscover here

Topics include the water cycle, cells, the rock cycle, the heart etc.

Well worth a look.

(You might have to register/sign up to download the posters, but it's free)

The Rainforest, with links

A while back I was trying to tie in dd's desire to do more science, with ds2's ongoing geography learning. I came up with rainforest (and soils - see previous post) as suitable topics that I could engage them both in. Dd has more of an interest in animals than anything else. Below is her rainforest layers poster: 

The rainforest layers printable (top left of the top picture) was the nicest and simplest one I could find. It can be seen here.

I printed out Rainforest food chain items which we laminated and velcro'd onto our felt board. I think I got more satisfaction from laminating than the kids did from the 5 minutes they spent arranging the food web, but that's kinda how it goes sometimes :)

[For info: This is the link to the food chain printable, which I found via this resource here. The latter has other Rainforest printables, worksheets etc. that might be of use if you happen to be doing Rainforesty things.]



In addition to all the rainforest stuff, ds2 did a mini-poster on The Nile and the Aswaan Dam, which was a spin off from the geography book he is using. He will be starting IGCSE geography in September, so I'm trying desperately to do the more projecty stuff now before we get to the hoop jumping.