10:18 Thursday. Learning about...

Skeletons!

(At the Natural History Museum)

Thursday: Printing adventures, bugs, rocks and kerb crawling.

Thursday.

We all of us head for the University Press printing museum:

Ds1 tries to beat the speed of the camera shutter - Ha! Caught you!

The original printy thingy plate from the mouse's tale/tail in Alice in Wonderland

And then, the boys head for a printing workshop:

And with a little frustration, produce some fabulous hand-printed sheets of paper.

Meanwhile, dd and I discover a whole new meaning to the term 'kerb crawling'
There's a lot of kerb in our city. And it takes a long long long long time to crawl along it all.

Occasionally there are glimpses that she has inherited her mother's madness:

What big feet you have...(if you're a dinosaur)

Bugs, bugs, glorious bugs

That's me and the three kids. I'm the big flat one with bingo wings.

Then on to the rocks (oh joy!).

Dd takes 20 blurry photos of rocks while I go walkabout, take photos of unsuspecting tourists and wonder if I had a pocket of spit-dried-paper balls whether I could actually hit them. Ahem. And then I grow up again.

We rediscover the museum microscope

Elementary my dear Watson: dirty thumbnail, sign of a filthy child and a mother who doesn't give a toss.

Ouch! Attack of the killer stuffed animals. So that's why they say 'Please Touch': it's so gallery assistants can have a laugh watching small children being eaten by taxidermied wildlife.

Just time for a quick visit to the scary next-door museum with the pointy jangly people who stare when you put a quid in the box. Not forgetting the shrunken heads and the ghoulish masks.

And the best bit of all: a chance to see what people have dropped down the grill holes in the floor of the museum...

'Ooh! A pencil! A hairclip!'

'Yeah yeah. Can we go home now?'

Oh yay! Oh yay! October round-up is here!

Ok, what can I say bloggy audience? I must kneel at your feet and beg forgiveness.

Forgive me for I have sinned: I've been a bad bad blogger.

You see this is how it happens:
I think of something I need to post. I have the photos; I have the words. But then somehow I don't get them to the pc.
Then a day or two later, something else happens that I want to blog. This time I get to the pc, but I don't have the photos to upload. So I think, 'well I'll wait till I have the photos'.

And well, you can guess the rest.

So here I am to rectify the situation. I have forgotten all the words I was going to say, all those pearls of wisdom/angst/humour. So instead we'll stick to annotated piccies.


Dd's 7th birthday. The hedgehog cake. Entirely home-made (well the role of nice mummy didn't extent to hand-crafting the chocolate buttons, but you know what I mean).


The best party game ever: tie mini chocolate donuts to strings off the washing line and yell 'Shark Attack!' and realise how difficult it is to take a nice photo of your child at a party without everyone else's kids in it. Especially difficult when said child is wearing a bear hat.

The best bit of birthdays of course



Mother has a fit of worksheetitis and sends children on a trail around museum. 'Just read the question again.' I say cheerily through gritted teeth 'The answer's got to be here somewhere.'

Detour to the toy shop to goggle at over-priced house-junk (the reward for not filling in the museum trail). We are all mildly impressed by the lego R2D2.

'No you can't have one for Christmas!'

Making beady bugs. Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas instead of a lego R2D2..?

Dying fluorescent orange cotton a (hopefully) less fluorescent orange colour.

Only another 20 or so balls to go...

Hoping these will make stripey socks because I'm too tight to buy the proper wool.

So, if you're not getting a beady spider for Christmas,

it could be fluorescent orange (and brown) socks.

Halloween bonfire party in motion

A picture just made for quirky captions. Suggestions anyone?

How about 'The devil is in the detail' ?

Or perhaps 'It was a hell of a halloween'?

Is it one of my kids in the photo?

No, obviously someone more willing to wear silly headgear than my bunch.

I think someone has been drinking too much Tango.

And the most exciting part of the halloween bonfire party?

When the fire engine arrived, of course!

Nothing us mothers like more than when the firemen stripograms arrive

I think everyone should set fire to their carpark

and invite a few firefighters along to the party.

On our trip somewhere between worksheetitis and toy shop we do something far more educational: watch a stuntsman do a stunt for the next series of 'Lewis'. To quote a famous band: 'That aint working that's the way you do it,

get your money for nothing and your chicks for free.'

(Though it must cost a fortune in chiropracter fees.)

Darwin does it for home education...

Have I mentioned before that we've been having a bit of a Darwin/Evolution theme recently?

Seeing as it's his 200th anniversary I thought we'd make the most of any workshops, tv programmes, books etc. Well we went to the Darwin exhibition at The Natural History Museum in London a few weekends back. There was huge amounts of stuff to be seen just in the museum, let alone at the exhibition, and the kids were really good. But it was a long day...a long weekend.

Watch out! There's a scary scorpion behind you!

The entrance hall of the National History Museum

Pose for your mother outside the museum then...

And again...

Ooh go on, humour me, just one more photo...

Alright then..last time.

Yep, that's the Darwin guy!

(Ok, we've seen him, can we go home now mum?)

We've also been working on a -shhh - 'project'. I kinda hate the P word, cos it sounds all big and important and, yes, so unachievable.

Well in reality it's not so much of a P thing, but more of a lapbook thing. I've resisted the lapbook stuff before, thinking that my kids would see past my attempts to make something 'educational' as something more palatable. But...I thought for this Darwin/Evolution theme that we'd give it a go. After all, I'd spent a fortune on books from Amazon, even bought a couple of DVDs. It seems a waste to just look at them sitting on the shelves. So this was my lounge on the first day of our lapbook thing:

I think on days like these you just have to grit your teeth, forget about the mess, and accept that you're going to have a lot of clearing up to do at the end of the day. And - most importantly - you have to accept that there might not be alot to show for all that mess. Why does so much mess equal so little product? Answers on a postcard...

Of course there are some home educators who do this sort of nice structured thing every day (in a more controlled, table sort of way). As you may have guessed from my blog entries so far, I'm not one of them...

So, how did we start these lapbooks on Darwin/Evolution? Well, first a large piece of stiff paper folded into a wallet/book shape. Then we photocopied bits and pieces out of books and then the kids started sticking in.

We're working our way round where Darwin travelled on The Beagle. Tuesday we looked at The Beagle and all the equipment and crew that went on it. Today we read a chapter about Ecuador and Uraguay, and Fossils, and then the kids watched a fossils DVD by David Attenborough. (Ok, big tick of box.).

Am I sounding smug? Oops sorry. Those who read my blog will know that our bursts of educational activity are just that - bursts - and when they happen I feel compelled to write about it. It's not smugness...it's giving myself a teeny tiny pat on the back (well if I don't, who will?)

What you mean I'm meant to enjoy this??!!

oh, ok then if you insist...

Quiet children! Now then, I'm going to point at the map with my nose.

Can any of you find Ecuador for me?

[Edited on 6 April to correct spelling of David Attenborough's surname]