Light (part 2)

Here are two optical instruments we made while we were on the topic of "Light".

This is our periscope made by cutting and re-shaping a cereal box. It was painted white so it will camouflage with our white walls. ;-)


I found a place that sold little pieces of mirror quite by accident! God's providence! The periscope turned out to be a wonderful toy for play and my boys are now begging to make another extremely long one so they could spy on each other when they are on different decks of their bunk bed. What a practical application?!

This is our second instrument; a pin-hole camera made from a cream cracker tin. We wrapped blue paper around it and decorated it with gold stars to give it a whimsical look.


This is an example of what we looked at.


And the inverted image on the screen (made of tracing paper).


Here are some pointers if you want to make a pin-hole camera too:

• Use a big tin if possible
  
• Line the interior of the tin with black paper
• Pin-sized hole will produce quite a dim image; a toothpick-sized hole worked better for us. (the bigger the hole, the larger your camera has to be)
  
• Design a way to move your screen in or out so that you can get the image in focus
  
• Image will appear clearer if your eyes are cupped.

Related post : - Light

Medieval Birthday Celebration

Preparation for the Medieval Party started about two weeks before the event. Invitation cards were sent out and details were planned. Actual gathering of material and making of things took place a week before. It was a nice departure from our usual school routine. This happened to coincide with the one week school holidays so we had "lighter" school days then.


Costume

We wanted a costume party but did not expect our guests to come with the appropriate costumes. In any case, we don't have costumes either. We figured we could make very simple ones. This is what I did. I used gray coloured cotton fabric, cut them into rectangular sheets and use a safety pin to pin the back and front flaps at the shoulders. I had initially wanted to sew / hem these but time did not permit that. I was glad the fabric we chose lasted one wear with rather minimal fraying.

D and B designed their own coat of arms. We read the book Coat of Arms by Catherine Daly-Weir. This book comes with templates so that made it easier. The symbols and animal designs were drawn or traced onto coloured papers and then cut out. These cut-outs were then glued with white glue on a shield shaped flannel. The completed crest was in turned glued onto the gray armour. (I am beginning to discover how useful white glue is!) This method required no sewing at all!!! What a time saver?!

Coat of Arms gives detailed explanation on the significance of the colours and symbols that are often used. These are my boys' final products. They each made crests for all the members in their group for the Dragon Hunt.



Welcome Table / Decoration

I found idea of giving fictitious names to our little guests from this site. We came out with ridiculous sounding names that are food related (Straw of Berry, Gin of Ger, Guard of Lick, Man of Gostin etc...) These names were written on ice-cream sticks that were decorated to look like mini swords. The idea was to let our guest draw a "sword" out from the "rock" like King Aurthur style. The illuminated letters we made were put to good use in a little poem I composed to explain what to do.





Music

What is a party without music?! I hunted long for these and asked at forums to finally find a site that allows for download of MP3s! Gregorian Chants and other such church music (which are what most people know of music of that period) were much to solemn so I chose Medieval Dances instead. Here is a site of Medieval Dances. I selected the album from Anstrorran Dance Symposium for our "banquet".


Craft 1 - Glorious Goblets

I wanted to occupy the children while they waited for the food to be ready. I got the idea of decorating plastic wine goblets with sequins from this site. These are some that were decorated by the children.


These goblets were then used during the party for drinks. No problem with mixed-up cups ;-)


Archery

We have two wooden bows we bought long ago at Daiso. D and B love to play with these; shooting chopsticks along our corridor. We experimented and found that these bows could actually be used to shoot chopsticks into cardboard boxes!


D and B were excited to let their friends try their hands on some archery too. However, we were worried the bows might give way if they were pulled too hard so we decided to add a toilet roll core on our target board as the bull's eye instead. Accurate shots, regardless of the power of the shot, would lodge the arrow into the tube; the arrow should sit comfortably in the tube even if it doesn't pierce the cardboard. This set up worked pretty well :-) I think the children enjoyed this quite a bit.



Craft 2 - Medieval Arrows

Chopsticks as arrows don't look very pretty. We decided to dress our arrows up! I found how to make a medieval arrow from this video clip. I simplify the steps a little and tried to teach this to the kids. This craft required some fine motor skills so mothers were roped in to help. This project didn't turn out too well but I hope some interest was generated :-b

Dragon Hunt


I sent the children on a wild-goose-chase kind of Dragon Hunt. Each clue was written in a poem that played around with words. I composed these poems one day while my boys stayed over at their grandparent's place. I enjoyed myself thoroughly and in the process renewed my interest in poetry! The children had to decipher the clues. There was just a lot of scrambling around from place to place - all around my estate. :-D

I originally intended them to find the dragon and throw tennis balls into the eye of the dragon. But because we were running late, the final Dragon thrashing was skipped. :-(



Food

We had medieval potash with bread. Traditionally, potash was marshy soup with potatoes, beans and various spices. I concocted one without the more unfamiliar stuff. I decided to have pizza as a supplement just in case people are not used to medieval food.

It has become a "tradition" for me to bake apple pies instead of birthday cakes for my boys. (They are two of those weird kids who dislike cakes.) So I did bake two apple pies. Unfortunately, I didn't time myself properly so the baking time extended into the time for preparation of the other party food. As a result, my poor guests had to wait patiently for their lunch.

My dear husband was such a great help in the kitchen that day with assembling the pizzas while I got the children organized and prepared the other stuff. In our original plan, he was supposed to be the jester - juggling and entertaining... haha. Well, thankfully we don't have grumpy guests to cheer up and the children were left to entertain themselves most of the time.


All in all...

We all had fun!! Fun during the preparation as well as during the party itself. I am just super exhausted after that! I truly think it was well worth it though.

I kind of like this sort of themed party. May consider doing a Greek /Roman themed party next time... but without the food. Haha... Cooking is really not my forte :-)

Art : Limbourg Brothers I - Clay Animal Figurines

After reading another fellow homeschoolers blog on their artist study, I was inspired to restart ours. For the next few weeks we will be studying the life and works of the Limbourg Brothers. They are three Dutch brothers Herman, Paul and Jean. They were well-known for their richly illuminated Book of Hours.

A short description of the Limbourg brother can be found here. I was very attracted to this site because it has little fun puzzles and worksheets corresponding to various artists. My boys enjoyed solving and filling up these during their free time. I will be filing these sheets up in their art file together with their brief outline about the artists and whatever related drawings or paintings they did during our study of the Limbourg Brothers.

One of the projects in our Artistic Pursuit book was to make animal figurines of possible animals that the Limbourg brothers would see in their patron's (Duke de Berry) castle. We thumbed through the books we have that had clear photographs of animals. We each chose an animal to replicate. B wanted to look at our Neon Tetras in our aquarium instead. D chose a seal and I, an owl.

We started a new pack of clay. This time I bought a small pack of clay (500g) so that we can finish the whole pack in one sitting (solves the problem of having to keep the unused clay properly so that it won't harden). We managed to make another owl, a grizzly bear, a frog and that last little bit of clay was conveniently transformed into a snake. Every bit of the clay was used up. I liked it this way and would probably do the same next time.

It took us 2 sessions to complete our figurines. One session of two hours to mould and another session of slightly less to paint them.

After completing the animals, we sat down to constructively evaluate our work.

D didn't like his seal. We all agreed that the shape was not right. I however praised him for his effort in mixing just the right colour for the seal (He used up SO much of our paint in the process!! Ok... never mind about that ;-)). He was proud of his bear :-)
(I have taken pictures of our clay models together with the photographs we copied from.)



B wanted to make another owl after seeing me complete mine. But he wanted his owl to turn its head to face the back. He have read that owls can turn their heads almost 180 degrees to the back. After realizing that this might look funny, he decided it will turn its head to the side instead.



I joined in the fun too! Here are my sea turtle and frog.



We all enjoyed ourselves so much!!! We unanimously agreed that we need to have more regular clay model-making sessions. I am not sure how realistic this plan is though :-b


Visit Rumphius Webpage Art to learn more about how we approach Art in our homeschool.

History / Mathematics : Parthenon and the Golden Rectangle

We first read about the Parthenon in our Histroy core book Story of the World vol. 1 by Susan Wise Bauer. Subsequently, we learnt more about this ancient ruins from the travels of Richard Halliburton in his Complete Book of Marvels. Two paragraphs were used for copywork and dictation. (See my post on Parthenon for copywork)

We started making a model of the Parthenon when we first read about it. It took us several session of cutting and pasting to complete the model. It actually took us almost 10 hours to complete it! With 14 internal and 46 external columns to roll and glue, I don't think the boys (and I) will ever forget the Parthenon!

Here is D cutting away... look at the tray of columns ready for gluing.


Here is B with the half completed temple beside him...


We had to weigh the columns down with books while we let the glue set.


Here is the completed model. Impressive? (I'll have to arm-twist you to say YES in any case!! :-o)





This project is about the most labour intensive one we have ever embarked on. Of course we didn't know it will be like this when we started. I kept spirits high throughout by setting small achievable goals at each session. So some sessions were not more than an hour long. We enjoyed ourselves in the process. I am just not sure we will try something similar again though ;-)

In a related reading from Penrose the Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas, we learned about the golden rectangle and its fascinating characteristics. The golden ratio was mentioned but what was more obvious to my two boys was the ability to draw in infinite number of squares within the golden rectangle.

We were intrigued that the golden rectangle can be seen in many natural things around us like the butterfly or dragonfly. And if you draw aches within the squares, you get equiangular spirals that were supposed to be similar to that found in some snails.

Many a man-made objects also have the golden rectangle eg. credit cards and the Parthenon! Apparently, artist and architects incorporate the Golden Rectangle in their art works. You can read more about the obsession with the Golden Ratio at this site.

My original plan was to just read through the chapter on the Golden Rectangle, but just when we finished my boys enthusiastically asked if we could construct a Golden Rectangle (Penrose showed us how to do it - This site has a similar approach). Before I even had time to answer, they were off the sofa running to fetch paper and pencil.

We did try to construct Golden Rectangles. Then it daunted on us that we need to know a way to check if a rectangle was "golden". We managed to figure that out after some thinking. So we tried to check if my credit cards were Golden Rectangles. To our disappointment, it was not! Oh well... it just goes to show we mustn't always believe what we read. Ha ha... It was enlightening nonetheless.


Visit Rumphius Mathematics Webpage or History Webpage to find out more about how we approach Mathematics or History in our homeschool.

History : Greek Jars

We read that a Greek amphora was a two-handled jar with a flared neck, usually made big enough to hold about 10 gallons of olive oil. To win one was such an honour that some athletes were buried with the amphoras they had won! We were thus inspired to make our very own miniature Greek amphora.

However, we were faced with some challenges.

We used a air-drying red clay to make our replicas. This clay was leftover from our Sumeriam cuineform tablets project some months ago. They have hardened significantly and have become extremely crumbly. So we could not shape our jars to have the flared necks as planned. Instead, we used a disposable plastic cup to stick our patchy clay onto it just to get the shape right. (I read about this method from a project book but didn't like the idea at first. But it looked like that was the only way to go with this sort of clay.)

We had to change the whole design of the jar after that. No handles were added because our clay was just impossible to shape. After an hour of shaping, we did end up with something that looked like a jar. These were left to dry before we removed the plastic cup inside and continued with some more patching.

Unfortunately, at this point, B's jar rolled off the table and cracked. It was too badly damaged that it was now impossible to repair. I had to be quick to think of a way to console him. I assured him that it was alright because we could pretend that the broken pieces were excavated from a Greek acheological site. It would be fun to piece our "ancient artifacts" together again; just like what real archeologists do.

He liked the idea a lot and was wholehearted in completing his decorations!

We searched for authentic Greek designs. Many of the pictures of Greek jars showed drawings of athletes in action or pictures from Greek mythology. These I thought would be too difficult to reproduce, so we decided to try the simple geometric designs that were typical of the jars in the Dark Ages of Greek history.

So here are the end products - our ancient Greek treasures; one a "rare" complete piece and the other, pieced up together from broken relics ;-)


This just goes to show that not all our little projects go smoothly as planned. Hiccups here and there sometimes force us to change our plans completely. Isn't life like this all the time?! Being flexible makes life so much easier to bear...

B is now enjoying taking his broken jar apart to reassemble. :-) And they look forward to really making an amphora. (er... if we have the time?!...)


Visit Rumphius History Webpage to find out more about how we approach History in our homeschool.

History : Greek Paper Dolls

When I was planning our History lesson on Greek Wars, I didn't think much of the making of paper dolls activity suggested in the Story of the World Activity book. I made photocopies of the doll anyway, ... just in case.

Lo and behold, they were snatched and worked on even before the paper had a chance to cool off after rolling out of my printer! What's more, I haven't even read aloud the chapter on Greek Wars! Haha... That is the problem I face; I do not have the privacy that school teachers have to prepare lessons.

My boys conscientiously cut, coloured and assemble the dolls while I was busy preparing dinner.

They were more interested in the warriors obviously. I had to persuade them to complete the lady dolls as well. They did those quite unwillingly at first but found them useful afterwards when they were role-playing because at least now Odysseus and Hector has a Helen to fight over ;-)


They took quite a lot of pains in choosing names for their dolls; reread some portions of their history books and other story books with Greek themes to find the bravest Greek warrior. It was quite hilarious initially because they insisted on calling one Robin Hood. To that, my respond was, "No, no. Wrong era!"

I managed to sneak in some Mathematics as they were constructing their dolls. They needed to prop the dolls up with triangular bases. I had a chance to introduce such terms as right-angle triangles, isosceles triangles and equilateral triangles.

That night, they made me promise to read the chapter on Greek Wars the next day.

All in all, this turned out to be a rather fruitful session.


Visit Rumphius History Webpage to learn more about how we approach History in our homeschool.

History : Greek Columns

Our History readings brings us through the ancient Greek civilization. Here's what we learnt about the contribution of the ancient Greeks to architecture. This little poem (from Ancient Greece by Altman and Lechner) aptly describes the three significant Greek column stlyes that are still seen in numerous buildings around the world:

Ionic columns are topped with scrolls.
Doric columns are flat.
Corinthian columns are much more ornate.
And now you know all about that.

Here's our replicas of these columns:


It took us 2 hours of gooey, messy fun to shape these!


Visit Rumphius History Webpage to find out more about how we approach History in our homeschool.