All the kids were involved in helping with Jonathan’s magnificent gingerbread creation.

War on Gingerbread:

Jonathan describes it in detail: “at the top left corner there is a person with a jetpack  and a double barrelledd shot gun. on the bottom left is a person with a flamefrower. next to him is a dead body.next to the dead body is a lightning strike were the lightning has made a fire.

next to that is a person with a BIG gun. in the left bottom corner is a androgynous.

above   the androgynous is a BOMB!!!!!  next to that is a cloud.”

The trip to Carisbrooke Castle was good.  It was good for me to be going to an English Heritage site without being the organising person and stressing about all the organising.  We had a talk about the castle’s timeline and the kids had a chance to dress up

Jonathan got to play the Castle’s most famous prisoner, Charles I.

We headed off to walk around the ramparts with most of the others but it was just too wet and windy to be enjoyable, so we headed indoors to look around the museum instead.

I had very kindly been given some money to spend on Jonathan so in the shop we got a Trebuchet.

We spent the whole of the next two days making it (between going out to do other things and waiting for the glue to dry) and we are still making adjustments to try and make it fire well.

Obviously while doing this I am I am also helping Ruth with Chemistry IGCSE work and feilding questions from Rebkah sat at the computer about all sorts – typical home-edding really.

]]> http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/04/just-more-home-educating/feed/ 0 http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/04/chill-sunday/ http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/04/chill-sunday/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:58:23 +0000 Susan http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/?p=2714 Some time ago we changed the style of our Sundays to be far more relaxed and family orientated.  This has been brillaint for us making sure we get a proper day off and spend some time together.

This Sunday was a particularly nice one.

Martin and I woke up ridiculously early and mooched about listening to the radio and enjoying the sun in our living room and looking at the silhouette of the Easter Tree.  We were taking the second part of the service at church for “Chill Sunday” but had done all the preparation so there wasn’t too much for us to do.  So a lovely cuppa and bit of mooching kept us happy.

Church went well.  We were having an experiment with something different.  So I gave a short talk and then we split up into groups to have a go at activities linked to the fruit of the Spirit.

Martin took a group outside to plant fruit (well rhubarb and lavender but we’ll add some raspberries too).

Ruth took a group for art (I even let them use my Sharpie pens) and lots of people made little plaques of the fruit of the Spirit.

There was a tiny discussion group and all the while we had some lovely low key music going on that people could join in with and help themselves to communion.  I felt it worked very well and people seemed to enjoy the variety of activities on offer as a bit of a change to the usual – although I did wonder what the few visitors we had made of it!

We even, coincidentally,  had cushions on the floor which made our moving about a bit easier.

So even though we had been involved in organising things it all felt very relaxed and not stressful for us.

The rest of the day flowed happily too.  We had a relaxed lunch, played Ticket To Ride and demons, Rebekah cooked dinner and made some biscuits with Jonathan and Jonathan wrote stories.   We drank the wine and spent a long time in lively robust conversation, with lots of laughter.  Poor Jonathan can’t quite manage to get a word in and gets a bit frustrated.  He has taken to putting his hand up to get attention, it seems to work quite well as we do pause and listen to him.

I love the fact that we all spend lots of time just sitting round with a glass of wine and enjoying each others company.  The girls said that they think that because we do that on a Sunday we are more inclined to chat more on other days.

We’re approaching it in a different way to other exams – Maths was weekly tutorials and Environmental Management was broad understanding followed by 6 weeks of mega revision with loads and loads of exam papers.  This time we have been inspired by Grits and her blog assignments for her children.  So Sam and I are writing weekly blog posts – based on the IGCSE chemistry book and various websites.  The aim is a chapter a week, working through the questions and viewing the material in interactive ways on-line.  We are then getting together every so often to do some practical experiments.

Today was the first day of practical activities.

Firstly we needed to set up the “lab”.  Partly in the kitchen, with a hotch-potch of chemistry equipment borrowed and some everyday items,

and partly in the garden (failing to have a fume cupboard and needing instead a “well ventilated room”).

We do have a real bunsen burner and a borrowed tripod, even a proper beaker and test-tube, but no clamp-stand – a handy microphone stand  did the job nicely!

The kids arrived and this being home-ed they ranged in age from 10 to 15 and some of them are planning to do the exam, some are just following along for fun and some are the brothers of the people doing the course.  We did some demonstrations togtether then in groups did some more while the others did some card-sort activities, demonstration on the relative size on an atom etc.etc.  If you want to see the experiments we did you can have a look at the blog post.

Some of the things we did were:

mixtures and compounds – using sulphur and iron filings

Our first effort at showing diffusion in a liquid using some rather illicit Lead Nitrate and Potassium Iodide

The second effort worked much better and gave some spectacularly sparkly results

We used a mix of kitchen equipment and lab stuff, so this was speed of diffusion of a drop of food colouring in water of different temperatures.

We had a go at making elephant toothpaste  but ours wasn’t anywhere near as spectacular as the ones you can find on you-tube – I will have to have more attempts to see if I can do better – anyway it illustrated what a catalyst was.

And here are some shots of the theory – should the LA ever need to see a bit of evidence that we do actually do something!

And then when most people had gone home Martin went and smashed the bouncing egg at the bottom of the garden.

Paper flowers on the cross, fruit and sweets (in place of the beans in our sacrifice jar) on the mantle piece and some flowers.

I added the decorated eggs to the Easter tree and put a basket of decorated egg on the table.

We did have a few chocolate eggs too.

The eventually the others got up and we had some of the fruit with yoghurt for breakfast – yummy!

Then a trip to church where I was delighted to sing Thine Be The Glory – it is to Easter what Oh Come All Ye Faithful is to Christmas – an absolute necessity if you ask me!  Jonathan got a chance to show off his cake based Easter Garden.  He made the cake with Ruth, the cookie stone with Rebekah and the icing with me – he was really impressive with the icing bag as he’s never done that before – and Martin took the photo so we were all involved.

The weather was yucky so we didn’t go and do our egg rolling and instead went home and had a lovely leisurely afternoon eating and playing demons and Wizard and watching Bang Goes The Theory.

Just some observations of celery and food dye.

The inside of some celery that has been in the food dye.

And the inside of some that hasn’t been in the food dye.

Jonathan also made some lovely gloop.  You need real borax for this version to work and it’s now more difficult to get hold of – the borax substitute that is now sold for household use apparently doesn’t work.  As we are not obsessive about cleaning here we still had an old packet of the real stuff  so used that.  You make it with a borax solution, PVA glue and food colouring.

]]> http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/04/more-science/feed/ 0 http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/04/bouncing-egg/ http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/04/bouncing-egg/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:40:48 +0000 Susan http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/?p=2653 So Jonathan really enjoys science and Ruth fancies having a go at Chemistry and Biology international GCSEs over the next year or so which has meant we’ve been thinking about science activities a lot recently.  We’ve started doing a few more science demonstrations so that Jonathan can enjoy them and Ruth can learn something!

So we did what any serious scientist would do and made a raw bouncing egg.

We soaked the egg in vinegar for 3 days and watched the bubbled form as the vinegar reacted with the shell.

Then we tested the gas at the top to see if it was carbon dioxide (a test for carbon dioxide is that it extinguishes a lit match).

Then we fished out the still raw egg and tried to bounce it.

After bouncing it and examining it with a torch we shoved it in some golden syrup.

The we left it for a day.  After that we looked at it again and it was no longer nice and firm and bouncy.  It was pretty squidgy and Ruth noticed that that the syrup was no longer thick but runny.

Then we put it back in water to see what will happen then, but we haven’t got that far yet.

We started with an early (for us) morning and headed down to the church.  Then we had an elicit exchange of dairy-free eggs and got ourselves sorted out for the Good Friday meditation we were taking.

We stole the script for the meditation based on the last words of Jesus from Kingdom Story

We ended with recording of the lovely Aled Jones (definitely getting middle aged, but he has such a lovely tone to his voice) singing Abide With Me (Martin’s favourite hymn)  and this image that we took of the cross at St Benet’s Abbey on the Norfolk Broads.

Then we just had to hang about and prepare for being the final destination of the walk of witness, rearrange the chairs, butter some hot crossed buns, sort out the PA stuff, make some tea and coffee.   But we had about 3 hours to do all this, Ruth took the little ones to the park, Rebekah and Jamie went for a coffee and we just pottled about in church, in quite an idle manner!

The walk of witness arrived, babies cried, songs were sung and lots of drinks and hot crossed buns were distributed.

Then we sat around for a long time with friends and coffee.

Next home.

Jonathan and I had cleared the area around the fire place and had made a cross from the sticks in the garden to put up.

I tidied up our cupboard surface with our Lent stuff on.

Jonathan updated our very behind lent lamb calendar

I put up the cross picture that I made.

I managed to find time to listen to the last instalment of the excellent Peoples Passiondrama on the iplayer.  I read an article that said that religious broadcasting has almost disappeared around the Christian celebrations but I have to say that I have been very impressed with the variety, quantity and quality of the broadcasts relating to the passion on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra during Holy Week.

We also have an Easter tree that Ruth went out to pilfer from the cycle path.

We had a leisurely afternoon spending some of it looking at Jonathan’s bouncing egg and making a lot of quiche for dinner (always a joint effort as Rebekah makes better pastry and I make a better filling) and rebekah also made a batch of truly delicious hot crossed buns.

We sat and ate a very very leisurely dinner, drank a yummy bottle of red wine (which we unfortunately now have to give a small share of to Rebekah) and sat and had a great lot of conversation ranging from theology, to holiday to moral dilemmas to parenting.  The girls said some lovely things about us, but Martin said that Rebekah must have been under the influence of the wine!!!

We had a great day because there were lots of times to not be in a hurry, to sit and chat and take our time.  It reminded me that we need to get back to being more idle and not to just rush and be busy all the time but to really slow down and appreciate the here and now, savour time with family and friends and time alone and with God.

Clever home-ed dad Mick had made a brilliant balance beam with nails in it to hold weights (they looked like bags of dog poo but apparently they were 1kg bags of sandpit sand).   They all experimented with placing different amounts of beams in different places and predicting what would happen and how to make it balance.

Naturally as this is home education not school education you need to involve small children and dogs if at all possible!

We then tried adjusting the pivot point of the balance to make Pete and Eli balance.

Then we experimented with lifting a bucket of sand in various ways.

Some had more success than others.

They did some more experimenting and then spent a couple of hours playing while we drank tea and discussed, well,  educating the kids mostly!

]]> http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/03/science-home-ed-style/feed/ 0 http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/03/dairy-free-danish-pastries/ http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2012/03/dairy-free-danish-pastries/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:39:23 +0000 Susan http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/?p=2618 Had a go at Mary Berry’s Danish pastries today, but used soya milk instead of cows milk and Vitalite instead of butter (lots and lots of Vitalite).

This process took ages and ages.  First of all I made the dough which wasn’t just “soft” but too sticky to kneed, so I added a very little extra flour and it was fine.  then I left it in the lovely sunny garden to rise for an hour.  Then there is all the palaver with the adding blobs of Vitalite and folding it over and doing it again and resting in the fridge and then more folding and rolling and more resting and hoping not too much of the Vitalite pops through the dough and all over the work surface and rolling pin and at some point in between making the almond paste (that was really really easy ).

Then the shaping and leaving them to rise again.

Then the eggy wash and into the oven. Then a drizzle of icing and we’re ready to go.

Jonathan knows which one he wants – due to being on a dairy-free diet since he was about 6 months old he has never tried a Danish pastry before and he loved these  I’ve kept a few in the freezer for him to have at a later date.

My conclusion was that these were very time consuming to make but not too expensive, very yummy and brilliant for a dairy-free version.  I’d like to try some other fillings and also perhaps some savoury ones next time.  just as well they are too fiddly to make too often as I wouldn’t want to eat the amount of fat in these too often!

We had a lovely Sunday afternoon walk out at Bembridge, Rebekah was at a youth event with the Eternal Flame but the rest of us had a great afternoon outdoors.

Martin spent the time taking arty-farty photos.

The rest of us spent the time hunting for interesting stones,

playing, drawing and bird watching.