Today, as well as making table decorations for home, we have been rehearsing our songs for the end of term French class demonstration to parents - it involves a lot of changing of hats!

13th December -The prevalence of wobbly molars has led to an interest in finding out more about teeth. Our 2 are presenting their research to date to the pre-school children, with molar masks they have created. It was the children’s choice to put on a play for the younger ones. This was an interesting experience of working together to produce something creative - important learning in and of itself in terms negotiating a process, collaborating on ideas and thinking about their audience

6th December - We had the second seasonal outing to Waltham Place organised by a Home-Ed mum - thank you. We saw the oxen who are trained to work on the farm, together with atypical sheep who refuse to be herded. We learnt about wool and the (messy and long) process of turning a fleece into yarn and had a lovely afternoon making felt and learning felting techniques.

30th November - The children have been collecting pictures of buildings through time to add to the paper timeline that we have created. We spent some of our morning trying to date these. The challenge question to the children is to think about some of the possible reasons why we have so few examples of buildings up to 1000 AD.

29th November - This is work introducing the comma - as you can see, the children thoroughly enjoyed creating their (very long) list, using the little environment from the Children’s House - good practice in thinking up lots of juicy adjectives too.

28th November -Following on from a child’s interest in Egypt, we discussed the importance of the River Nile for many different reasons, looking up the atlas and thinking about agriculture, paper, communication and trade. We re-enacted bartering - thinking about what neighbouring countries might have to barter and trade in return. We had an impromptu cooking session, baking Egyptian pastries to a historical recipe - still warm from the oven, with honey glistening, they looked so enticing. How

23rd November - The children have been doing a lot of work on time and this gives us the opportunity to discuss AD/BC, the Nativity, decades, centuries and millennia. We have created a time line with the bead chains and string - to experience these in relation to each other. As a result of their discussions about the Nativity, some of the children followed up to explore the symbols of different religions. This prompted a very interesting discussion with one of our volunteers about Hinduism

14th November - Our work this afternoon focused on light: the children were examining what was transparent, opaque and translucent - with objects in the environment. This was a piece of sustained work and the children made some very interesting observations. They enjoyed the ‘spooky hands’ demonstration too.

9th November - The children have been experimenting with viscosity and fluidity today and we had our own viscosity races. The older children debated what we needed to do to make the experiment a fair one and managed the recording. The younger children decided on quantities and were responsible for timing.