The Museum and paper

We've had a busy past few weeks - played lots of games, been on playdates, to swimming, Beavers and so on.

Springy has written a delightful book (she goes off, cuts up paper, sometimes asks for a little help) and when she has written and illustrated her books she asks to read them to us.

The latest is The Museum (spelt THE MUOZEM) which is about a dinosaur who is hungry. No, she hasn't seen the film Night at the Museum although we did go to the Natural History museum a couple of years back and saw the Tyrannosaurus Rex animatronic there, and this seems to have stuck. The book is backwards but that doesn't matter. It is lovely that she has book making as a creative outlet.

Today, I have been poring over the Hope Education and NES Arnold catalogues. I'm one of those home educators who is able to laugh at some of the contents rather than wanting everything. It's such an irony to see play money, shopping games and so on because we do these things for real so we have no need, unlike schools, to simulate these experiences in a classroom. That said there are a few items I would like. There is a wooden cube set - 1 cm cubes which form 100 by 100 by 100 cubes for length and volume. The plastic stuff leaves me cold though - I'd much rather dip into the Myriad catalogue.

This afternoon we went on an adventure around the home. I used the vignette on paper from the Live Education website as a basis to spring from. We explored toilet tissue by pulling it when dry and then wet it to notice what happened. We held pieces of different paper up against the window to see how much light was let through and then poured a little cooking oil on to show how early people had used oil to waterproof their paper windows and also allow more light in. We discussed wasps and I drew a set of hexagons on our chalkboard and Springy knew that bees used wax instead of paper for the same construction shape. We discussed papyrus and it is fortunate that we have a piece of Egyptian papyrus (it came from the World Scout Jamboree in the summer) so Springy was able to feel it. We then pretended to be wasps and chewed up toilet tissue (not really) with our fingers and added water and then squashed it into a different shape to dry (we'll look at that tomorrow). We have a bamboo plant growing in our lounge so when we discussed paper making in China she could see a bamboo as well. We went around the house on a hunt for paper items - kitchen roll, books, magazines, newspapers and Springy was very excited about each new discovery. We also looked at our house construction with the plasterboard - some of it is falling off in Springy's room which meant it was easy to see the layers. All in all brilliant and I just wish there were more resources written in the same way for me to bounce off with the hands on/discovery approach.

We came back to wasps at the end and Springy had grabbed some plasticine (our lovely new non-smudge Oko certificated stuff from Myriad) and made a wasp. Beautiful :)