Keeping the children quiet: Part 2

A Museum of Things
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago (in the 1980s), we used to take our children to a great many museums, until one day they were inspired to create a museum of their own, situated in George's bedroom. Wanting to cover a broad spectrum, they called it "The Museum Of Things", and we adults were obliged to buy homemade entrance tickets to visit the museum's special exhibition and have our tickets checked and stamped at the door. I no longer remember exactly what the exhibits were (model railway engines? collections of shells? feathers? animal bones? favourite books and posters?) but I do remember that each item had a neat label giving suitable information about it, and that we weren't allowed to examine the exhibits at random but were instructed to follow a precise circuit round the room.

If you are the sort of family that visits museums, feel free to play with this idea. I'm sure my kids, now middle-aged parents themselves, won't mind your borrowing it! The point is that the children themselves become the collectors, curators and administrators.

Rolled paper frames
Another thing my children will remember is how we used to make frames for dens out of rolled up sheets of newspaper. This structural engineering exercise also requires duct tape for dealing with the joins and corners. By trial and error experimentation, it doesn't take long to realize that some shapes are far sturdier than others.

Do not plan for a geodesic dome on your first attempt; this would be too ambitious.

It occurs to me that homes of today may not have so many sheets of newspaper lying around. So if you can't find newspaper, this activity could to be modified into building smaller scale frame-like structures from tightly rolled sheets of printer paper, or drinking straws. If you want to combine engineering with a foray into Maths, you could construct a set of polyhedrons (comparing the number of sides and corners) and then dangle them from a bedroom ceiling on threads, like mobiles.

My husband came up with a challenge for the older kids in relation to this exercise. Find a polyhedron where Euler's formula is incorrect! Euler's formula states that

the number of faces + the number of corners (vertices) = the number of edges + 2 

Flags and pennants
Who likes flags? Children can try identifying them, copying them, or making their own.

Watercress eggheads
Has your family tried this? If you can't find cress seeds, mustard seeds grow just as well. Getting kids into gardening is much easier when it's a fun gardening idea: watercress eggheads.

Dressing up: historical costumes
I hope every family gets some respite from struggling with the new home-schooling routine, this weekend. I wonder if it would help to put a variety of "dressing-up" clothes into a pillowcase and let your children play with those for a while. Most children like dressing up.

If you want to turn this into an educational activity at a later date, have them do some research on costumes worn in historical times and see if they can imitate those. When I was young I seem to remember I had a book of "Costumes Through The Ages" and used to spend ages browsing through it or copying the illustrations. My sister and I also used to dress up as Cavaliers from the English Civil War of the 17th century in order to ambush imaginary Roundheads. The Cavaliers were "Wrong but Wromantic", as it said in the funny book "1066 And All That", and the Roundheads "Right and Repulsive".

Easter eggs on twigs
Home schooling tip for Easter. This is on my kitchen windowsill today ... all too amateur and incomplete, but you get the idea. I imagine your family could do better than this!

Units of measurement
Learning cannot be all fun and frivolity. With my series of homeschooling tips, I've probably been leaning too much in that direction. As well as wanting to keep your offspring creatively occupied at home, you are doubtless worrying about the routine schoolwork that they're missing, so here come some recommendations for more serious lessons.

Exam syllabus notwithstanding, if Chris and I were the parents of teenagers in lockdown, we'd take the opportunity to focus on the ESSENTIALS of a school subject first.

1st recommendation:
Before they launch into some Physics homework, it's best to make sure your middle-schoolers or high-schoolers know what the base units of measurement are, because they won't make much progress otherwise. Can they confidently explain the difference between weight and mass? between temperature and heat? between acceleration and velocity? between energy and power? Can they tell you in what units each of those must be measured?

To add a hint of fun, the unit prefixes could be listed and memorised / memorized:

yotta, 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

zetta, 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

exa, 1 000 000 000 000 000 000

peta, 1 000 000 000 000 000

tera, 1 000 000 000 000

giga, 1 000 000 000

mega, 1 000 000

kilo, 1 000

hecto, 100

deca, 10

deci, 0.1

centi, 0.01

milli, 0.001

micro, 0.000 001

nano, 0.000 000 001

pico, 0.000 000 000 001

femto, 0.000 000 000 000 001

atto, 0.000 000 000 000 000 001

zepto, 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001

yocto, 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001


Fractions
The ESSENTIALS of a school subject, my second recommendation:
My husband sometimes gives students private help in preparation for Maths exams, and what he says is that their problems nearly always lie with the fact that they have never really mastered the concept of fractions. Understand fractions and the rest will follow! (so I gather). You can't begin too soon. This is a link to primary school material, but try it out with your older kids and see how well they manage.

Jabberwocky
The ESSENTIALS of a school subject, my third recommendation ... was going to be about languages, but being a (former) language teacher I hardly know where to start. So while I'm mulling this over, I give you my favourite nonsense poem, which my sister and I know by heart because we used to recite it in front of our parents — complete with melodramatic actions!

If you want to make an English exercise out of it, go ahead. Get your young students to identify all the nouns and verbs in this, then all the adjectives, the pronouns, the conjunctions, the adjectival phrases and what not. Or they could just have fun acting it out, as we did. They may pronounce "gyre and gimble" in any way they wish.

Maybe the first essential, your duty, even, when teaching English or any other language, is to instill in your pupils a lasting delight in words.

A letter to your older self
You have doubtless seen other posts encouraging you or your children to keep a written day-to-day record of the COVID-19 lockdown experience. Good idea, because it's amazing how much one forgets, as time has goes by, and it's going to be important to remember this. If younger children don't want to write a lot, get them to draw a series of cartoon pictures.

However, I have an alternative suggestion. My daughter was given a special assignment at school when she was in Grade 8 (while we were living in North Carolina). Her English teacher got each student in her class to write and seal a letter in a self-addressed envelope that would not be posted until that student would leave school at the age of 18. The teacher would then mail the letter back to its writer. Emma says she had to write about how she imagined her life would be in five years time, and about what she wanted to do or be when she grew up. She also described her life at the time of writing, at the age of 13. As a young adult she was thrilled to receive that letter. (Because our family used to move house rather often she'd had the foresight to put her grandfather's address on the envelope and he had forwarded it to her.)

As a variation on this inspired idea, I suggest that your children write a letter to themselves describing what their lives are like right now. Get them to seal the letter without showing you what's in it (they'll need to know this before they start writing, and you must NOT be tempted to look over their shoulders while they're at it). You must then faithfully hide the sealed letter until five years have gone by, and then, in May 2025, bring it out and let them open the envelope and read it. On that date it will be their choice whether or not to show you what they'd written.

Keeping the children quiet during the COVID-19 lockdown

... or, at least, occupied.

These are my ideas so far, posted day by day on Facebook since March 19th, and collected here in backwards chronological order (the order doesn't matter).

Invent a Secret Code
Sometimes teachers get insights from the children they teach.

My favourite class (somewhere in Wales) was a class of 11-year-olds learning French for the first time. Two of the boys lingered after one of my lessons to tell me, all excited, that they were now using French as their secret code. In other words, they were having fun with the language (even if their French at that stage was all wrong, as I'm sure it was).

How about suggesting that your children stuck at home use a foreign language as a code for transmitting secret messages to one another or to their online friends, or that they invent their own secret code?

Conduct a recording of orchestral music
Zubin Mehta's 18-month-old grandson has been delightfully doing this at home, moving his whole body to the music while watching and hearing one of Mehta's symphony orchestra concerts.

Hula hoops
(April 6) we watched a video clip of our 6-year-old grandson in Australia playing with a Hula hoop on the patio. Wikipedia tells me that Hula hoops were first invented in 1958; I remember them well. There's a physical exercise idea for any child that can get hold of one.

Garden on a tray
When my sister and I were little girls, we used to make miniature gardens on a tray.

Give the garden a base of soil or damp sand or florist's foam. Moss, if you can find it, makes a realistic lawn, tiny pebbles make paths or stepping stones. (We sometimes had a mirror for a pond. Twigs became trees.) If you add tiny flowers to represent large flowers, give their stems a source of water so that they'll last longer. Take a photo of this transient work of art, so that you'll remember it.

Astronomy 
Choose a clear night for some star gazing.

I got rhythm!
OK, musical children, how many rhythms can you come up with? Tap them out on a (homemade?) percussion instrument.

If parents don't feel like joining in, because you're trying to get some work done, tell the children to try this elsewhere in the house, or in the garden.

Make a maze
Build a maze out of Lego.

Writing practice
Within a time limit, perhaps each member of your family could write a list of good things that he or she has noticed since the day they were forced to stay at home. (I'm not a psychologist, but I have a hunch that compiling a list of the bad things would be less advisable.) The person with the longest list gets a reward, even if it's just a hug.

If you would like to expand this exercise, your list-makers should explain why those were good things, either in writing or spoken words. Children who can't yet write very well could dictate their lists to an older person, observing how that person writes down what they say. It might be best not to correct every spelling mistake that's made, but the lists could be printed out later --- with all the words correctly spelled, this time --- and then displayed on the back of a door or a wall, so that wrong spellings are not reinforced.

My husband thinks that older ones could try to do this exercise in a foreign language.

Family timeline
This one requires a little adult participation. To give children a sense of history, find or construct a long piece of paper and have them draw a timeline on it, marking the important dates in your family's story. Depending on the children's ages, this could be as simple or as complicated as you wish. Illustrate the line with their drawings, or affix printed photos.

Draw floor plans
This mathematical home-schooling tip is inspired by my youngest grandson who told us the other day that he likes measuring, and by memories of my aunt and uncle who designed their own cottage, in Teesdale (England).

Give the children tape measures and get them measuring things, so as to draw floor plans of a room, or rooms, in your house. Encourage older kids to draw their plans as accurately as possible to scale, then calculate the areas of floor space. If you'd rather have them doing this sort of thing outside the house, get them to record the dimensions of your garden or back yard. Or have them design an imaginary living space, showing the exact measurements on their floor plans.

Travel round the world
This is a geographical exercise or fantasy best carried out using Google Maps, these days, although when I was young I used to fantasize by means of a school atlas, often instead of doing the homework I was meant to be doing. Encourage your teenagers to plan a journey round the world, using whatever means of transport they like, other than planes.

Knitting
I'm posting this with some trepidation because some kids I know (mentioning no names) might think that knitting needles would make good weapons.

How about learning to knit? It could be a useful skill to acquire.

Keep it simple, teach them to knit just squares, to start with. If the young parents out there either think this is a stupid idea, or don't have any knitting needles in the house, French Knitting might be a good, alternative way of keeping your children quiet and productive.

Playing hotels
When my sister and I were children we used to love "playing hotels" ... at home. We found that setting the table in an abnormally posh way, providing menus and pretending to be waitresses was great fun. If this game appeals, you could take it further by numbering or labelling your bedrooms and bathrooms, dressing up in uniform and so on.

A variation would be playing at restaurants or cafés. Once, when my parents baby-sat their grandchildren, they spent a whole weekend pretending to be at a boarding school. Young children could set up a restaurant for their dolls or soft toys. Older children could prepare any food and drinks to be served and / or treat this as a role-play exercise, providing menus and taking orders in a foreign language.

This morning I saw photos in a Facebook post of a family who had done something just like this last weekend. Try it yourselves?

Send a work of art to someone
A picture of a lion, displayed at her care home, was one of the last things that delighted Mum (then aged 98) before she lost most of her sight and other faculties. It had been painted by a child from a nearby school to be displayed on the wall of the communal dining room. My mother took me to see the picture multiple times, telling me that in her opinion it was the artist's self-portrait and that she'd very much like to meet him!

If you know someone who might be feeling lonely or depressed just now (if doesn't necessarily have to be someone very old), they might well appreciate receiving a young artist's picture like this, with bright colour painted right to the edges and corners of the paper. Write a friendly covering note, make sure the picture is signed and dated, mount it, put it in a big envelope and post it (if still possible), or take it round to their door.

Make a relief map
One of the most enjoyable pieces of homework I ever did (years and years ago) was to make a papier maché relief map of South America, about poster sized but horizontal, with a thick cardboard base. I painted the mountains, rainforests, rivers, surrounding ocean, etc. I can still picture it now!