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 + 2Flags 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.
JabberwockyThe 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.
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