Tutor Group – Home Education Is Not Always At Home

Once a week on Fridays,  I go to a tutor group with other home educated children where we do formal Science, English, Maths and History/Geography.   We get given homework most weeks but we don’t get homework from Science or Maths on the week before half term.  School holidays still apply to tutor group.

At the moment we are learning about the internal organs of the human body in Science.
In English we are learning about A Midsummer Nights Dream and the language that Shakespeare uses in the play.
In Maths we are learning about coordinates and how to plot them various ways.
Last but certainly not least in History/Geography we are learning about Japan.

All of the subjects are interesting.

The lessons are an hour long and we have Science and English before lunch and Maths and History afterwards.

KS2 and KS3 are in a class together so the works is pitched somewhere between the two.  Some work is a bit harder for the younger ones in the group.  Those doing GCSE levels are put in a separate class.

Another really good thing is we (the students) have an input into what we would like to learn about.  So this term we as a group, chose Japan which we thought would be an interesting topic.

It’s a good time to see my friends and if you send your children or you come to the one I go to.  I will introduce you to my friends then you can sit with us.  (you may even already know someone there).

I would fully recommend it to everyone.

Vikings – An Interesting Topic – Part 1

Each term I ask my girls if there is anything they would like to learn as a topic.  This term they asked about Vikings. There is quite a lot of Viking history in the County we live in so I hit the internet to find a curriculum to base from then we went to the library  to borrow some books and we were ready.

The first thing we talked about was the most obvious. The longboats.  We talked about the history of them, the size, why they had the shields on the outside and why they burned them.  We completed some worksheets about them then made an origami one to finish that part of the topic. We went to Sheringham which had a replica (small), which they set light to in the evening.

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We talked about the different foods they would have eaten, then we made some Viking bread from a recipe we found in one of the books we got from the library. It was very salty 😀

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Next we talked about weapons and armour.  We visited our local museum where they have an extensive array of weapons and videos which was really interesting.

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Then we made a shield and some swords out of card.

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The display of work we have been doing.  This includes a timeline through history, some research on runes, food, longboats, weapons and armour, and where the Vikings attacked the UK.

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Letheringsett Watermill

We went to Letheringsett Watermill to have a look at how flour is made.  We saw the different cogs which move the stones and through the glass we could see the watermill moving too.

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There were some scales which are used to weigh the bags of flour.  The lady showed us the flour they were making and the shoot it comes down to go into the bags.  The day we went they were making whole wheat flour which felt courser than white flour as it used all of the grain.

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The stones are used to crush the grains and they have a different gap depending on the different flours they make. They are closer together to make finer flours. The lady then showed us some stones which had been used before.  They were very ground down.

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The flour they make in this mill is sold in the mill shop and also in local shops around the county.

It was a very interesting day.

Learning about Famous Artists – Pablo Picasso

As I’ve said before, Elsa is more of a crafy type of person, more hands on.  So am I really too.

I love art, particularly impressionism, so I thought it would be nice to introduce her to different artists from over the years.

I was searching for something I thought might be suitable when I stumbled upon the Pink and Green Mama website, There are several artist ebooks you can download for a small fee.  I chose the 3rd one, but I think any of them would be interesting to do.

So today we started with Pablo Picasso and his blue period. We talked a little bit about Pablo Picasso, where and when he was born, what type of art he did and why he went through his blue period (1900 – 1904).

I had bought some art books and paintbrushes from The Works, so we were ready to give it a try.

Firstly we sketched our portraits, then using blue, white and black paints we created different shades and tones to create our pictures.  This was a really interesting project for me to see if they could use just 3 colours effectively.  They did. 🙂

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Finished artwork 🙂

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