The inevitable

Scene: a (fairly new) Home School Room, February 2012

Child 1: I’ve finished

Me: Really? Oh. Well done, let me see. . . well, that’s going very nicely isn’t it C1, I can see you’ve thought of a theme. Now, this part here says ‘paragraph’ and what you’ve done is a sentence . . .

C1. <witheringly> I know. I don’t want to do a paragraph.

Me: Well, the question is partly to see how well you can continue this story with a paragraph – say three sentences or so . . .

C1. <witheringly> I know. But I don’t want to.

Me: I’d like you to please.

C1: I won’t.

Child 2: Why not C1? You would at school.

C1: This isn’t school.

C2 and Me (in chorus, oh dear): Yes it is.

C2: And Mummy’s your teacher.

C1 to me: You’re NOT the teacher.

Me: Well, I am, C1 and this is school. This really isn’t how you’d behave with your teacher or at school.

C1: I don’t care.

C2 then makes an error in her neat copy of a story she’s been writing, shouts at C1, C1 shouts back . . . how will it all end?

Well, end it did and in the afternoon we all truly did enjoy discussing a presentation on Forces (physical, rather than of personality), and drawing pictures of flying monkeys and C1 being blasted with an air cannon. All of this was based on a Royal Institution lecture we attended that was so good it remained good when selectively reprised by me some days later.

Dr Matt Pritchard, you were a star, on which we can all agree.

Royal Institution of Great Britain http://www.rigb.org

Home news

Home education. January 2012. We're new at this and my house tries to accommodate. The walls grow trees and baskets of eggs, and on one egg Child2 has written, ‘Who invented metal’? Oh, what a lovely child, with a lovely question, taking charge of her education so well, so soon.  While supervised from a distance she decides to find out. On the internet. She is triumphant, finds paper and writes the answer in expansive handwriting for my adoration.


The spelling is correct, the reference included, the paper proudly presented. And I learn . . . that the inventor of metal is . . . Black Sabbath.

Thank you, answers.com. 
 

The trips to the Royal Institution and the Science Museum are planned.  But sometimes I think that first answers are best.

I’m sure I’ll be mentioning the Royal Institution again and their great lecture series for children – they’re not just the major Christmas production you may know (from whose archives I filched the probability machine in support of my topic ‘Sell your Cleverness and Buy Bewilderment’). If you visit, don’t miss seeing the game in the basement, where you can be treated to a rendition of Tom Lehrer’s ditty encompassing all the elements of the periodic table. Ten of these were discovered at the Royal Institution, and I may well have stood on the spot where the Davy lamp was invented.  Having taken the children to visit a coalmine last time I was in Yorkshire, it was a good spot to stand on.

Royal Institution of Great Britain http://www.rigb.org/