Christmas is coming....

 The Girl made a Tardis Advent calendar for The Boy :0)

Here they are trimming the tree on December 1st. They are sooo keen :0D They love it that there are decorations on our tree older than them.

 We took part in the FIAR tree ornament exchange for the first time.. The Girl decided to send out a flock of Christmas sheep a la A New Coat for Anna.

Visiting Santa on a train :0)

Truman's Aunt Farm

Truman's Aunt Farm by Jama Kim Rattigan and G.Brian Karas is a very funny book, the humour stemming from the confusion between 'ant' and 'aunt'. It works well with a Yorkshire accent, not so sure how well it'd work with a southern one :0) The pictures are bright and colourful and add to the fun. Truman is given a voucher to redeem for an ant farm from his aunt, but instead of ants he gets aunts knocking on his door. They look after Truman well and keep him entertained - they are good aunts, but there are too many of them so he finds them all new homes. In the end, he is reunited with his own aunt.
We tried to keep our own ant farms but were very unsuccessful. Catching the ants was very hard and I don't think we managed to get enough for them to maintain a colony. We'll try again next year - it'll be a good excuse to read the book again and they'll get to use the lapbook that I printed out ready :0)
Here is the lapbook the children made :-

We also sang The Ants Went Marching One by One - complete with actions and, for a bit of silliness -and nostalgia on my part - we listened to Adam and the Ants :0)



Resources we used
Ant society printable from Movies in the Classroom
Ant hill maze from Squiglysplayhouse
Ant lapbook from HSS
A good explanation of the homonyms, homophones and homographs
We used the homophones riddle .doc to make Bopykin's minibook (last on the list, right-hand column)
We used minibooks from Kendra's lapbook at The Aussie Pumpkin Patch 
Teachers notes to go with Ant World (see below)
We tried both of these ant farms. Ant World is easier to set up and, judging by the short time we kept them, it seemed better for the ants to live in. 



Books and films we used

Silent Sunday

National Schools Film Week and a half Pt 3

The last two films we went to see were Mr Popper's Penguins and The Smurfs. Out of the two, I have to say I enjoyed Mr Popper's Penguins the most. We had fun trying to speak alliteratively (is that a word?) using our initials and we discussed (again) the treatment of animals and how realstically you could keep 6 penguins in a flat. We also discussed which bits we thought were real penguin action and which bits were computer generated. There was a really sweet moment during the film when all the children in the audience spontaneously started clapping when one of the penguins got out of a bit of a tight spot. They also applauded at the end. I'm not a big Jim Carey fan but I enjoyed it and so did my children, more to the point. It has a lovely happy ending where family relationships take precedence over ambition and greed.
The Smurfs, on the other hand, made me feel dizzy. Parts of the film seemed to move too fast in a spin of little blue men. I found the human characters to be a bit bland for the main part, although Gorgomel had one or two humourous moments. It's definitely a children's film with little in it to appeal to adults - or at least to me :0) Maybe I'd just been spoilt by the other films we'd seen....
On the way back, I asked the kids which film they would choose to buy if they could buy any of the 6 we'd seen for NSFW. The Girl chose Gnomeo and Juliet  and Boykin chose The Smurfs. They found it more difficult to decide which one they would choose to leave out. In fact, The Girl couldn't choose at all and Boykin chose Arrietty. Turns out he's not keen on any of the Japanese films they've got.I'd either choose to buy Gnomeo and Juliet or (seeing as how The Girl's already chosen it and we don't need 2 copies pf the same film) Arrietty. The one I'd leave out would be The Smurf's. Definitely not my cup of tea.
It's been a good week and a half and we're all looking forward to next year :0)

Thwaites Mill Trip

Thwaite Mills in Leeds is well worth a visit. We went with a group of Home Edders to take part in some World War II workshops followed by a tour of the museum. Boykin and The Girl dressed up complete with gasmask boxes and evacuee labels. (The museum gave us gasmask boxes to use, labels to wear and ID cards to keep at the start of the day too).

The staff were lovely and friendly and I hope they enjoyed themselves as much as we did. The first workshop was about the air raids, gas masks and what it would've been like to be evacuated. They got to handle gas masks and a replica incendiary bomb, hear the gas warning rattle and the air raid siren and hide in an Anderson shelter.

 

 After that, we went into the mill and learnt how putty is made and had a go at glazing. They also looked at some German recon maps and discussed what we thought would be likely targets for bombing raids in this area.

The last workshop we did was on rationing. The chidren all got a turn at weighing out the weekly rations for an adult and were reminded that their ration would've been smaller. We were really surprised at the small amount of bacon they got. 2 oz. Not even enough for a butty! And I'm not sure how I would've managed with the amount of tea we would've been allowed either. Mind you, I think the 1oz per week of sweets would've been much better for my children's teeth :0)

 

An adult ration for a week

After lunch we were taken on a guided tour of the museum and saw it in all it's working glory. We learnt that conscientious objectors worked there during the war and even further back people had been paid a shilling to pull any dead bodies out of the river. They were paid more for pulling them out of the canal which ran down the other side of the 7.5 mile island that the mill sits on, so you can guess what they did. Yep. They pulled them out of the river, dropped them into the canal and then dragged them out again to claim the higher rate of pay. Ugh!

Lifting 8cwt of chalk

We were so blessed with the weather - even though it was cold, the sun shone all day.
I'd really recommend going there for a trip. It's only open at weekends and during schoolholidays and for special events. Other than that, you have to book a group visit for one of the 3 different workshops they do there. Thank you so much to those who organised todays outing. We very much enjoyed it and learnt a lot in the process. Just perfect :0)

National Schools Film Week and a half Pt 2

Yesterday, we sat in the balcony of this beautiful old cinema and saw Arrietty. We very much enjoyed it and my children quickly realised it had some similarities in style to Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away. They are all Studio Ghibli films. My eldest loves all things Japanese and loves to share some of this love with his younger siblings :0)


The film is based on The Borrowers by Mary Norton but is set in modern Japan. It was interesting to spot the Japanese things like chopsticks and fish shaped bottles. We read the original book a few years ago for bookgroup and we talked again about the differences between borrowing, stealing and recycling.
I have to say, that as an adaptation, I enjoyed it much more than the 1997 version of The Borrowers starring John Goodman.

 It is a small cinema and Pandaboy was delighted to see there were curtains for the screen. It was built in 1914 and has features that you expect to see in old theatres such as moulded plasterwork and ornate lightfittings.

Today, we went to another old cinema which to see Gnomeo and Juliet. Another enjoyable film that we once more arrived to see by the skin of our teeth. Why does it always take longer to get places than I think it will? The film was funny and had odd bits of Shakespeare thrown in, with a whole array of British actors. I enjoyed playing spot the voice and explaining the Shakespeare references to my kids. If I was going to watch it again with them - which I probably will - then I'll make sure we watch the animated tales Romeo & Juliet first so that they can compare the plot and characters. I quite like the idea of giving Shakespeare's tragedies happy endings.... I'd also visit the movie website for downloads, games, printables etc

National Schools Film Week and a half Pt 1

We went to our first NSFW film yesterday and went to another today. National Schools Film Week is an annual event in which schools can take children to the cinema for free. It is also available to Home Educators who can either book as a group or as individual families. There is a primary programme and a secondary programme and lots of cinemas take part. This year it's on for nearly 2 weeks - the earliest showing I found was on 11th Oct and the last is on 21st Oct. We're booked for 6 films this year. It's such a treat to go the pictures so many times in one week. Film Education also has pdf resources available for most of the films shown.
Yesterday we went to see Rio which we very much enjoyed. We discussed bird smuggling, animal poaching, endangered species, animal sanctuaries and street chldren.
Today we went to see A Turtle's Tale Another animated film about animal preservation with a strong environmental message about the effects of human activity on marine life. There were one or two bits that made us jump but the overall impression of the film was that the sea is a beautiful colourful place and that even though human activity causes lots of damage, there are people who try to help. It made me want to watch Finding Nemo again because of the turtles in that.

Wednesday Catch Up

It's been a busy week and after prompting from my lovely friend, I thought I'd better blog....

On Wednesday we went to our local HE group session with the theme of Autumn festivals. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of everything, which is such a shame cos there was a particularly cute gathering of girls eating lunch in the shelter they'd built for Sukkot. I also failed miserably to photograph the sparkly firework craft I did. And I failed to take photos of the geometric floor patterns and failed to remember which festival they were for :0( Sorry.....

However, I did manage to get photos of....

Hand Sandwiches from A Wacky Guide to Food Fun

Harvest loaf making

Making Trick or Treat bags

Singin' in the Rain

We watched Singin' in the Rain as part of our Film project. Anyone who knows me will know just how much I love this film so it was a great treat to watch it with the kids as part of an educational project. Apart from watching it because I love it, I knew it was a good way for the kids to understand the difficulties involved when studios started to make talking pictures. It's really interesting to see how they could film 3 films at the same time and build sets alongside when there was no sound recording going on. We discussed how sound technology was still very new in 1927 and that they have made massive advances in microphones since. They enjoyed pretending to be Lina Lamont talking into a bush and doing the 'no,no,no' 'yes,yes,yes' bit:0)

We talked about how a lot of silent movie stars didn't transfer well to talking films and how they still use different people to be the voice of someone else, usually for singing. We talked about The Jazz Singer  being the first talking picture and how musicals became very popular. The Panda Boy really enjoyed himself trying to copy all the dancing - luckily he stopped short at trying to do the backflips that Donald O'Connor does in Make 'em Laugh. Phew!

After that, seeing as how I've got a Gene Kelly boxset and it wasn't that late yet, we watched The Three Musketeers. Well, you'll never guess what I noticed. There's a scene in which Gene Kelly/D'Artagnan has a good old swashbuckley fight on some stairs knocking a bloke over the banister, swings off a chandelier, and throws somebody over a balcony rail into a pond, pretty much the same as in The Royal Rascal starring Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont. So I checked and realised that the black and white silent movie clips ARE the same pieces of film interspersed with Lina shots. At one point, if you pause the DVD you can see Lana Turner stood in the doorway, just before they cut to Jean Hagan/Lina. Of course, I realise that cinema goers of 1951 would probably have been very much aware of this, but it gave us something else to talk about, how films reference each other and why, how the two sections were edited diffferently and how the continuity errors in the black and white mock up version make it obvious. A fine way to spend a Sunday evening :0)

Other than that, The Girl has moved onto Year 3 in MEP, practically filled a shoebox for OperationChristmas child, been to Brownies, had a cornet lesson and started learning some theory for her exam, watched another episode of The Story of Film (with one or two clips edited out by me - a bit too graphic blood-and-guts type stuff), read a book about nouns, added a paragraph to her letter for her penfriend and helped prepare a marrow for making chutney - not necessarily in that order. Meanwhile, (not necessarily at the same time or in the same order) the Boy has read a book with me about Edison inventing the phonograph, made a clay walkie-talkie model, done a jigsaw, a page of maths, 2 pages of his handwriting book, been to Beavers and got 2 new badges for me to sew on.

Cinema Project Trip 1

Well, if you're doing a project on cinema, it's importanty to go to a cinema :0)
Luckily for us, a friend of mine had organised a trip to The Vue Cinema in Bury. We were shown around the projection room and then got to see Zookeeper. The cinema is just about to convert to digital projection, so we were very lucky to see the old projectors and the new digital ones.

These are the reels the films are held on.















This is the new digital projector complete with special filters for showing 3D films.

This reel holds about 20 minutes worth of film which has to be spliced together by hand to all the other reels to make up the full picture. The last Harry Potter had 7 reels and the Lord of the Rings films had 10 apparently.

Here's the splicer used to tape the ends of reels together which also punches holes in it so that the taped bits can run through the machinery. When you're watching a film, look closely for a slight mark where the connection is. Old films used to have a little black dot in the corner of the frame to tell the projectionist when to change the reels.

This is a short reel for a trailer from a cupboard full of trailers.

Finally, we got to see our film all set up ready to be shown :0)

It was a really interesting tour but I was sad to learn that this 10 screen cinema, instead of having 5 projectionists as it has now, will only have 2 when the switch to digital is made :0( Somehow, I prefer the shiny wheels and whirring film to the impersonal black box and 5 people in work has got to be better than 2....

The film was good though :0) Both my children thoroughly enjoyed it and there were plenty of laugh out loud moments for us all. The message was pretty good - just be yourself and money isn't everything. we discussed the characters and their plausibility in the car on the way home. There's some interesting stuff on animal behaviour and the special effects were pretty good. Those animals look so natural when they're talking :0)

We received a free CD-Rom from Film Education at the beginning of the summer which we had brief look at then but will get out and look at again tomorrow - all being well ;0) I filled the form in stating I am a Home Educator and regularly receive free material from them. They've always been very good at providing free resources - even way back before we had internet when my eldest was a teenager and everything was hard copy and on VHS. Definitely worth taking a look at if you're family are into films :0)

Today was a maths free zone (almost)

The Girl has mostly been working on her personal cinema project which is to use blogger as a space to hold her topic on Walt Disney. She spent a lovely couple of hours designing her blog and writing her first post. It's a private blog so sorry, I won't be sharing it but I will share one item from it :0)

I've been learning a few bits about using blogger from her too. Mutual education - love it!
For our family cinema project, we watched another couple of episodes of Reel History of Britain and I learnt that my daughter is interested in the social history of the second half of the Twentieth Century but is bored by Edwardians. (Personally, I enjoyed it. It was all about films made by Mitchell and Kenyon that had been discovered in a shop cellar in Blackburn in 1994 about 90 years after they were made. They're so important that they've been declared a World Treasure. The people in them could go and watch themselves on screen for a penny or two in fairground sideshows later that same day. That must've been so exciting back then, I'm not surprised the people being filmed looked so happy.) I've just noticed that the Reel History series is being repeated again starting on the 11th so we'll be able to watch them all on iPlayer after all. Hooray!
We also watched a couple of Chaplin shorts that none of us reckoned much to and couldn't understand why he was considered so funny. Maybe we should just watch The Kid and Modern Times....
In and amongst this,  Boykin's new Doctor Who comic arrived so everything stopped for a while so he could read it and sort out his new collector cards. Later, while The Girl was still blogging, we started to read War Boy: A Country Childhood by Micheal Foreman. We didn't get very far into the book because we discussed different bombshelters, the weight of an incendiary bomb (2 bags of sugar and sneaky maths), looked at some replica cigarette cards from a Home Front pack we've got and looked at how close Lowestoft is to Holland on a map of Europe. He wants to make evacuee labels and a gas mask box - all nicely timed as we're going on a museum trip in a couple of weeks :0)


Books, DVDs and stuff we used

October Project

Because we have National Schools Film Week in October, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do a fun project on the history of cinema. Luckily, it coincides with The Story of Film  which we are watching in small chunks on 4OD. We've only watched Episode 1 so far, which has taken us pretty much up to the end of the silent era. It's already lead to loads of discussion about film shots, and early special effects. There's also an interactive timeline on the site. In future, I think I'll watch it first because I'm not sure how suitable some of the content will be in later episodes as it's not really intended to be a children's programme. The only slightly disturbing bit in Episode 1 is a very short clip from the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan which I explained very quickly was special effects.
We watched Flying Down to Rio yesterday, partly because it was on iPlayer and partly because it was the first film that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers starred in together, but mainly because I have a Boy who loves tapdancing and Doctor Who. What does Doctor Who have to do with Fred Astaire? Top hat and tails costume in the Let's Kill Hitler episode, of course ;0)
Anyway, apart from the (very) loose Doctor Who connection, they were interested to see that some of the special effects and editing techniques that had been shown in the documentary were used in this film.
We watched the remainder of the 1st episode (each episode is an hour long which is a little bit too much for my kids) and then went on to watch The Great Train Robbery from 1903.


This is a very early Western from Thomas Edison's company and seeing how Edison was one of those instrumental in inventing moving pictures I thought it would be a relevant choice. My children very much enjoyed it, even though it was silent. They loved the melodramatic deaths and acted them out round the living room. Sounds morbid I know, but just watch and you'll see how funny they are :0) They watched out for the 180 degree line between actors and whether or not entrances and exits were in keeping with each other. I think we'll watch Charlie Chaplin before we move on to talking pictures :0)

We're also watching what episodes we can of Reel History of Britain - I did download all the available episodes last week but somehow they have vanished from my iplayer desktop :0(
My 2 especially enjoyed this programme with it's mobile cinema which shows how film has been used to document history and how that history connects with people today. The one we watched was about the highrise estates of the 60s & 70s and how they were viewed then and now. The Girl thought it was really sad how they ended up because they looked so nice when they were built - all of which lead into a discussion on social housing. I think I might be going to spend quite a bit of time here

I'm not sure how much actual hard evidence there will be at the end of this project so I'm going to try and keep a good record of what we've done on here.

Alongside this, we are still doing maths, lots of reading, activities for the various groups they go to and other spontaneous learning :0) Today that came about as a result of The Girl doing the washing up (round-eyed shock emoticon needed). She was pushing an upturned glass into the water and explaining it to The Boy who then wanted to know why, if you let a bit of water into the glass, it stays there until you take the glass out of the water. The Girl then went on to investigate the WaterAid site until it was them for her cornet lesson.
And to top it all, we managed to get out on the moors for a bit...

Iris Folding

OK. So, when I heard we were doing Iris folding at our local HE craft & social meeting, I thought we were going to be doing something like this...

...which I thought would be a bit tricky and not very popular with the boys.

Luckily, I was wrong :0) What really happened is, that with much patience and determination....

 
....they turned a load of torn up old envelopes...

 ...a numbered template and an apperture card...

...into 2 beautiful iris-fold cards :0)