Well it is officially our second year in to home education and we took the first year easy, we concentrated on the basics and mostly had lots of fun along the way.
This year we are getting a little more serious but no too serious, we started our year off with a bang and we took a couple of educational trips for a bit of a well earned break, we went camping and had a focus on History.
The first of our camping trips this year was to Wales, this was more of an advanced birthday trip for me, being a super fan of Dr Who we decided to take a trip to the Dr Who Experience in Cardiff which was amasing and is part of our theme for history and Science this year.
Yes we are using Dr Who for our base theme for History and science, he mixes the two quite nicely and it makes for a great way to spice things up in these subjects for the twins and we also had fun watching some old episodes where they end up captured by some stone age people and forced to make Fire... which fits in nicely with our stone age history project and rock science discovery project which we are kicking the year off with.
We also fitted in St Fagans Open Air Museum which is a fascinating insight into how houses have changed in Wales and how people lived in the past right up to 80's. You can find out more about the place here St Fagans National History Museum it is well worth a visit if you get a chance.
Our History this year is very mixed as there is a focus on how people lived in the past and how things have changed and a small focus on why, but our main project to start the year off and the reason for gathering so much material with the focused trips is the Stone age/ice age and Iron age, but an introduction to the Kings and Queens of UK hence why we ended up at Cardiff Castle on this trip. It just seemed like a fun thing to do and also to fill in a few gaps they will need later on in their learning journey.
The beach came in handy to think and talk about fossils and rock formations which started off our rock science project nicely along with filling in our love of fossils and talk about the work of paleontologists and archaeologists.
Our second camping trip we entitled 'Not Back to School Derbyshire Archaeology Trail Camping Trip'.. A great celebration of not returning to conventional school.
We visited a fabulous farm called New House Farm in Ashbourne Derbyshire, this farm is a little special as it is situated on an archaeology trail with fascinating finds, the farm owners have put together a small trail with explanations of what has been found and what we can see now, camping on this farm was pretty special, no showers or anything fancy and only a tap and compost loos, we had a fabulous time living in our tent amongsts the Geese, horses, goats and sheep..
We talked about burial mounds and ancestors and talked about the harsh weather the miners must have endured and saw some great examples of archaeology, it will be interesting in the future to track down the artifacts found here that are now kept in the London Museum .
I also dragged the twins to one of my favourite childhood places named Manifold Valley, this is a magical place and is home to a cave named Thors Cave, we talked about the cave and who must have lived there and the valley how it was once covered in sea and how the limestone is made from sea creatures fossils..
We also spent some time at Creswell Crags and had a couple of cave tours, and found out some interesting facts about the place.
It felt really good to be bringing our topics to life for the twins, not just talking about the stone age but actually going to places that can tell us a lot by just being there..
Now we have lots of material for our Stone Age project and all we have to do is now put it all together.
On our return from our wonderful archaeology trip we picked up some chickens.... We are now proud owners of 6 chickens, I will share what we learn about chickens in another post.
In the meantime here are our girls..
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