Chess and Fibonacci Numbers

Oliver started at his new chess club 3C's, what a fabulous club. I was a little worried about Olivia getting bored but she was far from bored as she sat and joined in a conversation about maths and was struck by Fibonacci Numbers and Da Vinci.

Wherever you find a chess board you find people with fabulous ideas and a gentleman named Carl who I was nattering away to was talking about maths and demonstrated Fibonacci numbers to Olivia

Olivia loves maths but she also loves art so the combination of learning the Fibonacci numbers has introduced Olivia to something new in the world of art, she can combine her two greatest loves.

So far she has been working out the Fibonacci numbers with great enthusiasm since she got home, and I will hopefully introduce her to how we can put that into a piece of art work.

Carl also introduced her to the genius of Da Vinci  and showed her some you tube videos of the maths within the Mona Lisa Picture, her little brain is spinning with ideas, it will be interesting what she comes up with and learns about numbers and art over the coming months.

So although the chess club is firmly on Olivers radar I really did not expect Olivia to get anything out of watching her brother play Chess but clearly she has and it looks like an environment where all of us can flourish, we felt very welcome, we were shown the ropes and the achievements of the club which are pretty impressive and we are all looking forwards to going back again next week.

Pneumonia when home educating!

I was so pleased that I did not go to the doctors before the Halle event as I never would have got there, although allowing the kids to force me into taking them to the Art Gallery and finding food afterwards would not have happened either, which would may have been a good thing really as being diagnosed with pneumonia is a definite deal breaker..  

I feel so poorly and unfortunately our yearly trip to the Birmingham Science Festival will have to be cancelled, there is no way I can drive to Birmingham in this state. The kids are less than happy but unfortunately I am not superwoman and will make it up to them somehow. 

Its early days for the penicillin to be kicking in but I promised them I would take them to see the Terracotta Warriors at Liverpool to make up for it in a few weeks time, time enough to allow me to recover.

I had to cancel hub explorers that should have been today and tomorrow we were supposed to be going to a glass blowing workshop in Fleetwood that I know I will never be able to make it to, which we are extremely disappointed about as we really wanted to go to that one.

I am not really too sure when I will be back on my feet again, although I did try today and I took some ebay orders to the drop off point and did some paperwork and tried to sort some boxes in the stockroom but doing even just  that made me feel worse and I spent a few hours afterwards with a fever, sweating and ended up soaked through, exhausted and with a massive headache, my cough is getting slowly more frequent.

The kids have been practising their life saving skills they have learnt at badgers, they have been rehearsing what to do in an emergency, I am not quite sure if they expect me to croak it or not, ha ha... it did make me laugh but I am very impressed at their proficiency.

It looks like any structured learning is off the cards, for a little while at least but these two have an inbuilt learning button so am I sure they will not stop learning just because I am down and out for the count.

Halle For Youth - Back to nature 2018

All my panic disappeared over the Halle for Youth event yesterday. I was feeling so poorly, weak, temperature and with a terrible painful cough and just felt all round terrible. I managed to get there to ensure everyone had their tickets and the concert was fantastic. I have organised these Halle events since 2014 and they are always fantastic and seem to get better every year.

The Halle For Youth Concerts are an annual educational event from the Halle Orchestra. They give school age children the opportunity to engage with and experience orchestra at it's finest.

The program was engaging and had a theme of Nature this year.

The program was as follows:-

CONDUCTED BY JOHANN STUCKENBRUCK
PRESENTED BY TOM REDMOND

SIBELIUS †*Finlandia (cut version) [TUNDRA]

BATES †*Anthology of Fantastic Zoology: The A Bao A Qu [JUNGLE]
BARRY †Out of Africa [GRASSLANDS]
WILLIAMS Star Wars, Return of the Jedi: The Forest Battle [FORESTS]
SONG: MARSH/Orch PICKETT Earth, Sea and Sky
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS *The Lark Ascending (cut version) [BIRDS]
Soloist: JORDAN GARBUTT (violin)

SMETANA †Vltava (cut version) [RIVERS]
PICKETT ‘Elephants move in mysterious ways...’ (for Halléoojamaflipaphone and orchestra)
URBAN LANDSCAPE: Audience participation
DEBUSSY La Mer: Finale (cut version) [OCEAN] 

 

Lets talk charity!...

I thought I would do a small post about supporting charity.

Supporting charity to me is something I have always done and I would like the kids to also support charity effortlessly and regularly as a normal part of life.

Since I was a small child I have been involved in charity in some capacity, starting with Carnival queens and church queens raising money for local charities, fundraising has always been there.

The twins had their first dip into raising money for charity when we started an appeal for the children of Syria when the conflict began, we raised money by people donating their no longer needed items and sold them on to raise funds to pass onto the charity.

Personally we do not have a pot to piss in but we still manage to support our local charity who do some fabulous work. We manage to do this by buying goods in bulk from their local charity shop, selling them on ebay and raising more money to put back into buying more stock in bulk from the charity shop.

Circular economy, when we do this it demonstrates to the twins that we are having an effect far wider than just helping support the charity that we choose, we are keeping things out of landfill and playing our part in helping our mother earth.

Ellen Macarthur Foundation was established in 2010 with the aim of accelerating the transition to the circular economy. You can find out more about them here.

Fashion is considered to be one of the most polluting industries, the chemical waste is not always discharged according to proper measures causing water pollution worldwide, for a single t-shirt the average water footprint is 2500 ltrs of water (30 bathtubs) 

We can't do very much as a small family but we can play our part and at the same time help charities. 

 

Learning more about the weather.

Olivia asked the question of 'how do the weather people know what the weather will be like'?. This was asked after we saw the snow weather warning come up.

So.. We watched a few videos..

 

We also got out our weather kit that we have had sat on the shelf for the past few years that we picked up at a charity shop.

One of my clients on ebay was saying how she had no snow so we talked about UK climate and why it could be different for different parts of UK.

My Street Greater Manchester-

 My Clients Street Hampshire:-

We learnt a little bit about UK Climate from Met Link Royal Meteorology Association.

Being quite lazy and all..they also emailed the Met Office to see if they could answer the question of why does it snow in one part of the country while simultaneously it does not in another, such as in Hampshire. They received a lovely detailed reply with some great links so they can explore more.

They also learned the difference between weather and climate and created a couple of graphics to demonstrate:-

We also learnt that it is the Earths Tilted Axis (Axial Tilt) that is responsible for our seasons.

 We watched this interesting video to learn more.

The kids are now busy writing up what they have learned.