History meets Recycling

I am loving our new focus on history. The kids love history and it is constantly on our agenda, I have started to get them to look at history in a different way or more how it is connected to how we live today and how people will live in the future.

We had a great discussion whilst in the bath, about how we know about history and how many things we have looked at are the same in history but have changed, for example our theme for the past few years has been focusing on how people live, so we looked at how fashions have changed, ho toys have changed and how people's houses have changed and in addition what, in those houses have changed like lighting for instance from candles to bulbs.

We went back to some of the things we have seen and learnt about such as the nomads caves we went to look at and the Castles we have been too along with the museums we have attended. 

We talked about the theme of things changing and  I asked what was the common theme throughout the changes, and asked them to think about why those changes occurred.

We came up with the answer that things changed so that people's lives were made better, better housing, better ways to cook and our favourite example was how shampoo is bottled, instead of people walking from the shops with shampoo dripping through their fingers someone came up with a way to bottle shampoo to carry it away easily making it easy to transport shampoo.

We then discussed how these good changes can cause problems or discourse, for example although people have come up with ways to package things and make it easy for us with canned and packaged foods instead of having to go to a field for our food to harvest it ourselves, this in itself causes issues such as disposal of all that packaging.

I got them to think about it by using the example of the shampoo bottle and telling them that there are 45 million people in our country so imagine 45 million people each having one shampoo bottle, were does that go?. how big that mound of empty shampoo bottles would be, so people have had to come up with ways to recycle things. Then I asked them to think about each person in the world having one shampoo bottle each and how big that mound of shampoo bottles would be.

We looked at the bottom of the shampoo bottle and talked about the recycling sign on the bottom of the bottle.

We talked about mummies business and how it is based on recycling, by mummy selling items that people no longer need, they avoid going to landfill and lengthening their life by selling them to people that wanted to use them therefore helping to keep the environment slightly better off.

So we now have two trips planned from this conversation, one to a recycling centre, although they are aware of recycling centres anyway as we go to the local tip, a visit to a working demonstrable recycling centre will be excellent and  I do know of a couple of places that do educational visits which centre on non-recyclable waste that I can arrange a visit for.

When we were talking about fashion changing we realised that we have never attended a fashion museum, showing changes in fashion throughout the centuries, so that will be our second visit to plan, a fashion museum.

I set them a project to do in their own time over the coming months, I challenged them to come up with something made entirely out of recycled materials, this can be anything that is usable or decorative.

But the rules are they have to plan it first with diagrams and lists of materials needed. Using their own imagination or searching You Tube for websites for ideas.

Calendar Project.

Well the Calendar Project is going really well, better than I thought it would to be honest.

Oliver googled the history of Calendars and found out that it was Babylon where the Calendars started and as he noticed that Mesopotamia was mentioned, he looked into it more carefully, as he had covered a topic on Mesopotamian last year when we covered the nomads and Egypt, so he spent most of the afternoon discovering the story of the Babylonians, he watched the story of the Tower of Babel and discovered more about Babylon, he has plans now to make a sun dial or (shadow clock).

He also had questions about the moon phases so we looked at some more videos on the moon phases, watching the moon go round the earth on various videos.

The topic of star signs came up and this was his very first introduction to star signs and Astrology, we discussed our own star signs and he found it funny that he is Gemini and also a twin and the sign for Gemini is also twins....  He found it quite amusing but I am yet to discover why. he also has his sights set on the Gods that where worshipped in Babylon, Gods is very much his thing....

Olivia has not shown very much interest today, she has her own mission on at the moment, not sure where it comes from but she has decided that she wants to blow bubbles, yes bubbles... 

She has a few pots which she has put washing up liquid in and a tiny amount of water, her mission is to blow bubbles with the solution using a straw. Her quest does not stop there, she has decided on her own hypothesis and has made a series of assumptions on what she thinks will happen if she does the experiment with different types of water, i.e cold, hot, lots, less, and in addition what would happen if she used more liquid and then used a different liquid like hand soap, shampoo. She has quite happily been trying out different experiments all day. I have tried to get her to write some of her hypothesis down on paper and give herself something to see and compare but she is not interested in any writing for this experiment, just verbal info is enough for now.

It is becoming more of a regular thing where they both want to be doing their own thing, Oliver is mad keen on anything history, there is no stopping him and Olivia has very little interest in history at all, I have been waiting for her to show her hand and do what interests her more instead of having to go with what Oliver wants, and today was that day, it felt very good actually, I felt she had increased in confidence enough to express herself with conviction and it is very much a huge leap forwards for her, all done with a very big smile on her face too.

I think with twins, especially these two, can depend on each other so much, they have been like an extension of each other for so long, I feel hopefully they are now becoming more of their own people instead of  joined at the hip.

Lets see where this milestone takes us....

I thought I would also share this great Multiplication tip from Supercharged Science that I had emailed to my inbox today, the twins have done multiplication and can do 2's up to 20 and their 10's to 100, their 5's to 20 but they have learnt that by rote, I found this email hit my inbox and I think it is a great tool I will take a closer look at to help the twins with their multiplications some time in the future. Click on the picture to learn more and get to grips with multiplication.