Infastructure - Roads - Poetry

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends. 

The kids liked this poem, we discussed the language used and looked at the theme of colour used in the poem to make descriptions, such as 'the grass grows soft and white', Oliver decided the poet was describing diseased grass and coupled with the line 'Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black and the dark street winds and bends', Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow,  the poet must be describing a place that produces the asphalt for the roads to be constructed hence the description of Asphalt flowers, the asphalt flowers being a metaphor for a description of no flowers just asphalt. where flowers should have been before mining. and the feeling that we get from the poem is that people just wanted to leave that grim mine.

The kids were very observant whilst looking at the poem and came up with the conclusion the poet was American, because of their use of the word 'Sidewalk', they also decided that the use of colour within  the poem was a great way to use rhetorical metaphors.

We then decided to go and look at what other people were saying about the poem and see what analysis others came up with.

We found that we where way off the mark in our observations about the poem, we were looking at it in a literal sense, but we were right with a couple of things those were the fact poet is American and the use of metaphors and rhetoric within the poem. It turns out the poem is about children's imaginations and how far away adults are with their imaginations, essentially telling adults to go to the place where the children know, for adults to see the world like a child, to find the joy in life that children have.

The poet in this instance is using descriptions referencing a state of mind rather than in a literal sense.

This was a great lesson in Rhetoric and Metaphors.

It always surprises me how engaged the kids get with this kind of thing, they really enjoy learning about the use of language.

There is a mission on now for them to come up with a poem of their own we have also purchased the book to have a look at his other poems, the book is aptly entitled 'Where the Sidewalk Ends' by Shel Silverstein.(click through to purchase from ebay)

Shel Silverstein also has some great educational resources to go with his writings (click here) there are games, puzzles, audio's and printable on his website for you to explore, with a wonderful poetry workshop downloadable kit, the kids are using this to help them come up with a poem of their own.

Infactructure - Transport - Canals

We watched a video by the lovely late Fred Dibna who introduced us to and told the story of Canals, you can see this video below.

We visited the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere port where they had a horses at work day!. The kids learned about the horses and the families referred to as 'the boat people'.

We did go to this event to have a focus on the Victorian tunnels and how they were constructed, but sadly they were very much not what we expected and were pretty modern in their design.

We have visited quite a few Canals such as Standedge Tunnels you can find our short review of the place on our educational days out page. The place served a better purpose as in terms of the Victorian construction of the tunnels as it is the longest canal tunnel in the UK and has some excellent examples of the engineering that went into building it. As it was a while ago since we last went we may take another quick trip to refresh what we learnt when we were there.

Anderton Boat Lift is excellent for demonstrating the locks and so was Caen Hill Flight of Paddle Locks

Apart from learning about the locks and how they were constructed, we learnt about the horses that were used to pull the Canal Boats and the families that worked on them.

We also looked at the important work of the Canal and River Trust who look after the waterways to protect and enhance the historic and natural waterways.

What we did find interesting was the fact that it was the Romans that built the first canals although they were used for irrigation, although they did build navigable canals that linked rivers which increased transportation inland by water.

The kids are now getting on with coming up with some poetry for their canal experience and are creating pictures for our wall mural .

Discovering Infrastructure

We have been using infrastructure for our latest project. Discovering everything that makes the country tick over seamlessly.

Olivia kicked off the project by looking at transport, she was quite amused at penny farthings and said she can see why they never took off, although they did look fun.

We have a visit to the recycling centre planned in September and a trip to Fiddlers ferry arranged in November to look at the coal fired power plant, during October we are visiting Muncaster Castle so we will try to fit in a visit to Sellafield whilst we are over that way.

We found this great interactive map (click on the link below to see it in action) that shows the infrastructure of Greater Manchester so they learned  lot about our local infrastructure.

We have decided to make a wall mural with the different parts of infrastructure that we choose to look at, so far we have transport, recycling and power and utilities to go onto our wall mural. 

We took a trip to M24 Art Supplies in Middleton to find some scrap art materials that we could use to create our mural, what a lovely place, the people are friendly and very helpful and they have crafty workshops during holidays where the children can make and take things along a themed line.

We are comparing and contrasting UK infrastructure with other countries too, looking at less developed countries and understanding why this may be.

This is another long term project that we will incorporate some maths into as well as history and some science and other cross curricular topics.

Considering I just wanted to work on their writing skills this has turned out to be much more so far.

One example is graphs, we are looking at the types of vehicles on the roads, counting as we go on our road trips, to then put into different graphs and turn that into a piece of art, I loved when we did the pi Skyline building art work so something on those lines will be equally as much fun, here is a video below of how to do it.

We have started to work on some poetry, for this we are looking at the different types of poems with the theme of Infrastructure, for example limericks and acrostic poems, looking at some already created and making our own silly poems.

The children have enjoyed learning about buildings and the changes they go through and why, learning how infrastructure changes over time and what differences these changes have made to peoples lives, how some fight back against change and how some changes have discourse attached.

We are very much looking forwards to the heritage open day and will make sure we take advantage of places we wouldn't normally get to go to. Looking at how churches played an important part in UK infrastructure and how they are used today for tourist attractions so still play an important role in our infrastructure.

The point of this exercise is to look at things in a different way and see the worth in things that we would normally take for granted but are in fact an integral part of our lives using writing practice, research practice, maths, history and other subjects to cover their basic literary and maths skills.

Working on our writing and imagination skills and learning about how these things work and what kinds of jobs people do whilst looking after our infrastructure, the science and the history, there is so much to learn from this topic of infrastructure, it is an exciting topic to cover and I am sure it will expand as we go along, I have already decided to add in a visit to the medical museum and the broadcasting museum to our list of places to visit to look at the medical side of our infrastructure and communications infrastructure, it is a topic that can expand and grow over the next year!

The great thing about using this topic is that the kids have been very proactive putting their own ideas into the mix and doing their own suggestions, for example Olivia wanted to find out about transport and wondered where the first bike began and this lead to her discovering the penny farthing she then suggested making an art piece of a penny farthing. So this is wonderful that the kids are taking the lead in what and how they are learning.

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.

 

New Year Projects...

It was a particularly busy December with my work, which in hindsight I really should have shut down and not done any, the results of the profit and loss for the period tells me I really should listen to my instincts more often. 

It was disastrous in more ways than one with ebay, mainly their returns policies causing a huge financial loss for the December period, it really is a dead duck ebay and I have to start to wind things down and cut my losses and move on, it only caused me to get behind with my clients for my accountancy side of work, a month late on reminders for my existing clients Tax returns due in January which I normally start on in December.

So lots of projects will be underway for both myself workwise and also with the twins too.

We have kicked off this January with two projects firstly we are working on Kingdom of Fungus, this is a fab project that Oliver has been working on himself for a few weeks now under his own steam and guidance, he has worked on a lot of observations and his scientific skills in hypothesis.

He is using his skills that he has learnt about research and he has googled and found out lots of information himself and I am now going to help him put this all together in a legible format to present it as a project.

Our second project is regarding Calendars, how calendars where created, what they are for, how they are used, the different types of calendars, this will be a longer term project as it looks at different cultures, astronomy, history, religion, so this is an ongoing thing, we are using this project to work on our computer skills and English skills, this will be their first project that they do absolutely everything themselves on the computer.

They have decided they want this to be presented in a book format, and have learnt about the front covers of books and the information they contain and why, and the introduction and the contents page.

So far there has been lots of brain storming and discussions about how they want the first page to look and how they format this, I let them loose and this is what they have achieved today.

I got an excited glow watching them spelling things out and discussing what they where doing and discovering new things on the computer program to design their page (they are using word for this) It is such a great project as they will be doing so many cross curricular things, the hardest part for me is coordinating this effort, keeping them on track and allowing them to make lists of things they start to question so that we can keep on track and come back later to their query.

This is a great example of expanding and building on work we have previously done, such as seasons and the Nomads, the Chinese new year and the solar system sun and moon phases, all those and others are being brought into play which gives them an excellent ongoing enthusiasm as they are familiar with the contents involved in Calendars. 

So a huge project that they even had the grand idea of creating a video at the end as they could not find a video that explains calendars in a way they could understand from one video, we had to flit between a few videos and will have to do a lot of research of different sources to get the result that we want on our finished project, where as normally they can find things from one source, this time it is different.

So hopefully originality will also come into this project, thinking for themselves and not relying on what they find to put things together and coming up with their own original work that they could share with others, so a very exciting project if I can do my job right and keep the momentum and excitement going on this one, which I will find hard, I know as I have so many other things with work that are imperative to sort out.

But thankfully we have no time frames for this work so we can dawdle on as long as they want to with it... Hoorah for home ed...