The Big 5 North East Inventors

It has been a whirlwind couple of weeks! 3 birthdays have happened in our house and we have had a lot of visitors. Hopefully life can resume some normality now.

We went on a tour last week at the Discovery Museum with other home ed families to explore five important North East Inventors through the museum exhibits of their work. It was fascinating and I learnt so much that we will be able to talk about and bring into future visits to the museum and to Cragside and the Quayside. I took a few notes on the tour and have included them here for my future reference and for anyone else who may be interested to read them.

Joseph Swan

Invented the first electric light bulb. He worked on it between 1850 and 1879, so needed a lot of perseverance. They were expensive at the time and only used by the very rich. Swan's own house was the first in the world to be lit by lightbulbs and he also installed his lightbulbs at Cragside, the house of his friend William Armstrong. Swan's lightbulb idea was stolen by Thomas Edison and used in America but they later worked together.

William Armstrong

Designed the Newcastle Swing Bridge using water power to make it turn. This was needed to allow large ships to deliver goods from Armstrong's factories down the Tyne. He also used hydro-electricity famously to power his Cragside house.

Armstrong also designed an army gun which could shoot over 3km further than any others at the time and with more accuracy. He sold it to both sides during the American Civil War.

George Stephenson

Made significant improvements to the speed and efficiency of trains to transport coal and designed the first public railway on which steam trains could travel. He also invented mine safety lamps so that flames didn't ignite dangerous gases.

Robert Stephenson

The son of George, above. He worked with his father on many railway projects and designed the High Level Bridge, the first double decker bridge in the UK. Queen Victoria travelled to Newcastle to open it.

Charles Parsons

Invented a revolutionary steam turbine used in Turbinia, the fastest ship of its time (which is displayed at the Discovery Museum) and later in many other ships.

Zog

I found this interesting website recently which has lots of activity ideas to use with popular story books so I thought I would give some a try (this is similar to the Five in a Row approach and we always enjoy our Five in a Row activities). We used Zog by Julia Donaldson as I liked the look of the activities for Harry and Peter loves the book, so I thought he might actually participate in some of it too.

We went through the book and identified all the plants and animals we recognised. Harry knew lots! Harry looked up the shape of oak leaves online to confirm the presence of an oak tree. 

We also looked up mushrooms to try and identify them. We found these Nature Detectives fungi trump cards and spent a long and interesting time looking at them. 

When we had finished the identification, Harry and Peter created a Zog picture using animals and plants we had recognised from the illustrations and dragons cut out from a colouring sheet. Harry did really well taking care with his drawings and trying to copy from the book and Peter was very proud to have made something for the wall too.

We had a look at rhyming words in the book too and Harry made an 'og' word family using magnetic letters. He wrote all the words he had found.

We also looked up the meaning of two interesting words used in the story - 'agog' and 'implore'. Harry wrote the meanings and we have been trying to use them in everyday speech. I often implore Harry to be quieter :-)

This is Harry trying to look agog!

We also played role-play games, giving medical aid to dragons and re-enacting the story.

We really enjoyed this and I think I will plan some more. I love this way of working as it doesn't even feel like work but we can cover almost any subject simply by using books with a related theme.

Learning with Top Trumps

Harry received his first set of Top Trumps cards for his birthday - they are fantastic - why haven't I played with these!? Stuart said he remembers them from his childhood but I don't. He has the dinosaur set and we have played a few times today. 

If anyone is not familiar with the game, there are lots of cards, each of which shows one dinosaur with a description and list of facts - height, weight, length, killer rating, intelligence and age. You choose a fact from your top card and read it aloud to the other player, who has to read the corresponding fact from their card. Whoever has the highest score 'trumps' and wins both cards.

Since playing today, Harry can recognise numbers in thousands, has been recognising and stating decimal places correctly and can read the words used in the fact list. Also, for example, he has to recognise that 3,500 is bigger than 2,800 to know who has won the card. He will start to recognise that 3,500 is a big number in the context of the rest of the cards in the game, so that this is a good fact to use on your turn to give you a chance to trump the other player.

World book day treasure hunt

I prepared a treasure hunt to celebrate World Book Day at home today. I chose books that could be hidden in a place related to their title and wrote or drew a clue to lead to the next book. 

This was the selection I used:

The Enormous Turnip (in a plant pot in the garden)

Pat-a-Cake (in a cake tin)

The Red Coat (in a coat pocket)

I Like Books (on the bookshelf) 

Pooh's Christmas Adventure (in the honey cupboard)

Lost and Found (under Peter's bed as he sleeps with soft penguins)

The Emperor's New Clothes (in Harry's wardrobe) 

The last book, The Emperor's New Clothes contained a prize each of a book voucher which we will use next time we visit a bookshop and a chocolate treat.

Happy Birthday Harry!

We have had a lovely relaxed day for Harry's birthday with my sister and dad visiting - we spent the morning building and playing with Harry's lego space shuttle present. Peter mainly wrestled with helium balloons, he spent a fair while trying to throw one down the stairs which was amusing!

Then more presents - rollerskate practice and jigsaw building.

Lunch at Pizza Express

And more lego building!

The Stone Age and an outdoor journal

We visited the Botanic Gardens in Durham today with some friends. Archaeology students there are constructing a mesolithic settlement and we saw a teepee-style house made of logs surrounded by clods of earth and grass and a kiln. 

There is more in progress so we may make another visit. While we were there we read this book

And did some drawings of some of the images from it. 

This tied in well with a library book we have been reading at home, which has a really interesting double page showing how stone age humans lived.

We also started a outdoor journal today, thanks to a kind friend who brought some exercise books for all the children. I had bought Harry a clipboard for working outdoors too and he was very impressed - he even used it at home later in the day! We are going to use this for all outdoor work, so our stone age drawings went in there and we also looked out for early signs of spring using this Nature Detectives spotting sheet. I had forgotten how many good resources are on the website so I will be checking back more regularly! We saw hazel catkins, snowdrops, bulb shoots and primroses, although no frog spawn yet. Harry cut out the pictures from the spotting sheet and glued them into his journal. He also had a go at drawing some himself and writing the names.

I am really looking forward to some outdoor work - I am sure the journal will be full before the end of the year! I think we will enjoy looking back through it too and remembering what we have seen through the changing seasons.

Invisible ink

We spent a very interesting morning at a friend's house yesterday. Our friend had prepared some invisible images (using white wax crayon on white paper) which the children uncovered by rubbing a felt tip pen over the top. The children then created their own for someone else to uncover. 

These were Harry's....

And the ones he created for me to uncover...

We also used some other materials from the kitchen to write messages on white paper. When these were heated in the oven at home they 'magically' appeared on the paper. A very popular activity!

This was my message for Harry using sugar water....  

And his writing using a bicarbonate of soda solution....

Lemon juice, milk and onion juice were also used. We are likely to do this again, especially when Peter can join in more (he had very little interest!) and we will use more of the materials.