Bath Bomb Science

A little afternoon of fun as we made some bath bombs.

In typical home ed fashion, Rugger girl also wrote a small report and findings table with some recommendations for next time!

Moondial, Moondial, Moondial

The Moondial at Belton House is, in my opinion, an absolute must see!

Rugger girl thoroughly enjoyed Helen Cresswell's book The Moondial, based at Belton House in Grantham. It spurred such an interest that we have even invested in the audio book and sought out the old tv adaptation on YouTube.

What could be better than now living close enough to visit in a day? I can see lots of Moondial Days ahead for us! We still have the grave to find in the church ... I guess that means we must visit again!

We also often meet other home ed children at the adventure playground on a weekly basis. A truly lovely place and well worth the educational membership to The National Trust.

The Moon

The Moon exhibition has been on tour and it presented an ideal opportunity to do a little side topic on the subject in the lead up to our NASA project.

The topic included a study of the moon through the excellent Usborne book and their associated learning pack you can download.

Fascinating little book with lots of interesting facts and information

But nothing could beat actually seeing the moon at the Usher Collection in Lincoln. A grand day out and interesting little project.

NASA Part One

As part of Rugger Girl's fascination with space, we have turned our attention to the ISS and NASA

The Moon topic from earlier in the week had already prompted us to refresh ourselves on the planets in the solar system and we added to this the concept of Light years; how they work and why we use them. We also delved into the music of Holst and his Planet's Suite whilst doing some space colouring for our front page in our topic folder.

Rugger Girl wanted to know more about the astronauts who had already been to space, so we studied Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mae Jamieson and Tim Peakes.



We also looked at the computer systems used, the algorithms that would be needed and created our own algorithms for everyday activities. We discussed the different computer languages that are available and what each one does. We then considered which languages we might use for some of NASA's everyday tasks.

Rugger Girl also shows a keen interest in circuitry - a good thing if she plans to follow through on her plan to make a 'lights flashing and noise making' model space shuttle by the end of the year. So the good ole snap circuits have come in handy once again and we investigating ever more and more complex circuits and systems.

There has been a lot of alien based maths and we've enjoyed reading some science fiction novels.

We have also completed the introduction to coding on Khan Academy and enjoyed having a play with computer programmes on Scratch. We are now ready to move onto some deeper coding.

V for Viking

The Vikings!

We had previously looked at the Vikings, so we refreshed ourselves once again with a Home Ed group visit with other local home ed children to Yorvik in York.

First we did the workshops at The Dig ... excavating the sorts of things found at the various dig sights, considering the life of the Viking and looking at what they left behind. We also identified and handled real Viking finds.


The Yorvik Centre was excellent, as always, and more was learned as we travelled through the museum.

You can learn more about the trip by reading a blog entry that Rugger Girl wrote herself: https://hoopershomeed.blogspot.com/

Upon returning home, we learnt how to nalbind (a Viking form of knitting using a bone needle) and we used an ancient lucet to create some braided arm jewellery.

We also made a Viking Longship out of card and listened to some Viking music.

Norman ... nice man

Upon moving into our new little village in the wilds of the English countryside, Rugger girl wanted to investigate the village church. We took this further by investigating Normal life in general, ecclesiastical architecture and how a Norman way of life started to change the rural landscape of Britain. 

Further investigation of our local church led us to discover that it has a Humility Door! Rugger girl was very impressed by this. 

We studied all the different aspects of Norman Village life and made a model out of plasticine of what our village might have looked like in Norman times. There's the church (we added a spire when looking at how, latterly, we changed the Norman churches), a dock pond, pigs foraging in the woods, large areas of unfenced ridge and furrow farmland, the manor house complete with walled garden, the river running through the village and the little houses lining the main road.

As part of our architecture studies we looked at Norman arches and the beautifully carved arched doorways. We considered how important the Catholic faith was to people at that time and how that is reflected in the buildings. We studied the layout of a Norman cathedral and then reconstructed our own out of Lego - based loosely on Lincoln cathedral.

We visited Melton Mowbray church - one of only five churches that is laid out with naves and aisles as a cathedral would be. Rugger girl commented upon this straight away! We didn't know why at the time, but later research revealed that it had been built as a potential cathedral back in Norman times before it was decided that it should be Lincoln that holds the cathedral. How different our landscape would have looked had they chosen Melton!

We finalised and consolidated our learning with a visit to Lincoln cathedral itself. We found the imp, looked at and discussed the Magna Carta and it's importance (a little side discussion for the day as the Magna Carta is held at Lincoln)