Wonderful blog post

Today I read a post from someone else's blog. It was a post by the son of the woman who's blog it is.
He has been to school for 1 year, after having been unschooled before.

Here is the link: unschool versus school

Have fun reading, I sure did. It actually did take some of my concerns away :-)

Education in the woods

Yesterday a friend of mine came over. She is very knowledgeable about plants that you can eat and stuff. She actually teaches it. We went into the woods near our house to have a walk there and see what there is to eat out there, there was quite a bit that you can eat or work with.
Clover flowers - in your salad
Stinging nettle - new tips of leaves in your salad, tea from the older leaves, use the older leaves as spinach, use the branches to make rope of.
Black berry - eat the fruit, eat the young leave tips, make tea out of the older leaves.
Duizendblad - eat the leaves in your salad, use them on wounds.
Dandelion leaves - in your salad
Bilberry's - eat the berries
Goat's willow - make things with the branches
Prickly coconut smelling bushes - flowers you can make wine of and put in your salad, they taste like coconut, but they have to be prickly.
Pine - the bark was used to extend rye & spelt flour by the vikings, like they do with soya now. I think I prefer the pine bark.
Birch - the sap can be used to make a nice wine of - tap the tree for 2 weeks in the end of march, no longer, coz that can damage the tree. Use the sap to make wine with. The pink colour of the bark has also been used as dye.

She also talked about quite some stuff that wasn't supposed to be in our woods, as they aren't native and are wrecking the soil or something like that.
Rhodondendron - comes from Asia and wrecks the soil
Hypericum - comes from Japan.

We talked about the grey squirrel, as that is a native to the US and outnumbering the UK native brown squirrel.
Furthermore we talked about rabbits, came with the vikings for food.
And hares, came with the Romans for food.
Neither of them native here basically. In the meantime they sort of are though.
The vikings used to use rabbits like we do chickens now, which are actually also not native, they come from Asia.

The kids enjoyed the talking very much, it was quite hands on, we tasted various things and found most of it tasting quite alright. The berries were all very good!

Viking Dork Normansson

Today we visited the museum to have a talk with Viking Dork Normansson. This was very nice, we had a great time. Its a very nice guy who re-enacts the viking and he is quite a good replica.

Adolf Hitler on BBC Exclusiv on Vox

This evening we are watching an episode of BBC Exclusiv on Vox.
Its very interesting, as its a historical piece on Adolf Hitler and the people who tried to kill him over the years of his ruling.
The people who wanted to kill him and how they ended if, if they did.

Flint knapping

Today we went to the museum in Camberley - the Surrey Heath Museum.
There was an exhibition organised where you could see flint knapping being performed by Karl Lee. This was extremely interesting, as he really showed us how several stone age time tools were made. He also made the tools with the tools that they used back then.

He explained to us that in some area's people who do flint knapping will use more modern tools, but he doesn't think the replica's made that way are real replica's.
Karl is an experimental archeologist. Therefore he makes replica's. There aren't many people in the world anymore who can do. Some people like the Aboriginals in Australia still do it, they didn't stop doing it. This is really cool, they are still doing it the authentic way there.
In the US there are only a handful of Native Americans left doing it as unfortunately their culture is slowly but carefully dying out. Which is a pity. Languages dying out as well, its such a shame, our planet was so rich in a big variety of cultures and languages and there is so much gone. Just like animals and plants, so much gone.

What we also discussed was the film Dances with wolves, as its a very educational film. It shows a lot of things very well and pretty accurate historically.
The next thing we discussed was the attitude of the white people back then towards the natives. They first tried to kill them all, but when the natives proved to be too clever they resorted to other measures, trying to kill all their food. This is also pretty clear in Dances with wolves as you can see in the film how the white people killed a load of buffalo's just for their hide and tongue, with no respect for animal, earth or fellow human being.
Its pretty rude if you ask me, to do what happened. The natives were friendly, fed the white people, invited them into their homes, next thing, the white people just take their homes.
Pretty sick minds were around then I would say.

The other thing that was really interesting that Karl had to say was that back in the stone age times people knew lots and lots more about which plants people could eat and which plants were good ad medicine. These days we eat such an incredibly small amount of plants, compared to the people back then.

What he also told us, was that people didn't get much older than about 30. I wonder about that, as I have read bits and pieces here and there where people state that girls have never started their periods sooner than now, so how could that be then, coz the kids that the people get have to grow up before they can take care of themselves.
So if periods didn't start until 16 to 18, and they would die at 30, their kids would be like 12 or so. Doesn't fully add up to me, so I have to look into that a lot more.
The other bit is that their diet was much much healthier than ours, so if we get as old as we get, how come they died so young. They did have good hygiene contrary to medieval times.
That is a topic for some time soon, coz the kids were also very interested in that.

I think this was really super cool. He explained so much to the kids, they could ask away, the kids enjoyed it tremendously. I also think he enjoyed their interest in it all. He talked about how people lived and hunted and everything that had something to do with that. Really great.

And then lateron I ran into the following article which really says it all.

The title is:

The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2032

Have a read, I really enjoyed reading the article.

Next week we will go the museum to talk to someone who knows tons about vikings and who re-enacts them. I think that is pretty cool as well.

Play dough

Cooked.

2 cups of plain flour
1 cup of salt
2 cups of water
2 tbsp of oil
2 teasp of cream of tartar
Food colouring

Put flour, salt and cream of tartar into a saucepan and mix. Add water, oil and, if wanted, colouring. Mix then cook over a low heat stirring continuously, until the dough is a
very lumpy consistency and isn't runny.
Turn out and knead, adding colouring if not added before. Beware it is very
hot.
Store in a plastic bag or plastic container.

Papier-Mache Paste

1 cup water
1/4 cup flour
5 cups lightly boiling water
Large saucepan

Mix flour into 1 cup water until mixture is thin and runny. Stir this mixture into lightly boiling water. Gently boil and stir 2-3 minutes. Cool before using.

Paste

Cooking paste:

1/2 cup flour
cold water
saucepan
food colouring (optional)

Add cold water to flour until mixture is as thick as cream.
Simmer and stir in saucepan for 5 minutes.
Add a few drops of food coloring, if desired.
This wet, messy paste takes a while to dry.

Non cooking paste:

Bowl
1/2 cup flour
Water
Salt

In bowl, mix flour with enough water to make a mixture that's gooey, but not runny.
Add a pinch of salt; stir

glue

2 cups flour
1 cup cold water
1 cup hot water
Mix well. Put in a glue type bottle and allow to sit for one hour.

Glue
3/4 cup water
2 tablespoons corn syrup
1 teaspoons white vinegar
1/2 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup cold water

Mix water, syrup and vinegar in small saucepan. Bring to a rolling boil. In small bowl, mix cornstarch and cold water. Add this mixture slowly to first mixture. Stir constantly. Let stand overnight before using.

Windtalkers

Last night we watched the film Windtalkers. This is about a piece of history that I wasn't taught anything about in school.
It was mentioned that there was war in Japan as well during WWII, but the main focus was Europe.
Therefore I found it quite important that the girls watched it with us, even though it was not for their age. It was very interesting to see how the Navajo language was used to make sure the Japanese didn't understand.
What was furthermore very striking was that Ben, one of the Navajo speakers explained how in missionary school he was not allowed to speak Navajo and therefore ended up chained to the heater for 2 days and then in WWII he had to speak Navajo to help his country.
Some of the racist bits were also very clear and educational.
Hope others will watch it as well.

Legoland continues

We have annual passes to Legoland this year. Its one of those places that I am not a fan of but all kids seem to love. So therefore we did it for one year on Tesco vouchers. So, we have them, we go in and of course the whole world of Legoland is plastic, didn't expect it to be different. But it did make me wonder what the carbon foot print of Legoland is. Doubt its a good one.
But then we found out that while thinking that we could go into everything and do everything with annual passes, that was a dream. There is sooooo much that you need to pay for still. I do have a problem with that. You pay entrance fee, which is high and then you still need to pay for quite a few things. That just bugs me.
I wonder if I am the only one.
The kids have enjoyed quite a few trips and we have done quite some things there which are linked to our education, like looking at all the houses built there, checking out the water flows and stuff like that, anything is educational I found out.

As Sandra Dodd also said, everything is educational. She used Blue Suede Shoes by Elvis Presley and yes, totally educational.
How are shoes made, where does suede come from, what treatments does it need to get blue, etc. etc.
Its just wonderful to take that path with your children. I love it. And its a way of life, not a chore.

Tales of the green lands

Recently we bought the DVD of this former TV-series. It is about life on a local farm in the times of James I, around 1620.
There are some historian and archeologists living like they did in those times.
It is very interesting to watch. Very educational.
One of the really very interesting things is how the celebrate christmas for 12 days.
Furthermore how they used almost every piece of a butchered animal.
The building of the animal shed to give them shelter for the winter is also wonderful.
We have watched it several times now and it keeps bringing us new things that we can discuss.

Conversions

The kids and I found a very nice conversions website about all kinds of measurements. Old ones and new ones. Its a great resource to use with explaining things and helping them understand measurements.
Give it a try! Here is the link.

Weights and Measures, Metric Conversions

Shopping at the museum

On 18 May there was an exhibition which drew on material across from our area to illustrate what we bought and where we bought it. On show are a wide range of objects displayed in replica reconstructed shop windows, with an old fashioned shop-counter scene as the centrepiece, complemented by a wealth of local photographs and reminiscences. A good chance for some retail therapy without spending money!
The children got to see the weights used back then, and the got the chance to buy some sweets with old money, they loved it.

Legoland

Heading off to go there today, more on it later.

Behaviourism crap

Today I was watching some educational tv programs on the BBC and found that they are totally into making children participate in a way that is fitting with the behaviourism style of psychology.
And as I have been reading a lot of stuff from Alfie Kohn, which made total sense to me.
Therefore I got totally annoyed with the "well done!" type of comments and the "when you had the answer right, give yourself a shiny"
This is soooo encredibly counter productive when it comes to educating people that it completely ticked me off. I have seriously wondered if we should just totally ban tv in our house. On the other hand there are quite some things on tv/dvd/video that are very educational.
But I do want to minimise the behavioursm influence in our house as its totally not working.
And that goes for human kind as a whole to be honest. Its absolutely no wonder children in school aren't performing well or people in jobs. Its scary how something so wrong can have such a huge influence in our world.

Farnham museum

Last week thursday we were at the museum in Farnham, which was really very interesting. We learnt quite a bit there about the history of Farnham, how they used to supply London and how things changed because of greed.
How some people who did own land and we working on it, lost it all due to others being too greedy. It was sad to see how some people lost everything.

Deer and wildlife evening

Last night the girls, with a friend and dad went to an evening organized by Alice Holt near us. The evening was very educational. They were shown the different types of dear in Great Britain and there was a little talk about them. Furthermore wildlife in general was discussed and there was a walk in the woods near the center.
All of them loved going there. Alice Holt always has interesting stuff going on. We went to a lot of things last year and therefore we only do a few new things this year as they did almost all last year already. Luckily they organize new things every year.

Enchanted Learning

Recently, after the christmas holidays, we have started doing the worksheets from enchanted learning again. We really love those. They have a nice calendar on there, which gives 1 sheet a day to work with, but there is a lot more on there. Lots and lots of information for virtually all ages. The kids really love working with those. The worksheets tend to make them ask lots and lots of questions afterwards, which is really good, as this way they get a lot of information to think about. Home Educating really rocks!

First Emperor Exhibition

On 7 January 2008 we went to the First Emperor Exhibition in the British Museum. This was very very interesting. This whole terra cotta army, the governmental people, the artists etc. It was very impressive, especially when we learned that this emperor was only 13 when he became king of Qin. He came from a horse breeders family, but was very ambitions, within a few years he started conquering the surrounding states and made China as it is today, and this was before our counting of time started.
He standardized the written language to the Qin written language, therefore the Chinese today can still all read what others write, their spoken language can be quite different though. Of course it was necessary for all governmental offices to have the same written language to make sure all would understand each other. He standardized the weapons of the army, he made a sewage system and roads through the country happen. He also standardized the width of the base of charriots to make sure they would fit on the roads, which was important for quick transport of food, weapons or armies.
He died at age 49. He was quite afraid of dying and therefore made this huge army etc. to have that in the afterlife to still be ruling, obviously the feeling the need to keep doing what he did before death, after death.
We all enjoyed the exhibition very much, even our 4yo.

The exhibitions made me think about him being brilliant, but also that he was mad for all he did, its unbelievable what he all did.
That thought made a quote from Pirates of the Carribbean pop up in my mind: Will: "This is either madness or brilliance." Jack: "Its remarkable how often those two traits coincide."