From Antman to Alice in Wonderland via the Snail and the Whale and Aesop's the Lion and the Mouse, Ferdy and Gil have always been fascinated by scale. For a while, Ferdy's favourite creature was a tardigrade, and, after the question about who would win in a fight, they are constantly querying and comparing the sizes of animals and people. Gil still thinks that the biggest in the class is also the oldest.
Obviously, less than and more than comes up in maths a lot too, and today we looked at comparing fractions with different denominators. Ferdy struggled with this initially, but as is often the case, when we got out something for him to play with, he enjoyed working out whether 2/3 was bigger or smaller than 2/4.
Gil also did his own scaling up and down of numbers by adding and subtracting from 20 using a numberline.
After our maths, we began part two of our day about scale and headed out (befittingly with The Borrowers as our soundtrack) to the recently opened Museum of Making, and the Scale exhibition.
We spent a bit of time here, looking at models of churches and train stations and the boys were most intrigued by the photos by Slinkachu.
But the absolute best thing in this marvellous new museum, was the Assemblage room on the floor below. This is a collection of about 1000 seemingly random objects ranging from porcelain monkeys to telephone switchboards, all grouped according to the material that they are made of and displayed in an open museum store room. Sounds a bit boring? Not when there is an electronic database which members of the public (children) can use to create their own trails. Ferdy spent ages looking for objects and printing them out on lists (so many lists..) and Gil and I had to use the letter and number coordinates on the wall to find his objects. I've never been so excited to find a Midland Rail Lever Pull Plate (located A3, Drawer 1) in my life.
Influenced by Slinkachu's photos, we later created our own; Gil put himself in the fridge, and Ferdy at the front of a line up of playmobil Vikings.
Gil then wrote a rather funny story about getting bigger and smaller:
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| Once upon a time there was a boy who was a ordinary boy but you will notice that I will not always be a ordinary boy. That boy once got shot by a witch snd he became a little boy. Just as he was opening the fridge door, he became little and just then he felt a tingly feeling and he began to get big and soon he was back to normal size but the only problem was that the fridge was broken. |
And Ferdy used his photo to write a Beowulf inspired story about Ferdy the brave hero who met Vikings and defeated a Worrot and his avenging mother, perhaps encompassing nicely a few of the lessons we have learnt both at home and school this term.
This was our last flexi day this term, we'll return in September unless we manage a summer flexi extravaganza (as we did a few years ago) in a more adventurous summer than last year.
