Once upon a pyramid - invertebrate cats and hibernating hedgehogs

 For our Mum-reads-aloud book we are reading the Animals of Farthing Wood at the moment. It was written in 1979 but its theme, about animals who have to leave their homes because their wood is being bulldozed down for more homes to be made, is strangely pertinent.

The vocabulary in the book is quite sophisticated (for all of us) and a lot of words need explanation. So we decided to get out the dictionary this week and look up some of our new words. Ferdy then wrote them out on some new paper which we are trying in order to help his letter formation.

We like animals to be the theme of the day; Ferdy is learning about vertebrates and invertebrates at school, and Gil is learning about autumn and hibernation, so where is the best local place to go to see animals? No, sadly not the woods, but Derby Museum..

Derby Museum is a place we often use as our Friday classroom. Ferdy is also studying the Egyptians so we started with the Egyptian mummies.

We got a lecture from our impromptu tour guide (Ferdy) about how people were put in bandages before being placed in the coffin, about how the head was a jackal head and how kings were buried in pyramids. To our great astonishment we even found a mummified cat.

In the nature gallery we discovered vertebrates and invertebrates, and Gil looked for animals that hibernate.

We even spotted a hibernating butterfly (a red admiral), and we also talked about the migrating butterfly, the Monarch.

Later on, Gil drew a hedgehog with the legendary Art for Kids, and Ferdy taught him to add up to ten on his fingers and wrote and dictated a story about an Invertebrate Cat. Thanks to Derby Museum, we could bring together English, History, Science and Art, not to mention the Maths we used to work out how much crisps cost in the cafe, and the Music we listened to in-between times tables at home.

A gloriumptiously good day

 In our household, we love a literary pilgrimage. We have done a fair few in our flexischooling career, be it transporting ourselves off to the land of fairytales, looking for the Lorax, meeting some of our literary heroes at Hay on Wye, celebrating Christmas with Michael Rosen and Charles Dickens, and we've even been known to travel all the way to Denmark to find Hans Christian Andersen..

Arguably though, one of the constants in Ferdy's long life of loving books has been Roald Dahl. He has been listening to the audiobooks since he was 4; he started reading with the Magic Finger and now reads them all and our latest, which we listened to this Friday, is Boy.

So when I found out that the museum had reopened, I decided we should take a trip there. We have no idea how much longer these amazing and vital places are going to stay open or survive.

Having travelled there the night before, our early morning countryside trail entailed tramping through the woods which inspired stories like Danny the Champion of the World, Fantastic Mr Fox and Billy and the Minpins. We encountered Wangdoodles, Snozwanglers, Hornswogglers, Vermicious Knids, had to run away from the blood suckling, tooth pluckling, stone chuckling Spittler (Gruncher for short), and even found the orchard and farm belonging to one of Ferdy's favourite baddies, Mr Bean (the lean one who only drinks cider in FMF).

Gil enjoyed leading the way on this walk by following instructions on our map and not getting too biffsquiggled. It culminated in us tracing the BFGs footsteps to Roald Dahl's grave where we had a little chat with the great man himself..

After some scrumdiddlyumptious food in the cafe, we went to the museum. Many things are a bit miserable at the moment; places seem like ghost towns and no one seems to be having much fun. But it is rather nice to have your own personal tour guide (a splendiferous lady named Helen who reminded us a little of Miss Honey) and a whole museum to yourselves.

Both boys churgled to see the mouse in the sweet jar from Boy and delighted in seeing Roald Dahl's actual writing room and to work out what character they were according to their height (Ferdy was George, Gil was an Oompa Loompa to his annoyance, I was Willy Wonka). We learnt loads of new stuff about Roald Dahl, (although Ferdy seemed to know rather a lot, occasionally taking over as museum guide) like how he had loved the Beatrix Potter books, how Charlie from the Chocolate Factory had originally been made of chocolate, how Oompa Loompas were very nearly called Whipple Scrumpets and how the BFG was based on Roald Dahl's very good friend with big ear lobes who had made his writing shed.

Gil particularly loved the ball of tin foil Dahl made from every chocolate wrapper he had eaten, and Ferdy very much enjoyed showing off all his knowledge of the characters in the stories (he was able to answer every question correctly) and stomping, flying and oompa loompering around the museum between the rooms.

On the way home, we listened to the rest of Boy and later we watched the whizzpoppingly excellent Fantastic Mr Fox and spotted Roald Dahl's chair and ball of tinfoil in Mr Fox's office in the film.

The day was made of zozimus for all involved.

Ferdy's trick taken from Matilda's book of genius

What's in the news today?

 In the olden days, when I was young and cool and hip and before I became a world weary mother, I worked in the newspaper industry. So when Ferdy asked if we could make a newspaper this Friday, I became a little (over) excited. The chance to be an editor again had arisen...

After school worship online, we were just in time for the 10:30 news meeting where news story ideas were proposed to the Editor. Our research consisted of reading a few daily papers and choosing our favourite stories, watching Newsround and finding out about how best to approach putting together our paper.

Chief reporter writes a list of all the important stories of the day

We decided we needed an exclusive story so contacted one of our sources about some tree felling happening nearby, and then out we went for some on the ground reporting.

Here's The Adventure Paper, all articles written and dictated by Ferdy and/or Gil and all pictures drawn and taken by Ferdy and Gil apart from the final illustration.

Our interview with retired local resident, Granddad, took place at 3pm so we only just made our 4pm press deadline. Ferdy and Gil found it hilarious that this was called 'putting the paper to bed'.

Ferdy's Law of Emotion

 Some Fridays work well, and some less well. This was a less well kind of a Friday.. We've all had colds this week and I'm still recovering, plus Ferdy's been getting upset about work and unable to concentrate for very long. And also, we often fill our Fridays with an exciting and enriching day out (this was part of the reason for flexischooling in the first place!) but it feels difficult to arrange anything at the moment, especially anything further afield.

However, many places are still open so Mum just needs to do a bit more creative thinking and stop feeling negative.

We are doing quite a bit of maths at the moment, which often works well through games, so we started with a game called Happy Maths Families. This involved me giving Ferdy a number sentence and him finding the other members (facts) of the number sentence family.

After Gil had done all the worksheets he had asked for (he is doing the letters g, o, c and k this week), he ordered numbers 1-10 and did some sums adding up to 5.

Ferdy really enjoyed his work at school this week on emotions so we then decided to look at some famous paintings and think about what they made us feel (we couldn't look at Munch's The Scream as both boys are scared of it).

Slightly frustratingly (this was one of our emotions hehe), Ferdy has denoted a colour to each emotion (perhaps from a book at school?), a law from which he won't budge. So when we looked at Dr Seuss's beautiful My Many Coloured Days, he was adamant that Dr Seuss had it wrong. He also repeated the same mantra for looking at paintings; when asked why a painting made him feel calm he stated, 'because it's green of course'.

I tried to counter Ferdy's Law of Emotion by introducing a few black and white pictures but was promptly told that black is 'scared', so that was slightly unsuccessful.

We then decided to move on and watched a video about the difference between emotions and feelings, listened to some songs and Ferdy wrote some sentences about when he feels sad, angry, calm, scared and brave. He then insisted on drawing colourful monsters to accompany these sentences (blue, red, green, black and orange). I tried to remain green and embrace rather than reject Ferdy's law.

On our way to the woods, Gil made up a beautiful song about what we feel and that 'our emotions are always there, we can't run away from them'.

The song ended with the fact that we are going to the woods to 'run away from our emotions'.

Later on, we all did some paintings and felt yellow. I surrender.

The Swap Shop

Today, Ferdy and I made up a game called The Swap Shop. This entailed me giving Ferdy a number, he then had to halve that number using dienes and two bowls and write the number sentence. Sounds a bit boring? Not when you have to visit The Swap Shop, run by Mrs Swap Shop who spoke a bit funny and had a weird sounding doorbell, to exchange your 10 block, 100 block or 1000 block for 1s, 10s or 100s.

Mrs Swap Shop was also a bit wayward and often tried to cheat Ferdy out of a few blocks so he had to be very alert. A simple game, but thoroughly enjoyable..

In the meantime, Gil worked on a few worksheets. He likes to do these on his own with the occasional interjection by Ferdy (practise saying 'd', Gil by saying 'a dog dug a dragon's dung') and definitely no help from Mrs Swap Shop.

We've never really done a lot of work on worksheets on a Friday but Gil seems to love them so who am I to argue? Ferdy then also did some of his own, as well as some important work writing about a day in the life of Bananaman.

Ferdy then decided it was time for Gil to learn about ordering and recognising numbers 1-10 so taught him a numbers game.

Gil won, much to my and Ferdy's annoyance..

With Akimbo and the Lion (Gil had requested that we listen to something about Africa as he really enjoyed learning about Africa in school this week) as our soundtrack, we then had time to head out to do some afternoon activities.

We had loads of fun doing the Activity Trail which we fortuitously had all to ourselves. Both boys, who are generally cautious, were fearless on the rather too high rope bridges and found it hilarious that I had shaky legs at the end. Gil also wanted to do the Sensory Trail (it's much easier to guess what things are if you look inside the boxes and it's still using one of your senses actually Mummy), and it was apparently amusing seeing Mum get lost in the labyrinth.

Later on everyone flagged a bit. Two weeks back at school seems to be taking its toll and we've had to wipe off six month's worth of dust from the calpol bottle this weekend, so when Gil selected a pile of books for Mrs Swap Shop please to read, no one complained.

Signs of the times

 Phew, we managed to get through the first week back with only a few tears, a sprinkling of nighttime worries and just one nervous tummy ache. The boys were fine though...

When questioned about what they wanted to do this Friday, Gil asked for a playground and the woods, and Ferdy suggested going on an aeroplane. We settled on Gil's request and decided to go to Hicks Lodge.

But first some maths: Ferdy did lots of work with number sentences and times tables using dienes, numicons and even money. Gil did some adding up to 10 with the numicons; he was pretty excited that he recognised them from school.

Gil has learnt the letters s a t p this week and is thrilled to actually have his own work on flexischooling Friday (how long will this last? ponders Mum cynically..) so completed about half a dozen letter formation worksheets, whilst Ferdy and I looked at sentence types in his books and with some videos.

Ferdy is probably the slowest breakfast eater I have ever met; he even pointed out to me that during breakfast I had covered all the four sentence types we were learning:

Is Ferdy eating his breakfast? (question)

Ferdy, eat your breakfast! (command)

Ferdy is eating his breakfast. (statement)

What a lot of breakfast Ferdy has eaten! (exclamation)

So after an hour of eating breakfast, he was pretty much able to collate different sentence types from the book he's currently reading aloud, The Haunted Ark.

At Hicks Lodge we ticked both the playground and woods boxes, we also scooted around the lake, saw buzzards, horses, geese migrating, and lots of dogs, played hide and seek in the woods, climbed trees and ate ice creams.

There were signs everywhere. So when we got home, Ferdy colour coded the sentence types, and Gil circled the letters he had learnt.

We noted that a lot of the newer signs were commands; a clear indication of the world we live in right now.

Introducing Gil

Lockdown was mainly not a bad experience for us. In fact, the boys generally had a lovely time playing Lego, reading Tintin/Asterix/The Beano/ every single Horrid Henry book until Mum wrote her own book entitled 'No More Horrid Henry Ever', listening to audiobooks, running around the woods, seeing friends and relatives (when allowed), going on scooter rides and of course, making countless Lego ships.

Despite being pretty busy, we did manage to do some work and it was quite a good opportunity to see how Gil and Ferdy can work simultaneously on similar but ability appropriate tasks. Perfect preparation for flexischooling Fridays with Gil, who will now actively participate in flexischool.

Gil also started school this week and thoroughly enjoyed it. Fingers crossed for a child who likes school...

We began the day with some maths; place value practice for Ferdy and number formation practice for Gil.

Then it was time for some BBC Bitesize videos about expanded noun phrases (Gil loves these videos too). Ferdy dictated and turned a few sentences into expanded noun phrases, although I wasn't that impressed when Mummy's tummy became Mummy's big, fat tummy.

Because we had to ease ourselves back into the term gently, we spent the afternoon in the woods in Worcester.

Later on, we even managed a bit more place value practice with dienes - Ferdy really likes using something tangible when doing maths, and Gil likes counting them.

And we got into these brilliant Art for Kids Draw Alongs over the summer - great practice for Ferdy who often finds it really hard to copy what he sees in front of him so we drew Frozone and Mr Incredible.

All in all it was a good start to the term and we are very content with our new flexischooling classmate.