Thursday, February 6, 2014

Science and Art

This morning we started off with some activities I had organised and laid out for them last night. They decorated two left over choc-chip muffins (from the ones I baked for their movie night yesterday). Miles especially loved painting different colours, sprinkling (and eating all the ones that didn't make it onto his muffin! Then they ate them for their mid-morning snack! 






Then it was time to begin our science project. Cress egg-heads! I had prepared egg shells earlier and got the materials handy for their experiment. 


First we scrunched kitchen roll into pieces and stuffed into the shell, pouring a little water on to pat it down. Taking care also not to break the egg shell as Caden discovered happens when you don't listen to the instructions. It's all good learning!


Then we drew faces on our eggs. 



Then we put seeds into our egg heads on top of the paper and wet the seeds. They are now going into a dark cupboard for a few days until the seeds make shoots. The reason they go into the dark is to fool the seeds into thinking they are underground so they will sprout. The plan is to measure our findings every day and draw graphs each once we get shoots to see whose egg produces the longest cress by the end. Then we will eat our cress of course :) 


The boys had a lot of fun at lunch time wrestling, playing horsey rides with each other and dancing to the tambourine together. Miles really loves to move in time to faster and slower rhythms, he has good musical sense. Caden too I think, rhythm seems to come naturally to them. They love dancing. 





Then we visited our friend on the house boat as we had a walk in the rain planned. We played a little game of knock the stacked cans down with a bean bag. 


Then they played with little wind up bugs on the floor of the boat together, making them fly about all over the place. 


We went for our walk together. We talked about all the wasted apples in the orchard and I have made a mental note to bring them here in the Autumn and next Winter for much scrumping and making a variety of things with apples. Juicing too of course! It is such a shame to see this wasted fruit! 


The boys and their friends went off running together. 


Miles showing a daisy he found and picked!


Miles up to his ankles in puddles. 



Then we said goodbye to our friends and went on our visit to a local art/sculpture gallery. 

The following recycled and welded pipe sculpture was representing a thinking man. Caden and I talked about whether we could see the man in the shape and how he was posed. 


We found a rabbit sculpture, no information about this one nearby. 


We found the sunshine sculpture. We are looking forward to the sunshine :)


Caden loved this and pointed his sword to his favourite leaf. We will probably try to recreate this leaf at home using mosaic/collage sometime soon. 



The red sculpture was two people kissing and the one near Caden (he read me the sign when I got to him) was about the girl next door. 


This was very interesting, the information told us some of the background of the artist and Caden liked hearing that he was from Zimbabwe because he has been interested in looking at Africa on the map recently. There was a photo of the artist with his hammer and chisel and we looked at and felt the chisel marks on the sculpture itself. It was a great piece of art to talk about. 


Miles liked this one!


We found a maze with more sculptures in. 


This was a very interesting Dali-esque piece of work. No information again sadly. 



We saw a stone? head coming out of the hill on the other side of the small beck. 


I liked this, it was called 'Grief' - the man has a hole in the middle of him - I thought it was beautiful. We talked about what grieving is and how the art shows us that emotion really well. 



Spring is coming, here are some early daffodil shoots. We also saw crocuses on our walk and lots of buds on trees. We think it will snow still though and that it is a shame for the early plants who think it's Spring because it has been so mild. 


Miles loved the musical frogs. He wanted to be the one that played the drums. 


Some art on a shed wall that reminds me of Michelangelo!

We identified a Christmas rose together.


This was the place we were at. 


They absolutely LOVED the Spiderman themed Triceratops and we called it the 'Spideysaurus'. 


Finally here is a picture of Caden identifying worm casts in the grass. 



Then they went home and Caden read two pages from The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, to me and they watched a short film for pre-schoolers about racing cars. 

1 comment:

  1. Wow that art garden looks fab! Added to my list :-) Wonderful busy, arty, friendy day - love it xxx

    ReplyDelete

New Beginnings

 The boys are growing. They are now 14 and 11. It's been 2 years since we escaped from Thailand and what a couple of years we have had. ...