Music for a beginner French horn player.

When we decided on home education, one of the few things that I was slightly concerned about being able to provide, was the opportunity to make music with other people, particularly at the early stages of learning an instrument.  M started learning the French horn 10 months ago and has got to the stage of playing pieces of around about Grade 1 standard.  Playing music in orchestras was a very big part of my life from about M's age until I left school, but it was mostly in the school orchestra to begin with, certainly at the stage that M is now, before joining a couple of youth orchestras a bit later on, so I hadn't anticipated this being an option for a while yet. 

Music for Everyone is a fantastic organisation, that provides just the sort of opportunities that I wanted to make sure K & M had access to if they were interested.  I've already been to a few of the Blow the Dust Off Your Instrument workshops with my viola and really enjoyed them.  Some of K & M's friends have both done the Vocals weekends, which K & M did consider but decided against, and also Bandwise, which M joined for the first time this year.  There are three levels of Bandwise and no auditions, but the guideline of around Grade 1 to 2 for Bandwise 1, Grade 3 to 4 for Bandwise 2 and Grade 5 upwards for Bandwise 3.  M's French horn teacher is involved with the organisation and gave her a leaflet about it, but she was a bit unsure whether she wanted to go or not to start with.  However, after talking to her friends who have taken part previously and also C, our friend who used to teach them piano, she decided to give it a go and she really enjoyed it.

M was one of two French horns in Bandwise 1.

The music is sent out in January, along with an audio cd (or you can download it), so there is plenty of time to practise and go over the pieces with music teachers.  M got rather frustrated and worried when she tried to play along with the cd, but was reassured by her friends that they couldn't manage that either, but were fine when it came to playing with the others in the band.  There is a weekend with rehearsals both days (just in the afternoon for Bandwise 1), which was last week and then today there was another afternoon rehearsal for a couple of hours before an informal concert for family and friends.  As well as the children (there were over 100 of them over the three bands), there are quite a lot of adults who played with them and helped them along (very handy when you have lots of counting to do, as it's easy to lose your place!) and everyone was very friendly.

M was a bit nervous about the concert, so we talked about the worst that could happen.  The scenario that she came up with was that it all went horribly wrong and sounded awful.  That was easy to deal with and I told her about the time at a school concert when just that happened and our music teacher just stopped us and we started again and it was fine on the second attempt. 

Nearly ready to start.

The three different bands each played their own pieces and there were various other smaller groups from Bandwise 2 and 3 that performed their own things too, for example a flute group, a double reed instrument group and even a percussion group.  Then for the finale of the concert all three bands performed together in a very cleverly arranged piece, which had sections where each of the three bands were playing on their own and others where they all played together.  The concert was really very good, even without taking into account how short a time they performers had all had together to rehearse and the whole event was incredibly well managed.  If you have a musician in your family, I really can't recommend it highly enough.

M is now talking about joining the Nottingham Youth Band when she gets to around Grade 2 level, although it is the same night as Scouts, which she also wants to start.  Logistically it's just about manageable to do them both, although she's rather worried she would find it too much.  I've suggested she not worry about that just yet, as she's got 6 months to go before she can start Scouts and it'll be another 6 months or so after that before she would be the right standard to join the band.

Two different days out.

On Wednesday we were out and about in the car.  After M's French horn lesson we headed into the depths of the Derbyshire countryside to pay a visit to one of the country's top master chocolatiers.

Just over two years ago I had a lesson with him, possibly the best Christmas present ever from A and ever since then, I've been buying my chocolate from him.  Unfortunately he no longer comes to our local farmers' market, but has delivered to us when over in this direction, but this was the first time that we've been to his place.  It seems to have become a bit of tradition that M takes him something that she has baked, since his wife once commented, when filling in for him at the farmers' market, that nobody bakes for him because he's just so good at it (he's baked for royalty on more than one occasion!).  This time it was jammy dodgers.  Once we'd eventually found him, he made the girls a hot chocolate and us a cuppa and then showed us his office.  There we had an impromptu lesson on chocolate production, when he showed us in order:

• a dried cacao pod
• another one cut open preserved in formaldehyde
• a jar of what would be scooped off the forest floor with the beans along with assorted rubbish (this would be paid for by weight, so it's not in the interests of those collecting it to be too picky!)
• a jar with roasted cacao beans, still in their husks.  He gave us each one to break open and taste; it was quite bitter and not that 'chocolatey'
• a jar each of cocoa powder and cocoa butter, which was in little buttons.  He gave us each one of the little buttons of the cocoa butter and told us to rub in on our skin.  Cheap chocolate doesn't have such a high cocoa butter content, as it's replaced with the much cheaper vegetable oil.  And cocoa butter skin products don't have much of the stuff in either, because it's expensive!

Fascinating stuff!

We left his place with 10 kilos of chocolate, which should keep us going for a while, and strict instructions to get in touch when we're down to the last couple of kilos, so that we don't run out again!

We then called in at Ikea on the way home, to get lids for some of our 'doodle drawers' (aka trofast ones), so that the rats can't get into them.  Once home it was time to clean out the rats' cage before the girls' swimming lesson.

On Thursday it was a home educators' day at Thinktank in Birmingham.  We got the train down and spent the morning exploring the museum, some parts which we hadn't found on previous visits.  I think this was partly down to the fact that we weren't with friends as we had been on other occasions, when they tend to stick to a particular area where they like to play. 

So we found the natural history area, the human body area and the medical area and spent quite a bit of time in these parts, some of it together, some of it looking at and interacting with the various displays.

Barn owl skull on the left, sparrowhawk on the right.

In addition to access to the museums, as part of the day, each child can attend three sessions.  These can include a show in the planetarium, a workshop in one of the labs, or a talk or show in the theatre.  Fortunately K & M are generally in agreement as to which sessions they would most like to go to, as they need an adult to accompany them (I think this is the case until they're 12).  All of the sessions that we went to were in the afternoon in our case, and they were one after another, although this wasn't a problem as each session is around 45 minutes long and there are 15 minutes between sessions to allow people to get to the next one. 

The first session we went to was a show in the theatre which was about very small things to very large things.  It focused mostly on looking at the scale of those things and I certainly found it very interesting and I think the girls did too!

Looking at the make up on an atom.

If the nucleus (i.e. the protons and neutrons) of the atom were the size of a basketball, then the electrons whizzing around would be about the size of a moth and the space would be about the size of Wembley stadium.

The comparison.

In a similar vein, a 'parachute' that was 5 metres in diameter was used to represent the size of the sun and the children were asked to decide which of a number of different sized balls would be the right size to represent earth.  It was one of the sort you find in sort play places.

The next session that K & M had chosen, sounded as though it was going to be one that they had done at a previous Thinktank day and it was quite similar, but not identical and since the girls had chosen it because they'd really liked it last time, that wasn't a problem at all.  It was on the subject of forensics and the children had various pieces of evidence that they had to look at, including fingers prints, dna results, crime scene photos, a footprint, fibres and a hair.  Once they'd gathered all the information they could from this, they were then given profiles of various possible suspects and asked to deduce who they thought was the culprit, although at this point they were also told about how the importance of 'evidence' varied.  For example, the hair found at the scene of the crime an office at Thinktank, was found to belong to the secretary, who worked in that office every day, so hardly incriminating.

Recording where evidence was found and what it was.

Recording DNA and fingerprint results.

The final session was a talk with one of the museum enablers (I think that was his title), in fact it was he had run the forensics session, who before a career change, when he joined Thinktank, had been a paleontologist.  This session was aimed children 12 years and older, but when M had seen the list of options when we received the email about the day and had seen this one she had been very upset that it was for older children and very much wanted to go along to it.  I emailed to ask if it was possible and quickly got a reply to say that it was fine (they are rather stricter about ages for the lab sessions though).  It was quite a personal talk, including information about the route he took to get into paleontology, with quite a lot about the digs that he had been on and what was involved and really rather interesting.  I don't know if, after hearing about it, M is still interested in that as a career option, and she was getting rather tired by this point, but I think she and K both enjoyed the talk and afterwards it was time to head back to the station.

After two busy days out and about we really needed the Friday at home and since it was the end of the month, that meant it was bedroom cleaning and tidying time.

In other news, we've been continuing with The Star of Kazan, which we're all enjoying.  M finished her maths workbook and has moved onto a grammar one and K has done the opposite.  Finally, M was busy last weekend, but that deserves a post of its own, so more on that later.

Things we have been doing.

Having had rather a slow period as regards things that obviously look like education, it's been rather busy round these parts.

K has continued with writing her 'bloggy' and finished the post about our trip to the Natural History Museum.  Once she's finished it, we looked through it together and corrected some mistakes.  There were a couple of errors she was making consistently, such as writing 'witch' instead of 'which' and 'were' instead of 'where', so I've asked her to make sure that she checks for those things when she does writing.  We also talked about punctuation and using it to help make meaning clear and avoid ridiculously long sentences.  K told me that she has also picked up a grammar workbook that she started ages ago and has been continuing with.  She tells me that she will show me when she's finished the book.  When I asked her if she was getting on okay with it and understanding it, she said that she was and on further questioning she said that she thought she might be able to use some of the things that she's done exercises on when she does her own writing.

Having made a start on the maths workbook, M has been picking it up regularly and has been working through it well.  We have now covered sequences, which she really likes, to the point that she asked me to rub out all her answers so that she could do the exercises again.  She also said she'd like some more around the level of the ones in the book or a bit more difficult and I also found her some more to do online here.  She was doing really well with them until she had to continue one which was something like 4/15, 1/3, 2/5, 7/15....  Then she decided that it was too diffcult, which given it was aimed at a school Year 8 (so approximately 12 year olds - she's 9), was understandable.  However, we had a look at it together and she did have a go at the next sequence, which was similar but with fourteenths, so a bit easier, and managed it fine before deciding that she'd had enough.  By that point she had done about 15 minutes of them though, so it was fair enough and she'd finished on a good note.  Other topics that we've done, usually snuggled up either on the sofa or in my bed, once before I'd even had breakfast, include addition and subtraction, multiplication of two digit by one digit numbers, angles (acute, right and obtuse) and pyramids and prisms.  M decided that she would rather skip the division one and come back to it, although there is only measuring left apart from the recap at the end of the book, so we will be addressing that one soon. 

Both girls have also done baking recently too.  M has made flapjacks and chocolate brownies (although these were somewhat overbaked, but that was my fault) and this morning K used two different recipes from her cupcake book to make marbled chocolate and vanilla cupcakes ready to decorate with friends who came round this afternoon.  They had eaten the best ones before I managed to take a photo, but here are some of K & M's.

When it comes to decorating cakes, more is definitely more!

We also played a game that the friends (they're K, M & A, so rather confusing for the purposes of my blog!) brought with them.  It's called Qwitsh and it's rather good, depending on the role of a die, you have to get rid of your cards, which each have a number from 1 to 8 and a letter from A to H, with either a number or letter that is one less, one above or the same as either the number or letter on the card showing the pile, as quickly as possible.

Mid-game of Qwitsh.

Finally, it's nearly a fortnight since the last Asfordby, but I forgot to blog about that session, which was on the theme of the Chinese New Year.  As well as the activities that various parents had brought along for the children to do, one of the mums who grew up in Taiwan, I think it was, brought along some Chinese cakes for the children too try as well as a writing set.  She did a little 'show and tell', about the language and the writing, as well as about some of her memories of living there.  Some things that stuck in my mind, were how the written language is not phonetic, and also how what would sound like the same word to us can mean four very different things depending on the tone of how it's said, for example a rising or falling tone.

C, S, M & K dancing with the Chinese dragon the children had helped decorate.

M did some tangrams

Some of the celebration cakes we tried.

Aren't libraries great!

In my catch up post, I completely forgot about one of the highlights of the week!  Last Saturday, due to 'popular demand' according to the posters, (we're pretty sure this is my friend Ka and I filling in the event feedback cards last time) Imagination Gaming were at the library for the day.  Therefore we were there pretty much all day too.  We popped home for a quick bite to eat at lunchtime and K had her ballet lesson, but apart from that we were there from when they were setting up until the end.

We tried Pinnochio first (rather bizarrely, I can't find it anywhere online).  This was never going to be one for my girls, because it involves bluffing/lying and they are very reluctant to do so.  The idea is to decide if someone is telling the truth or not about something to do with one of four categories on a card, then depending how many people believe them, they and those that were wrong about whether they were lying or not have to build up Pinocchio's nose until it falls down.

His nose got rather long!

At the girls' request, we had a go at one of the games that we played at the last session back in the autumn; Anomia.  This involves looking out for matching symbols between yourself and other players and then coming up with something in the category on the other player's card before they come up with something on yours.  Does that make sense?  It's a tricky one to describe and quite tricky to play, but a good one.

Anomia

Cloud 9 was one that we all enjoyed.  It's a really simple idea, where you have to weigh up the likelihood of someone being able to match the colours thrown on the dice with the cards in their hand.  You get many more points if you decide they can and they do, but lose all the points if they can't.

Cloud 9

M and her friend A had a few goes of Chickyboom, which, while for younger children, has loads of potential for use in exploring levers with slightly older ones.  To play you take it in turn to remove an item from the seesaw.  The items are different weights with corresponding different values and you get points for each item you remove until the seesaw falls off.

M & A playing Chickyboom.

One that I played, first with Chris from Imagination Gaming who was running the session (in a quieter moment), and later once each with a couple of the girls' friends, was Stratopolis.  I really liked this one.  It's a two player game, where your largest unbroken  surface area of colour gives you points by multiplying the number of tiles (from above) by the number of tiles in the stack at the highest point in that area.  You each have your own L-shaped tiles and have one, two or three squares of your colour and the rest of the three squares are either black or (one) red.  You can put the tiles on top of others, but not red on top of green or vice versa, thereby increasing your own area or sometimes blocking your opponents.

I won!

The tiles of Battle Sheep are fantastic and it's another really good game.  It's a game of strategy, where you try to spread your sheep out as much as possible over the field of play whilst trying to block other people from doing so.

Battle Sheep!

This is another one that I can't find online.  There are two sets of cards, one with letters and the other with categories.  The letters are set out around the pile of category cards and as soon as the category card is turned over and read out, players call out a word that fits the category.  The first person who does so takes all the letter cards that are in that word, then the next player does the same until everyone has had a go.  The gaps left are filled in with new letter cards and a new category card is turned over.

Fast Words

M watched another M play this one with a friend of his, before playing against him herself.  To be honest, I didn't entirely follow, but they seemed to enjoy it and it was very strategic.  This explains Brave Rats far better than any attempt I could make!  To start with my M lost every round, but then something suddenly clicked and after that she won several rounds in a row before moving on to something else.

The game.

Playing it.

We all made a point of giving lots of positive feedback to the library, so we're hoping that it won't be too long before they're back again.  Apart from us and two other families who are friends of ours and were also there for a big chunk if not all of the session, there were probably another half a dozen families or more who dropped in for a while and seemed to enjoy themselves too.

In other library news, a book that we borrowed from there, Ruby Redfort Feel the Fear, got us talking about base 3, since there's a morse code type code in the book but it uses indented and protruding dots as well as no dots in a pattern, so is ternary rather than binary (dots or no dots) like morse code.  We also talked about the decimal system that we use as well as binary code that is the basis of computing.

Having finished Ruby Redfort, we have moved on to another library book, The Star of Kazan, which is by Eva Ibbotson, who wrote a number of other books that we have really enjoyed.

Other things last week and into this one.

A final post to catch up with a really rather busy week.  Both girls have at various times been a bit off colour and it's been rather chilly, so I have been reading to them quite a bit.  Yesterday I finished reading the latest Ruby Redfort book Feel the Fear, which we ordered from the library before it was published several months ago (along with two other friends, so we all got calls from the library and each collected a brand new copy of the book on the same day!).  As usual with the Ruby Redfort there are various things that we can follow up, particularly regarding the codes used in the book.

In other news, K has started a blog.  It's just for her, although I am going to be allowed to look at some of the posts, so that we can use it to help her improve her written English.  The impetus was that last week was such a good week, with something on almost every day that she was particularly looking forward to, so I suggested she might like to write things down as a way of remembering them.  She thought it was a good idea and decided on a blog rather than handwritten in a diary and has been doing quite a lot on it.  Although I'm not allowed to look, she has told me what the private post is about.  She has been doing a number profiles, in the first person, of various characters she has come up with including information about them and their likes and dislikes.  From what she has shared with me, it sounds as though it's done in a quite wordy way, with sentences rather than single words for categories such as favourite food.  It's not out of the question, that I might be allowed to see one day!

On my suggestion, M dug out a workbook to have a go at.  It's a Letts one: Mythical Maths.  She whizzed through the number sequences pages and those about number place and value in 4 digit numbers.  Her mental maths is pretty good, but we very rarely do much written down and so it's perhaps not surprising that doing addition and subtraction in columns was a bit of a stumbling block.  Both K & M are usually quite keen (aka stubborn) to do things *their* way, even though in many cases the conventional way of doing things makes things either much simpler or less easy to lose track of working.  M consented to give the conventional way of carrying and borrowing in addition and subtraction and having got the hang of it very quickly, went back to the sums in the workbook and managed them easily.  We had an interesting talk about borrowing in subtraction and came up with the following alternative way of doing it, although I think we'll stick to the usual way.

 Also today, M issued me with an egg box challenge.  We each had an egg box and had to decorate it with just the things she had got out on the table in a rather short amount of time.  Here are the results.

Mine's on the left, M's is on the right.

This afternoon we had friends round for tea, play and to meet the rats of course, before the four of them went off to korfball.

Finally, we have been listening to When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr on iplayer, although we've now caught up and need to wait for the next episodes to be broadcast.

Maths and Magic.

On Tuesday, it was a little bit of a struggle to get up and across town for Fun Club, but we managed it despite the long day the day before.  It was a bring and share maths session, which was a first on this subject for Fun Club and it worked really well.  There were various board games, a shop, polyhedra and their nets, symmetry and measuring among other things.

Matching polyhedra and nets.

Symmetrical colouring.

A week last Thursday, M came with me to pick K up from Scouts, when K came out very happy because they had been told that the following Scouts was going to be a Harry Potter session.  Both K and M are very big Harry Potter fans, so K's excitement was matched by M's upset, although she managed to hold it in until we got home.  On Wednesday she finally got around to sending an email to the Scout leader, saying that she wanted to come to Scouts as soon as she's old enough and really likes Harry Potter and was wondering if she might be able to come.  While we were out at swimming, A had a phone call asking how old she was and when told that she will be 10 in June, Skip said that she was welcome to come along as a taster session. 

Thursday was Harry Potter Book Night, both at Scouts, but also at the library, where there was an event from 4-5pm.  The girls wore their Hogwarts robes, which I had made for them probably about a year after agreeing to do so.  It was so long that the material I had bought to make them each a robe, was only enough to make one for K, so I had to get some more!  I started on Saturday, spending a large chunk of the weekend on them and then finished them off on Tuesday and Wednesday.

K relaxing....

....and M ready for action.

The library event was okay, although a bit on the young side for K & M.  They really enjoyed the Scout session, which was a 'Triwizard Tournament'.  As well as a Harry Potter quiz (which M was very useful in for her team), they had other challenges including solving this puzzle, with the Scouts playing the parts of the man, boat and things the man had to take across the river. 

A trip to London.

On Monday we had an early start to get to Leicester to catch a coach at 9 o'clock for a day trip to London, organised by the lovely I.  We set off in what should have been plenty time at 7.45am, but traffic and roadworks in Leicester and a mile that took 20 minutes, meant that we unfortunately delayed the start a bit. 

The coach dropped us off at the Natural History Museum at just gone 11.30am and was due to leave from the same place at 6pm.  Some people went elsewhere for some or all of the time, but others, like us were happy to spend the whole day at the NHM. 

K, M and I started off with the dinosaurs along with E, L & J.  The first time we visited the NHM, when K was 5 or 6 at the time and M was about 4, K was so terrified of the moving model raptors that I had to take her elsewhere, while M and A continued to see the model T-Rex.  This time K decided that one of the raptors was called Geoffrey and named the others too (the T-Rex is apparently called Bob).  We enjoyed looking at the dinosaurs as we worked our way along the walkway.

Two juvenile hypsilophodon

An iguanodon

A gallimimus.

At the end of the walkway, we arrived at the home of a dinosaur that M has long considered a friend of hers.

 

Bob!

The section after Bob, focuses less on individual dinosaurs and more on things like habitat, hunting, how dinosaurs moved for example and has more interactive things to do with all of the children enjoyed.

We then met back up with other friends and after we'd had our packed lunch in the basement picnic area, E took L & J to the Science Museum and we spent most of the rest of the day with C and S and her dad and granny.  First we went in search of the museum's latest acquisition, the most complete skeleton found to date of a stegosaurus.

No need to name this dinosaur, as she's already been called Sophie!

We then headed up into the red zone of the museum.  It varied how much time we spent looking at the various exhibits, but the earthquake and volcanoes section caught the girls' interest and they particularly liked the earthquake simulation.  K and I then looked at the different types of earthquakes and also where the biggest ones are most likely to occur, since there had been one with the epicentre not very far away recently that was strong enough to be felt (although none of us did).

Map showing the tectonic plates and the direction they are moving.

K was particularly keen to see the 'pretty, shiny, sparkly things' (said with tongue in cheek I think!).  She is particularly keen on opals, which are her birthstone.

Stone with opal in.

Later we went to 'The Vault' to see some more.

Opals in The Vault.

And an opal necklace.

The girls were keen to visit the mammals section too, so that was our next port of call.  K & M have a favourite in there, a very small deer, the dikdik.

The dikdik.

We spent quite a while in this section too, before meeting back up with other folks.  The children wanted to have a look in the shop too and most of them spent some (or all!) of the money they had brought with them.  K bought some bookmarks to add to her collection and M bought a wind-up torch. 

K, M & I upstairs to the minerals area and visited The Vault, as I mentioned.  We also had a look at the cross-section of the giant sequoia, which was felled when it was around 1,300 years old.

Just a few of the events during the life of the tree.

Finally, we stumbled across a relatively new gallery: Treasures, in which we read more about various of the particularly significant exhibits that this gallery holds, particularly William Smith's ammonites.  By this time it was nearly time to head back to the coach and everyone was pretty tired.  Everybody was back on the coach, so that we actually left London a few minutes early, which is absolutely unheard of in my experience!  We arrived back in Leicester to a light covering of snow and got back home to Nottingham about 9.15pm.