Maps and Scales

Following on from our seerah work on the Isra' and Mi'raaj, I thought now would be a nice time to look at the big atlas (they've only used their junior atlas so far) and introduce them to the concept of scales.

First, we revised which units are used for measuring length/distance and compared them to each other i.e. how many mm in a cm, cm in a m, m in a km. So which unit would be the most sensible for measuring the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem? They chose km. 😁

Then I showed them the atlas and told them we could use it to calculate the actual distance between those two places. Nowadays, we can easily use the internet to find out the answer - but before that technology existed, this is what we would have done instead!

They used the contents page to help them find the right page in the atlas (they knew they needed to look in either Asia or Africa) and then found Makkah and Jerusalem on the map. I asked them to measure the distance - what would they need? A ruler. At first they tried to do it in cm and said "around 6cm", so I told them to use mm - which is another new skill for them today! M said 62mm and F 64mm, so I said we'd go in between and say it's 63mm.

So is the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem 63mm?? M laughed and said her hand was bigger than that! So I pointed out the scale at the bottom of the page and explained this to them: the map was drawn to scale so that every 1cm actually meant 200km in real life!

The next bit of maths I did on the whiteboard and had them help with the arithmetic, but I didn't expect them to follow along with the method... So we calculated that if 1cm = 200km then 1mm = 20km. 1mm x 20 = 20km, so 63mm x 20 = 1260km. So the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem must be around 1260km.

Was it? We typed it into Google to check and found the answer given to be 1486km! Which is pretty close! We'd recently done work on rounding, so I had them round the two answers to the nearest 100km, i.e. 1300km and 1500km, and they agreed these were pretty similar.

Next, I asked them to find the page of the UK so we could calculate some distances between e.g. Birmingham and Ipswich.

M found the page quickly and they enjoyed looking at the map for a few minutes, pointing out familiar places: Birmingham, Ipswich, Felixstowe, Woodbridge, Leicester, Nottingham (where Papa's at work today!), London...

Then they repeated what they did before, in turn, and measured the distance between Birmingham and Ipswich to be 106mm. They both agreed at the same distance this time.

I asked them if Birmingham and Ipswich were further away from each other than Makkah and Jerusalem then, because 106mm was more than 63mm? They both laughed and said no, of course not. 😂 I prompted them by asking if the scale of the maps on both pages was the same or different then and they correctly answered it must be different. 👍

We did some more calculations on the whiteboard (again, not expecting them to follow the method!) and worked out that Ipswich is 265km away from Birmingham. Google came up with 264.2km, which they were very pleased with! 😁😁

Finally, we compared the two distances with each other by rounding... So Makkah to Jerusalem was around 1500km and Birmingham to Ipswich was around 300km... So how many times more is the distance between Makkah and Jerusalem, i.e. how far Prophet Muhammad (SAW) travelled in one night compared to when we go to visit Nani's house? With a bit of prompting (mainly me scaling the numbers down by dividing by 100!) they were happy it was 5 times more.

So if it takes us around 3 hours to get to Nani's house by car, how long would it take us by car to get to Jerusalem from Makkah? F quite quickly understood we needed to multiply 3 hours by 5, so 15 hours. This gave them some kind of tangible idea of how far the Prophet (SAW) travelled and why the disbelievers found it so hard to believe him!

How long did they say it should take? 1 month, i.e. around 30 days by camel. So if we were to travel the distance to Ipswich by camel, as they would have done in those days, how long would it take us? This was a little more difficult but they worked out they would need to divide 30 by 5, since the difference in the journey length was 5 times, i.e. 6 days. Can you imagine taking 6 days to get to Nani's house! But nowadays we can just get in the car and drive in only 2.5-3hrs! 😱

We finished there, but I noticed the two of them poring over the atlas together while I was getting lunch ready, MashaAllah. 😆💕

Light & Dark - Refraction

We read the pages about bending light in the Light and Dark book from the KS1 Science series we have. We did the suggested experiments ("floating" coin and putting a spoon in a glass of water) and talked about how the light was being bent so we didn't see the things as they actually were. When I put the spoon handle in the glass, F noticed that it looked bigger than it was - so we talked about how bending the light in a certain way can make things look bigger than they are.

Vocab revision: F remembered that the word for see-through is transparent and M remembered the word for making bigger is magnify. 👍

I wrote refraction in the centre of the whiteboard and asked the girls what it meant: the left two notes were their answers. Then I asked what the effect of it was/what refraction made us see: the bottom two notes.

I asked them if they could think of any uses of refraction then... Using the knowledge on the board so far, why is refraction useful? Can you think of any objects which use refraction, which make things look bigger or smaller than they are? I wrote their examples around the whiteboard as they said them.

We then read about things looking bigger or smaller in the Sight book from the same KS1 Science series, as well as the pages about glasses.

I had the twins look carefully at the lens of their glasses and to feel both those and the lens of the magnifying glass - could they feel they were curved? Compared to the glass in the window, what was the difference? Does a window refract light? Why? Then I added the pink label at the bottom of the whiteboard.

By this time it was time for A's nap, so I gave their task to the twins - to simply explain the difference between reflection and refraction on a piece of paper. Half the paper for each word, write its meaning and draw examples of objects which reflect or refract light.

I wanted them to do this task as I know the two words are similar and easily confused! And this would also consolidate all we had just discussed on refraction by them drawing example objects.

For the reflection side they just drew pictures of anything, since they understand bouncing light as the reason we can see everything. They also drew pictures of mirrors and we talked a little about how we use the word "reflection" in everyday language just to mean when we can see the same image in a surface (such as a mirror, a puddle, or any other shiny surface), but in scientific terms the word is to do with bouncing light. I told them briefly about why we can see our reflections - the shiny surface is smooth and reflects the light back nicely, whereas for everything else the surface is a little bumpy so the light bounces back everywhere - but I could tell this might become confusing and so we didn't pursue it any further!

For the refraction side, they couldn't think of anything which is designed to make objects look smaller... And neither could I! But we have some toy telescopes and binoculars and they noticed that looking through these things the wrong way did the opposite, i.e. made objects look smaller. Why? They came up with because then the lens was curved in the opposite direction! We didn't go into the detail of concave/convex/double lenses. 😁

Finally, they wrote a sentence at the bottom of each side to summarise what they had drawn. We spoke about it first and they both ended up writing the same sentences, although independently. 😂👍

Seerah timeline (6-8)

Continued from this post...

Open Preaching

Coincidentally, the week we covered this part of the seerah, the Big Life Journal email that week (I recommend signing up to the free emails if you haven't already!) happened to be linked with a similar lesson to do with overcoming challenges: "Trees stand strong despite high winds because their roots are deep. Similarly, we can stand strong despite the challenges in our lives because we have deep roots which support us: loving people, thoughts, beliefs, values, and so on."

So as part of our reflection on this part of the Prophet (SAW)'s life, we completed the week's Big Life Journal activity together and stuck the finished poster in their bedroom, while reminding ourselves of the Muslims at the time going through their challenges (i.e. ridicule, torture, the boycott, etc.) but never giving up their faith.

We coloured a quarter of the poster each, since it printed on to 4 A4 sheets it was simplest to divide up the work this way (myself, the twins and Z) - and this also represented teamwork and the fact we all share the same roots with each other. I took this opportunity to teach the girls about blending and hues by having us all use colouring pencils. I demonstrated applying different pressure using the same pencil and the effect it had on the colour, as well as colouring lightly with two colours on top of each other so the change between two colours isn't so apparent.

Year of Sadness

We talked about why this time of the Prophet (SAW)'s life is known is the Year of Sadness/Sorrow, how he must have been feeling and why he was able to continue his mission despite that.

Continuing the theme of being strong like a tree, we compared this sadness to a huge challenge and Allah's love and Muhammad (SAW)'s strong faith as being his roots.

I Googled some random photos of landscapes to show the children, first "summer day landscape" then "icy landscape" and asked them how the pictures made them feel - what mood did they give and did they make you feel warm or cold? Then we Googled "flower field landscape" and talked about why these photos made us feel warm and happy - what did they have in common? Bright colours... What kinds of colours? Reds, oranges, yellows and they also said bright blues and greens. I Googled "cold colours landscapes" to show the girls and we talked about why these photos made us feel cold... They were mostly blue, purple and grey colours and they were dull not bright. Finally I googled "warm vs cold colours" to show them a diagram to illustrate that, yes, they were right and the red-orange-yellow side of the colour wheel is associated with warmth whereas the green-blue-purple side is cold.

Bringing them back to the main topic, I asked them if we were to paint something to represent this time of the Prophet (SAW)'s life, which kinds of colours would give the right mood? They answered the cold colours.

As we were talking, I was still scrolling through the example pictures on Google and we came across this one:

I really liked how it showed the contrast between the warm/cold colours in one picture. That's when I had the idea to create a similar painting rather than just doing one to convey a sad mood, and to link it to the growth mindset idea of being strong like a tree.

On a piece of A4 card, I demonstrated with Z how to draw round their hand as if it were the roots of a tree, their arm the trunk, and to flip the paper round to draw in the outline of the leaves at the top. This tree represented them and they were going to colour it in with all warm colours to show their strength, whereas outside the tree they were only going to use cold colours to represent the challenges they might come across - just as the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) still had Islam keeping him strong and warm inside despite everything going on outside him (e.g. Abu Talib and Khadijah passing away, being treated even worse by the non-Muslims, being stoned at Taif) which actually wanted to make him feel very sad and cold.

Because A needed her nap just then and I couldn't leave them unsupervised with the paints, the twins and Z agreed to use wax crayons to colour their tree and save the watercolors for the background. I said this was a good idea because the wax crayons would stand out more against the paint. They chose what they thought were the warm coloured crayons from the box, including some pinks and purpley-reds. I didn't correct them as I wanted them to experiment with the colours and see if they gave the desired effect... Once they were done colouring the tree it really did give a warm feeling overall, but once they painted in their backgrounds suddenly the purpley-reds stood out as being cold! We talked about why (the background colours made the purpley-reds look more purple) and they decided to go over these parts of their trees with orange and yellow paint, which helped make their tree feel warm again overall. A mistake which turned into a learning experience, and another thing to illustrate the importance of mistakes in helping us grow!

Isra' & Mi'raaj

I thought there wasn't a much detail in the 365 Days book as I would have liked, so I looked through the other books we had and was pleased to see this part of the seerah covered a little more in book 3 of the Safar series. So I read both the chapter from this book as well as the relevant pages in the 365 Days book for the girls to then write their fact summaries.

Bringing in our work on shiny surfaces and light reflecting, I thought it would be nice to do a collage of the golden dome at al-Aqsa. I read the chapter from Goodnight Stories with the Prophet Muhammad as a recap (we did this the following day) and the girls talked about which materials would be good to create the shiny golden effect of the dome.

We've not done any proper collaging before, so this was a good opportunity to cover another new thing from the art curriculum I shared in a previous post!

I left this page from the book open as inspiration:

We also looked at some photos of Al-Aqsa from Google and talked about how to draw it simply - they came up with a long rectangle with a semi-circle on top; the bottom half of the rectangle was grey/brown colours, the top half was blue/greys, then there was a thin stripe of greeny colours and finally the golden dome.

They decided to use black card for their picture and I demonstrated how to fill the paper with a simple outline on Z's card. Then we talked about how to achieve a starry sky effect and I told them about splatter painting.

First, they tried dipping their paintbrushes in white paint and flicking their wrist to get the paint to splat onto the background... It was a little difficult to get a strong enough flick and to not accidentally touch the paintbrush to the card! Then they tried running their finger through the bristles and found this a lot easier to flick paint onto their picture - but the stars effect was smaller. They also used a small paintbrush to dot stars on too (Z only wanted to dot with the paintbrush!).

While the paint dried, we looked through our scrap paper and old supermarket magazines (free from the till!) to choose materials which matched the colours they wanted. I demonstrated how to rip the pieces into smaller ones (telling them they could cut with scissors if preferred) and laid them out over one of their pictures. We talked about which looked more effective: lots of different smaller different pieces or just one big piece cut to size... They preferred the first option!

After around 1 hour of independent work, the three ended up with these:

(F, M, Z)

Light & Dark - The Sun / Bouncing Light

Working through the suggested targets from the National Curriculum, we discussed the importance of not looking directly into bright lights and why (we took turns to look into each other's eyes while looking in and away from a light to see how the pupil grows and shrinks accordingly) and in particular the sun, then I asked the girls to draw a simple poster to summarise this information.

This is their first time making a poster (they didn't even know what one was!) so we first skimmed through some of their non-fiction books to talk about which layout features made the text inviting and easy to read, so which features did they want to copy for their poster... We came up with the use of pictures, bright colours, boxes and borders and simple sentences. I showed them a piece of A4 paper and asked them which was more effective - to squeeze everything into one corner or to spread it out over the whole page by writing and drawing larger than usual... They answered with the second option! Then I left them to it as A needed a nap.

Tbh I wasn't expecting masterpieces from them since they were doing it for the first time and unsupervised, so I was pleasantly surprised with the results!

The next week we focused on the fact light bounces off everything (revision: which is how we see things) but shiny surfaces seem to reflect more (not getting into the full details at this stage!). We talked about which kinds of materials tend to be shiny (glass or metal, sometimes plastic... Water! e.g. puddles, the sea) and focused in particular on mirrors. How do they work? We can see our reflections because the light bounces off the mirror's shiny surface.

In the 6th Famous Five book, Five on Kirrin Island Again, Julian advises his uncle to use the sun's light and a mirror to signal from far away (we learnt a new word here: heliographing!) so I thought it would be fun for the girls to try and do some heliographing of their own.

We were fortunate with the weather this week in November and headed to the Botanical Gardens where I knew they would have a safe, wide open space in which to have a go! I gave them a mirror each, and a walkie talkie so we wouldn't have to keep shouting to each other, and spread out over the main lawn with one twin at the top of the hill, one at the bottom near the bandstand, and myself, Z and A wandering around in between. It was a little tricky for them to catch the sun's light in a way for their sister to be able to see it, but a great practical experiment into understanding how light travels in straight lines and a subtle introduction to the idea of angles of incidence/reflection. 😁

After a good play around with mirror signals, the girls did some backwards walking through the gardens using the mirrors to see where they were going! And, of course, we ended our day with a trip to the playground. 😀

Arabic update

The twins have completed Madinah Arabic Reader Book 1 with me and we've just started Book 2, mashaAllah.

Their understanding is pretty good, as we read through the first chapter together and they had no issues with the content.

Current targets:

1) To be able to read more fluently (just need more practise, ideally daily!)

2) To be able to write simple sentences (they can spell words but don't have the confidence to write, especially joined... I need to give them more opportunities to do so!)

One of the grammatical concepts in the current chapter is the idea of the object of a verb in a sentence needing a fatha (and revising the subject needs a dhamma), i.e. "Tuhibbu al-baqaratu al-kitaaba" means "The cow likes the book" [as opposed to "Tuhibbu al-baqarata al-kitaabu" meaning "The book likes the cow"]. So we did some work on the whiteboard to this effect, using different familiar verbs and objects and emphasising that the order of the sentence isn't important, but the meaning comes from the vowel sound on the words.

Then the girls (Z included!) drew and painted a picture of 5 foods they liked to eat (so we could practise the verbs eat, like and want). They painted them with cottonbuds and a dot effect (I'm trying to introduce them to different art techniques where I can within other subjects, as we don't really have a set "Art" time atm!)

Art & Design Targets

http://art-techniques.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Progression-of-skills-KS1-KS2.pdf

I was looking for a set of discrete targets to follow when it came to Art, since it's not a specialist subject of mine, to ensure I introduced the girls to a variety of skills and not just the ones I was familiar with! I came across the above in Google and will be using it as a basis, inshaAllah.

I prefer to do Art as a cross-curricular subject along a theme (e.g. within Science or Islamic Studies, etc.) so this is a good checklist for me as inspiration for our work.

I've printed off a set of targets for each child and will highlight the relevant boxes as we cover each thing.

[EDIT:] https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100607215842/http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/schemes3/subjects/?view=get

An old link but still useful reference point for targets across (non-core) subjects.

Seerah timeline (1-5)

Over the years, the girls have built up a good general knowledge to do with the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) - they know who he is and some major events from his life - but we've never done any specific work about him, everything has just been picked up from reading books and everyday discussions. So now the twins have reached Year 2, I thought now would be a good time to create a basic timeline in their heads... They're young enough to absorb the information easily as a foundation for the rest of their lives yet old enough to understand and appreciate what they're learning.

I bought them the book 365 Days with the Prophet Muhammad as an eid gift, with the intention to read through a chapter here and there every other night or so. This didn't happen lol. So I'm using it now as a basis for them to create a timeline of the Prophet (SAW)'s life, which we'll do together over a couple of months as a large wall display, adding to it as we go. I split the Prophet (SAW)'s life into 12 key sections and we're looking at one per week:

1) Birth
2) Childhood
3) Young adult
4) Revelation
5) Secret preaching
6) Open preaching
7) Year of Sadness
8) Isra & Mi'raaj
9) Hijrah
10) Battles
11) Spread of Islam
12) Death

The hardest part of this for me is cutting out the detail... 🙈 Don't want to overwhelm them! The purpose of this exercise is to organise the key events in their heads and to relate them to set dates / the Prophet (SAW)'s age so they can appreciate the timescale between events. I'm sure more detail can be added over the years, insha'Allah!

This is what we have so far:

The format we're following is for me to read select chapters from the book over the first half of the week, then write some questions as prompts on the whiteboard (e.g. "What happened when he was 6?").


They then have to write a fact about that part of his life onto a mini post-it note and when they're done (meaning they've covered what I wanted them to!) the post-its are arranged onto the card strip (I used 4 different shades of green A4 card, split into thirds) and stuck on the wall.

This has been good in a Literacy sense too as we covered the difference between fact and opinion and have also honed our notetaking and summarising skills.

When our whole timeline is complete insha'Allah, I'd like them to revisit it from the start and illustrate each section using different art methods / mediums... So hopefully that will act as a way of revising the important information and help them to remember it better in the long run, rather than illustrating each piece as we go along.

Birth

We revisited the concept of family trees and the related vocabulary in Arabic. We also had a good discussion on milk siblings in Islam.

Childhood

Something which stood out for me this week was the part where Aminah died, all of us ended up with tears in our eyes. We talked about this afterwards and continued to talk about the meanings of the words sympathy and empathy.

Young Adult

We talked about the meaning of trustworthy. Were they trustworthy? I thought they were! So as an illustration of this, I left a big box of sweets open on the living room table and told them I trusted them all not to take any sweets. They could look (and even smell lol) but I trusted them not to eat any - my 6 1/2 year old twin and almost 4 year old girls. I said I wasn't even going to check because I trusted them so much... and besides, Allah would be watching and He would know if I was right or not. Come dinnertime, I asked if they had eaten any and they all said no (MashaAllah! And I'm confident they didn't either) so I gave them some after dinner as a reward for being so good. And, of course, the real reward is with Allah because all their good deeds are being recorded and helping them get closer to Jannah, insha'Allah!

When recounting the story of the black stone, we reenacted lifting something all together using a blanket and moving it from one place to another. This also served as a mini lesson on teamwork!

Revelation

We linked this to the tafseer of Surah Al-'Alaq and also the meaning behind the names of the surahs Al-Muzzammil and Al-Muddatthir as other names for Muhammad (SAW). We also had lots of hugs and talked about how being wrapped up makes us feel safe!

They drew in pencil and painted in watercolours a picture to show some of the things Allah has created - to help them reflect on our blessings similar to how Muhammad (SAW) would reflect on Allah's creation in the cave. Their pictures didn't need to make sense (I drew a panda on the beach! And the perspective didn't matter either) but it could only contain things from nature.

Secret Preaching

I don't think we did any particular activity with this, just lots of discussions on the different sahaba and some more focused work on summarising information, since there was so much covered they couldn't fit it all on one post-it per fact! 

Light & Dark - How do we see?

New science topic, taken from the Year 3 NC, and will inshaAllah carry us to the end of the year.

First, I replaced the batteries in some of their old light-up toys so they would have a range of light sources to talk about and play with over the coming weeks. I let them re-explore them again, asking questions like: "What happens to the light when you move your torch further away from the wall? What happens when you move it closer? What happens when you both shine your torches on the same spot?" etc.

I asked them what the word "source" means, to which the twins had an idea but weren't confident enough to turn into a definition... So we talked about where they've heard the word before: F said a water source and M said Allah's name was the Source of Peace. 💗

They came up with the definition of a light source as being somewhere light comes from.

I asked them to name some different light sources (F correctly said not the moon because that reflects the sun's light - if she hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have included that yet! So at that point I told them we see things because of light reflecting off them) then for them to tell me where the light sources in the room were... As they named each source, I turned it off (/closed the curtains!) until the room was dark.

I asked them if we needed light to see - it was harder to see the darker it became! But it still wasn't dark enough to not see completely; we couldn't get rid of all the light creeping in from the corners of the curtains and blinds... So I took out a big black blanket and covered us with it so it was completely dark underneath. "Can you see what face I'm making?" The girls laughed of course they couldn't... But M was sneaky and put her torch on. F then commented they could because they brought a light source with them! 😂

Next I helped them make a den under the table and we tried to block out as much light as we could... Then we read the first couple of pages from the "Light and Dark" book we have by torchlight.

As they shone their torches together under the table, I asked them how they thought light travelled. In straight lines only or does it spread out everywhere like water? A trick question lol. M said only straight lines and it can't go round corners. F said but it spreads out a bit because even when the torch was pointing straight you could still see a bit what was on the side, and when the light source is high like the lightbulb or the sun you can see everything! Something for them to think upon as we continue the topic, inshaAllah. 😏

Next, I told them I wanted them to draw a simple picture on A4 paper. It needed to have in it a drawing of themselves, a light source and 5 objects they could be looking at. I drew one as an example then left them to it while I put A to sleep. 😆

When they were done, I explained the last activity - to draw on how we see! First, I used a ribbon to represent the light. I lay it on top of my drawing coming from the sun and onto the cat, then folded the ribbon so it went into my eyes. I repeated this with the mountains and the tree, then asked M and F in turn to show what happens to the light, using the ribbon, so my drawing of me could see the flowers and birds. Next, I used a highlighter and ruler to draw the light rays coming from the sun and bouncing off an object into my eyes - emphasising we needed to use a ruler because light travels in straight lines. Finally, I put arrow heads on the lines to show the direction of travel.

Leaving my example on the table, the twins did the same on their drawings. Both understood the concept easily enough but I was surprised F needed a little help positioning her ruler - I suppose we haven't done any ruler work since the last time we covered measures in Numeracy!

Z joined in with all of the above, but when it came to labelling her drawing she did it without a ruler and with me narrating what was happening to the light as she chose each object to look at. I don't know how much of this she'll retain, but she seemed to enjoy playing in the den with the torches and drawing with us. 😁

Summer of Year 1 - Autumn of Year 2

A list of some of the things we've done over the last few months... No time for proper updates! SubhanAllah, my youngest brother was diagnosed with stage 4b lymphoma and things were a bit busy and a lot of going back and forth between Bristol, Birmingham and Ipswich. Alhamdulillah, he's finished his chemo course and seems to be doing well (and MashaAllah, the work we've done in Science recently on infection and the human body was really useful in the girls being able to understand pretty quickly why I was upset to hear the news and why we need to make lots of dua that Mamu gets better soon). Next time we visit will be next month, inshaAllah. 😄

So aside from the usual Literacy and Numeracy, guided by the Year 2 NC (going through the list and filling in all the gaps), we did the following:

1) Definition of habitats: research in non-fiction books, identify from fiction books, create a poster of a habitat of choice (including marking locations on a world map) which contained examples of plants and animals found in that habitat. Rehearse and give a presentation of their poster to each other, giving feedback on how to improve, then give an improved presentation to Papa. Convert their posters to PowerPoints (skills: typing, text boxes, inserting images, animations) and show this as a presentation to Papa.

2) Art trail around Ipswich, looking for Elmer statues. Map reading, walking, exploring, checking off a list, art appreciation & discussion... The girls then designed and named their own Elmers on pieces of scrap paper and compiled these into a booklet each. They tried to copy the art trail Elmers and came up with puns where they could!

3) Visit to a working water mill, where they grind their own flour and make their own bread - Tide Mill in Woodbridge. We took the train there with Nani, which was an experience in itself! The mill itself was really educational and child friendly. Definitely worth a visit if you're in the area! The girls got to help start the water wheel by turning a handle and follow all the ropes and pulleys to the top of the mill. They were able to identify where the old pulleys should have been connected in the roof for the bags of flour to be lifted through the hatch, and also understood the mechanism behind the cogs turning and affecting each other. While there we also did some bird spotting from the lookout area and talked about how the mill was connected to the river. This led onto discussions to do with water sources and the sea, which inspired some more visits whilst in Ipswich...

4) We went to Felixstowe beach twice - once on the train with Nani during the daytime and another at sunset by car with Papa. Both experiences felt completely different despite being to the same place, which led to some good discussions. On our first trip they had fish & chips and ice-cream on the pier, played in the sand and F was brave enough to paddle in the sea. On the second trip we went for a short stroll on the beach and they played in the sand by the light of some coloured string lanterns hung across the promenade. It was interesting to watch the sunset on the horizon and see how the sky changed colour and then how the sea faded to black so it was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began - the only clues the sea was there at all were a few lights from ships far in the distance. This led to talks about lighthouses and on how vast the sea is.

5) We walked down to Ipswich docks (only 5-10min from my parents' house!) and compared how the water was flowing to the river we saw at Woodbridge. Why? M had the idea that maybe both the water in the docks and the water from Tide Mill would end up in Felixstowe to meet the sea, so we checked on Google maps by zooming out and saw she was right! We didn't have time this visit to see, but I'd like to take them to Orwell Bridge so they can compare how the river looks there to how it was after the docks (and also to the little streams we saw in Holywells Park).

6) Which is the most popular car colour in Ipswich? The twins came up with a method of answering this question (watch the cars on the main road outside Nani's house) and keep a tally chart. We repeated this on two different days and compared the results (the same top three colours but not the same most popular colour on each day!) then turned these results into a bar chart (column addition practise to collate their results from both days). I helped them with this through prompts and questions and then wrote some simple questions about their data for them to answer.

7) We went to a free pizza making workshop at Pizza Express, organised by another home ed mum. The 3 eldest girls learnt a little about Italy and why a margarita has that name (the colours of the Italian flag represented by the toppings), tasted some pizza toppings then made their own margaritas on a pre-made base. The next week they wanted to make pizza at home from scratch, so I found a simple dough using Greek yoghurt and flour they could do independently. They made the dough themselves while I helped with the oven parts and making the sauce (tomato puree, oil & herbs). They put all the toppings on themselves and decided to make tuna, sweetcorn, mozzarella and cheddar.

8) Bake Off inspired baking: taking it in turns to bake cupcakes with me, one person each week. They designed their cupcake on paper first (sponge flavour & decorations) then baked with my guidance (they did measuring themselves for once!). After we all had a turn, we discussed which bake was our favourite and why. Mine was mint chocolate and my favourite lol - will need to post recipe soon inshaAllah!

9) First piece of extended writing in a while... We're currently reading the Famous Five series together and they're really enjoying them, so I used this as a basis for their writing. After a particularly eventful chapter, we did some hotseating on the characters' thoughts/feelings then I modelled writing a simple diary entry on A3 paper. Together, we discussed what the features of a diary entry might be and annotated them on the paper. Then the twins wrote their own diary entries as different characters from the book. When they thought they were finished, they referred to the poster and added to their work.

10) Bouncing ball investigation (as M asked why did the ball bounce higher in the kitchen compared to the sitting room?). Discussed in terms of energy (potential, kinetic) and energy being absorbed. Twins came up with ideas on how to test these factors (i.e. strength of throw, height dropped, floor surface) and how to measure - describe in words or use tape measure? Both ways difficult but tape measure was preferred option! One of the results didn't match our predictions, so we did some further investigations explore why. M came up with hypothesis 1 and F with hypothesis 2, with them both working together to think of how we could test each one. We put both ideas together to come up with a reason to explain why that one result didn't match.