Greek Mythology (2)

I spent some time debating how much detail we wanted to go into Greek mythology at this point in time... I didn't feel the girls would enjoy the violence aspect of the adventures at their current age... And Ancient Greek culture is a good topic base for Art, Geography and History lessons, so I'd rather have the time to plan a unit in enough detail to do it justice rather than do a rushed job now. 😶

With that in mind, I decided to use this week just to focus on the myths we've already covered in the form of another shadow puppet theatre (subtly revising work on light and shadows at the same time!).

The girls chose to do the story of King Midas and the Golden Touch.

Before they could do their play, first I had them rewrite the story in their own words in script format. This sounds a bit daunting for a 6 year old but MashaAllah they managed with some structured help!

After rereading the version in the book and comparing it with a version online (ideally we would go to the library but unfortunately we're without a car atm!), I had the girls tell me what they thought were the main parts to the story. We wrote these on scrap paper so we could then rearrange them into chronological order when they were done (this also helped them see if they had missed any key events out when summarising the story).

I gave the girls a storyboard template so they could translate the bullet point version into a storyboard. This was also useful in getting them to think about what might be on stage at that point during their shadow play.

Next, I had them write out the text in their storyboards on a new piece of paper but adding more detail, paragraphs and direct speech so it flowed like a story - and made them think about what their narrator and characters might say during the play. I had them do this pretty much independently as I wanted them to come up with different versions - a good lesson in how even though we might have the same thing to start with (we all read the same stories), they wrote them again in different ways. Maybe this could be why many different versions of the same story exist? Considering how many thousands of years old the stories are and how many times they must have been retold and passed down!

When they were finished, we recapped editing skills (we had done work that week on conjunctions and fronted adverbials, so they were looking out for those in particular!) and they made changes in a different colour.

(They wrote the words "everything" and "excitedly" at the end as spelling practise since they had misspelt them in their writing. Just chose one for them to do.😗)

Finally, I challenged them to work together on the laptop to turn their stories into one playscript. They needed to think about the layout themselves and talk together to agree on which wording to use! I created them a file on Google Docs for this so I could help with editing on my new laptop (gift from my husband, MashaAllah 😁) - they were amazed how we could all edit the same file at the same time! But it was really convenient so I think from now on we'll continue using Google Docs over Microsoft Word, inshaAllah.

The above was done over three consecutive days.

For their shadow puppets, we talked about how they could show the things turning into gold - how could they make the shadows change colour? I prompted them to think about layering - as we had previously layered blue and yellow cellophane to create a green shadow for grass - which materials could they layer to turn an opaque shadow into yellow?

When they were done and had practised it a few times, we recorded the show (each scene as a separate clip) and edited it on the laptop using Shotcut into one long video.

Light & Dark - Drawing Shadows

Target: Look for and measure shadows, find out how they are formed and what might cause the shadow to change.

We went on a shadow hunt around the house to see where there were shadows and why - what was blocking the light? Where was the light source?

On a piece of A4 white paper, I placed a toy animal on it and we used a lamp to create its shadow. I drew around the shadow (narrating what I was doing, including how difficult it was to not knock over the toy, or to see exactly where the shadow was when my hand's shadow got in the way, and look, I made a mistake here but never mind! - F, in particular, is still working on her growth mindset when it comes to difficult things and getting things wrong...) and coloured it in lightly with a coloured pencil. Then I repeated this process with different figurines and colours, overlaying shadows on purpose, to create this abstract artwork - revising earlier work on colours and blending.

They experimented with where they wanted to place the toy in relation to the light and saw how the shadow changed size or stretched. To make things fair, they kept switching seats so they could take turns being nearer or further away from the light source.

I wasn't expecting Z to write the title on hers, but she did while I wasn't looking and was very pleased with herself!

When they were done, they used their drawings to play a quick game of "guess the animal" with each other. 😄

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We discussed how to make a simple sun dial, recapping their knowledge on space and how the Earth rotates to create day and night. The book on Light and Dark in the KS1 Science series we have has a few pages on the subject which we read through together.

Before we made our sun dial, we recreated the theory behind how a sun dial works using a lamp to show how the shadow changes in quick time, moving across the ground, as the sun "moves across the sky". I had them predict what they thought the shadows would look like in the morning and evening and what time they thought it would be when the shadows are at their shortest (they correctly guessed stretched out and around midday!)

We tried making our own using paper plates with a pencil blu-tacked in the centre, but the weather this time of year was too overcast to see the shadows clearly. We might try again in the summer InshaAllah, but on a positive it was a good discussion point on whether sun dials were effective all year round or in all weathers!

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We drew some simple 3D shapes and learnt about shading to create a 3D effect. We started with a sphere, then a cone and finally a cube. We talked about where the shadow would be in relation to the light source in the picture. We also tried doodling other pictures, e.g. a tree, and I showed the girls how to draw simple prisms (recapping that a prism has the same 2D shape at each end!).

I bought some 3B pencils for this purpose and the girls discussed how the lead felt softer than their HB writing pencils and why it was easier to draw with the 3B pencil. They experimented with using different pressures to create lighter and darker effects.

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Finally, we watched The Gruffalo's Child (which happened to be on Amazon Prime) and talked about why the shadow was so large even though the mouse was so small! To help reinforce the point, we took out the torches again and played around with making shadows on the wall. 😁

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. 😂👍

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. 😀

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. 😁