The Great Wall of China

Not sure if this link will be up for long, but the kids have started watching this show on The Great Wall of China:

Learning about China

We enjoyed our study of The Netherlands so much that we were all keen to learn another about another country. Niamh picked China.
We have made a country file so this is the front page for China - Eden's.
Niamh's.
We have been reading about The Great Wall of China, this is a sketch of the emperor at the time - Niamh's sketch, Niamh is becoming more confident to sketch rather than to trace.
Eden's sketch.
The lovely thing about these country studies is that we bake things that we normally would not bake. These are very tasty chinese biscuits called sesame cookies. I love the look on Niamh's face here, she so enjoying cutting up biscuits.
Jude rolling it in the sesame seeds.

Don't they look yummy? Eden is the only one who wouldn't eat them because they had almond extract in.

Light study - mixing colours

We learned that the primary colours of light are different to those of paint, and they mix differently too.
The girls made a chart of all the colours, and we put it on a dynamo to see if we could make white.
Not bad Niamh, nearly white.
Niamh made cyan from blue and green.

We also had a light optic that shone different colours and we experimented making different colours by mixing them in the tube, this was magenta which didn't come over very clearly on the camera.

Their light charts.

The Magic Treehouse

Jude's reading is still coming on nicely, and he is really enjoying this series at the moment.

Some books we have enjoyed

The girls have been enjoying these books by Patricia St John, they are Christian novels.




David Livingstone is a missionary story we have shared as a family, I loved reading about his adventures in Southern Africa, so many memories of African landscape were evoked in my mind.
Although we have read about Corrie, Eden was keen to read it again, in fact she often reads books over and over.

Some more Eden has enjoyed. She says there are quite a lot of words she doesn't understand in some of these books, so now she has started a vocabulary notebook while she is reading of any words she doesn't understand and we get to talk about them and she writes down the definition the next day.

Another 2 books about remarkable women that we have enjoyed reading together

Our new study - learning about light.

Our Sonlight Science curriculum is covering light, and we decided to turn it into a bigger unit study. I remember studying light in Std 6, and it was the first time that Science was actually interesting for me.
We made a box, decorated with a lot of stickers and cards inside, but then sealed it up completely so no light came in. The little ones got to look in when it was dark and see nothing, and then we opened up a little sunroof and the whole scene inside lit up. A simple experiment yes, but it led on to some interesting discussion as to what light from the sun is actually doing, and how we can see colours.

This cool pair of glasses splits white light into all it's colours, quite a surreal thing to wear as you walk around staring at various light sources.


Eden and Niamh discovering what Translucent, transparent and opaque means.
This is one experiment I particularly liked at school, so I was chuffed to find a prism. The sunlight is coming through it as white light.
But as we turned the prism we split the white light up into the spectrum of colours.

Finishing off our Netherlands Study

It was good to go over Vincent van Gogh again, it has been a long time since our study of him.


The girls made posters!


Eden wrote a story about Aardina, a Dutch girl.

And some facts about windmills in The Netherlands.