Spring into Summer with some brand-new projects!

Learning French: parts of the body

Some people think small children shouldn't be burdened with the extra weight of learning a second language: others believe that the early years of our lives are the optimum time for learning and remembering new words, regardless of the language in which they are presented. I'm of the latter opinion, so my kids get to learn a little French every few weeks. What we learn officially is then repeated unofficially most days, in odd snatches of 'Ca va?' instead of 'Okay?' or 'ta jambe' instead of 'your leg', for instance. Above you can see one of my great artistic renditions of the human form, with French parts of the body labelled for them to read and repeat with me, with the additional help of a CD that uses French words and music aimed at small children.

I don't expect them to learn them in the same way that we learn a language as adults or even as teenagers, with books and plenty of written work. Instead I expect them to learn in the same way that they are learning English every day, by repeating and hearing the words repeated, working them gradually into the fabric of their everyday expectations of language.

The Romans

We are lucky enough to live in an area where Romans were plentiful back in the days of the Empire. Accordingly we have a local museum (Rugby) which houses a collection of pottery shards, bones and other artifacts found locally, along with various displays and activities for children, to help them find out about how the Romans lived and worked in our area. They also arrange for a Roman soldier (hmmm) to visit during half-terms and other holidays, so kids can have a chance to see what a soldier would have looked like and even try on various bits of Roman armour. All this goes hand in hand, of course, with our recent discussions of Roman life in Britain, the structure of the legions, the baths at Aquae Sulis as a Roman cultural centre, and the rise of Boudicca of the Iceni tribe in or around 60AD.



Here you can see my kids, looking slightly bemused, getting to try on chainmail - enormously heavy on them - and replica Roman helmets, also extremely heavy. I would have taken more photographs but one of my teenage daughters, seen in the background here looking sheepish, managed to turn the digital camera on in the car whilst handling it, and by the time we reached the museum the battery was almost flat. Hence these two rather sad and lonesome photographs ...

Science: the humble tadpole

We have a small kettle-hole a few hundred yards from our house, apparently left over from glacial depressions during the Ice Age, where the occasional frog lurks ... and deposits spawn in great numbers every spring.



Here you can see a few tadpoles liberated from the murky waters of the pond, living cheerfully in this plastic tank, recently vacated by an elderly goldfish who started swimming upside-down a few weeks ago and then died. I hope it was nothing contagious, though I did clean the tank out vigorously before sloshing this bucketload of pond water and handful of tadpoles into it last week.

We are feeding them boiled and mushed-up baby spinach, grown organically in our own miniature greenhouse (see earlier entries on our gardening activities!) and prepared to a process we found at an Australian site about looking after tadpoles. Apparently I can also give them protein in the form of crushed-up bottom-feeder food pellets, to be purchased from a pet shop.

So why tadpoles? I was feeling a bit guilty because one of our garden frogs managed to drown itself in a bucket of rainwater last autumn, and ever since then the garden has felt a little devoid of croaking in the evenings. We have some lovely little frog holes and dens, now empty, and if any of these tadpoles survive, they will find some snug little homes nearby - or can always hop back across the field to the kettle-hole if they prefer.

Good science for the kids though, not only talking about the life-cycle of the frog but actually being able to watch these little fellas develop into frogs at first-hand ... if they get that far. Apparently it can be quite a tricky business, keeping tadpoles alive long enough for them to develop into frogs!