New Topic Time!

Okay! We're a month into this schooling lark, so we decided to shake things up and bring in a new topic, but FIRST!

Birthday Alex! With his Thomas track and Dinosaur Wellies....

...and his Thomas cake! Thankyou Nanny Lyn!!



So, the new topic, as drawn from a hat by Birthday Boy himself is......FOOTBALL! Callum is very excited obviously, as is Rich, but to be honest, we spent the weekend thinking 'how the gosh-diddly-heck can we turn this into a lasting topic?'
We printed off plenty of worksheets of generic footie-related work (although with the majority of websites available on homeschooling being American, they are plagued with the words 'soccer' and 'offence', but hey-ho), but even by the time they started working on them this morning, we were still stumped. Callum would happily spend the next few weeks watching Match of the Day re-reuns and going to the park, but we needed something to sustain not only his interest but Issy's too, not to mention ours!
Then Rich stumbled across this link which had a World Cup Project Ideas sheet, and lo and behold, we had our direction. Basically, by adapting it to the Euro 2008 Championships, we have ourselves a Geography project! 4 groups of 4 teams, so one group a week, amd we simply dip into a little bit of European culture every day. We are hopefully going to create a Euro 2008 Country Factfile, with a couple of sheets on each country. We have made up our own Factsheets, which have to be filled in with details about each country - Capital City, Climate, Population, Geographical Facts, Language, National Cuisine, Flags and Historical Interest. To give Callum an extra footballing kick, we added the tasks of finding 3 of the national team's squad and the club teams they play for, their FIFA ranking and the name and nationality of the manager. Phew!
Basically we will be aiming to cover a country per afternoon, with 1 catch up day a week. Today we didn't really start untill 2pm, but managed to cover Portugal by 3.30, but in time we will be leaving it more to the kids to find stuff out more independently. All thats left is for Callum to copy his work up neatly onto the factsheet tomorrow. It was very sweet watching Cal and Issy try and work out, from a map, what the capital of Portugal was, conferring and coming to an executive decision. Sadly Callum overruled Isobel's correct answer of Lisbon with Porto, but the spirit of it was nice.

Can I just give a quick thanks to Grandad Michael - 3 years ago he bought the kids a whiteboard/blackboard easel for Christmas, it's certainly coming in useful now!

The River Tagus splits the country in diagonal halves, quite literally - the south-west is warm and wet, the north-east cold and dry, so this was a good opportunity to show them the basic compass directions. Callum was quick to realise that given the size of Portugal's coast, fish and seafood were eaten in large amounts (and that most of our country's sardines are from there). Also after discussing the language and its history early on, when it came to discussing the manager, 'Big Phil' Scolari, he straight away knew that he was a good choice because, being Brazilian, he too speaks Portugese!
All in all, it would appear we have gone from struggling for source material, to having a wealth of things to study. On the geographical theme, Callum has a book of major football grounds around the country, so we will be looking similarly at British geography. We just need to invest in some superlarge map posters from the library, and we're sorted. It looks like there will be less workbook work, which is, I think, a good thing, it's nice to see them working a little more creatively. Lots of maths work too, tables, statistics etc, which is good in terms of letting them use numbers in a practical, real-world way, rather than just lists of sums. And interwoven with everything else, as and when the opportunity comes up, we'll be dipping into the game itself, ie. the rules, team positions and roles, referees job, the history of the game and great teams past and present. Also, a topic rather eloquently suggested by Callum, how much money footballers make and whether or not they deserve it! Well I was impressed, lol.

It's good having an end goal, as it means less time stressing every night over what to do tomorrow, so we can just enjoy it and let the kids do as much work as they can, rather than trying to find them as much work as we can, if you understand? Ooh, and it means our field trip is over to Preston and the (free entry!) Museum of Football! So, onwards and upwards, and looking forward to the next day, and the interesting political shenanigans of Turkey! Altogether now, Istanbul, not Constantinople, do-de doo, do-do de do-de do-de dooo.....

Just me then :-s