choice chambers

let us think about habitats shall we. you are a spanish conquistador and bring back a new animal back to the royal court of spain. the keeper of the animal house now has to keep it alive. how does he work out what it likes to live in/ eat? often no record of habitat was brought back. imagine you are now voyaging with charles darwin. his attention to habitat to detail sprung him towards his great idea of evolution and adaption. imagine we are abducted by aliens, what would you hope your recreated habitat might have?
so here is an unknown species, antistons, brought back to you by intrepid explorers…

so after a bit of imagination and flights of fancy i give them the tools to design choice chambers for the antistons and work out what they might like. the younger group – for this is latinetc – listen carefully, answer sensibly and question logically, and they then set to to make great choice chambers. we have wet lint vs sand, shaded vs light, shiny silver floor vs shiny gold and some more or less repeats. we discuss a fair test, and how we need big enough numbers to think that the result may reflect ‘the real picture’ rather than an oddball response, so we put 10 antistons into each of our choice chambers. we learn that antistons appear to prefer dark, moist or shiny gold. [the last a surprise, but may be related to a couple of antistons being caught in cellotape unfortunately. so we learn to be more careful with cellotape in choice chambers…

then it is break, music theory, french and latin all happen [some at the same time as younger science] then the older kids have a go they just have to be more imaginative, wilder with their ideas and more complicated. what we learn in addition is that too much choice cause confusion and unclear results… and we also learn that moist lint and moist sand and are equally appealing, so it was the dampness rather than texture.

lovely lunch, rather fab veggie jelly, some playing in the garden and a clarinet lesson for SB. waved goodbye to the manor borns first – and we had been lucky enough for them to stay the night before, which was great company, and i shared my birthday champagne with michelle. the girls all had a great time, and seemed to love mario olympics on the wii, i kinda think that is why c would like to stay again some time!!

after everyone left, we decided to to some more felting. BB needlefelted most of a ladybird before the obligatory stab wound, and i finished it off. SB felted with ziplock bag a lovely flower picture semi inspired by van gogh. she had wanted to oil paint, but although we have oil paints, i have no idea how to use them, and she was put off by the thoughts that i might google it! i actually resent all that time ‘doing art’ at school, and i realise i have been left with no idea how to actually paint anything, use watercolours, oils, pastels or anything but poster paint! but SB on a bit of a roll, so at least now i know we need some linseed oil, paint thinner etc.

more playing and BB drew loads and loads of pictures of rabbits, and wrote her first real word unprompted by spelling [well apart from her name] it was ‘caf’ a quick check, and it became cat!

thankyou latinetceras for coming to mine. all antistons released again into the wild, and revealed to be woodlice!