There should be pictures to go with this post. There should be a lot more photos on this blog in general, but my camera broke and I have a rubbish deal on my phone contract so uploading photos from my phone is costly. My usual route to putting photos online relies on DH taking pictures on his phone and emailing them to me. Which is long-winded to say the least.
Oh well, I'll edit them in later!
We started with some reinforcement of the whole time-telling thing from yesterday, which really confirmed that she doesn't really get it. Yet. I know it will come and she *wants* to get it, so we'll keep working on it till she does. She also did a couple of the literacy tests. Of course she is not actually being *tested* but she loves these books and races through a couple of pages a day. One of today's was about adding a prefix to make an opposite, eg,legal/illegal. The question gave you the word and then a choice of two possible prefixes. One of them was "noble". Now it is possible that my intelligent, very articulate nine year old actually has a very limited vocabulary, but she'd never heard the word "ignoble!" It tends not to crop up often in our daily life, nor even in our reading! I do wonder how many children her age would know it! She did know "abnormal" though, which reminded me of a long-running private joke I had with a friend at secondary school when we would make up opposites of "normal" based on almost every other prefix, so we were "disnormal", "unnormal", etc. We never considered "ignormal". I quite like that!
We did a little bit of research on the origins of Halloween in the Celtic festive of Samhain, after which Hannah drew a picture of a Celtic man preparing the Feast of the Dead. We went to Celtic Harmony Camp earlier in the year and after that, she dressed in the costume of a Celt at one of our regular history fairs so the man was reasonable accurately portrayed, down to his red hair. However, her interpretation of the meal left a little to be desired. It included a pie (possible I suppose), grapes (trade with the Romans?)...but also coffee and spaghetti bolognese. I am not an expert in food history but I am fairly sure the Celts did not have these things. Maybe modern pagans would include them.???
We then had a break for lunch which necessitated attacking the pumpkin, which I eviscerated and went off to turn its innards into rather tasty soup, while Hannah made its exterior into a gore-bespattered pirate. It was her first attempt at carving and it was better than any of my efforts in previous years! Here is obviously one of the places the photos I did not take should go!
Later, we touched briefly on how the early church imposed Christian festivals on top of existing pagan ones and talked a bit about how we would feel if someone told us we couldn't believe what we did believe, but had to believe what they told us to! We were going to look at the origins of trick or treat and other Halloween customs, but she was too busy getting her costume together for actually going trick or treating. So she got ready and then we painted spooky castle pictures. I will put photos in tomorrow, honestly!
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