How we roll

31st of January, 2018: Arian asked to read 'The boy who asked why', yesterday. It's one of his favourite books and he hadn't read it in a while. This story about the great Dr. Ambedkar, has been beautifully told and illustrated and his fight for equality in India raised a lot of questions in our household.                                     Dr. Ambedkar was from the lower caste known as 'Mahar' (Dalit) and were treated as 'untouchables'. They were and are still subject to massive socio-economic discrimination and are treated in a manner that is not only inhumane but defies logic.  This book narrates how the untouchables were treated and all the different obstacles that Dr. Ambedkar had to overcome. He wasn't allowed to sit with his classmates at school and he and his classmates from the lower caste had to sit on gunny sacks and were separated from the rest of their classmates. This was India's answer to segregation within its

7th and 8th of January, 2018 A very exciting question was posed yesterday. The little man wanted to know how electricity was made. This led to us looking into Michael Faraday's work and the Faraday suit on YouTube. We watched some great videos alongside Dick & Dom's 'absolute genius' about how electricity is made available to homes from the source, different sources of energy - renewable and non-renewable, role of transformers in reducing voltage and so on. Here's a link to this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyrNh4UXrWw&t=1087s Today, we watched some videos about atoms as the next question was, "What makes magnets produce electricity when moved through a wire?" This was a video that we found to be quite engaging and informative about atoms -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1RMV5qhwyE The children talked a lot about the characters that there interested in and whether there were more male or female characters, whet

17/01/2018 We have had a busy and very interesting day today with a visit to our GP and then the Sick kids hospital to check if the older one's elbow had been fractured. Luckily, she's fine and will heal within a week or so from a minor injury. We have also had a trip to the garage to check the bodywork on our car as we were involved in a minor accident yesterday. Everyone is fine, thankfully. These appointments meant that the older one was off from school and there were a lot of questions about how x-rays were taken and observing the process, understanding why we had to go to different garages to get an estimate for the car and so on.  The most engaging aspect of autonomous or self-directed learning is the confidence it instils in children to pursue a line of thought, seek answers and explore that topic as much or as little as they would like to,  and   in a manner that they are comfortable doing.  Arian has been ruminating a lot about the things that he s