Joondalup Festival

Recently we attended our local festival in Joondalup. It's all free and we got to play lots of old fashioned fairground games, meet performers and enjoy music and circus shows.

Splat the joey

Limbo

In the evening we joined some of our new friends from Homeschool WA as we paraded our creations in the lantern festival.

Toys

We are just starting a cross-curricular unit on toys. We'll cover history, science and technology. We are using several schemes of work from the old UK National Curriculum website.

Moving toys
How are our toys different from those in the past?
Pushes and pulls
Forces and movement
Magnets and springs
Forces in action

We'll also be making some moving toys inspired by the Tinkering Studio.

To get us started today we went to the Museum of Sydney for the Toys Through Time exhibition. Here we investigated toys from the past and how they compare to modern toys today. The children picked up the free activity trail in the gallery. It was hard to get photos with the low lighting and reflections.

We also took the trail around the permanent galleries.

Over the next few weeks we'll be making our own toys and conducting lots of experiments to see how toys work. Pop back soon.

Ironfest

We are just about to start studying the Middle Ages so we travelled up into the Blue Mountains to the Ironfest at Lithgow. The show has a large display area dedicated to Medieval history and many re-enactments. The children tried on armour, had sword fights, watched jousting and R tried archery.

A highlight seemed to be flogging mum in the stocks!

Playing a Medieval board game

There were also displays from other periods of history including a very loud re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo and a WWII tank fight.

Even the Romans were there.

We visited the blacksmith display and the acrobatics and wrestling. There were lots of displays of crafts and sculptures made from metal but the children liked these robots.