We have been studying cabinets of curiosity. We looked at works by the artist Joseph Cornell who made mini boxes full of ephemera from his life and travels. The children made their own from collage materials and their own collections of junk.
Today we went to the Western Australia Maritime Museum. We went along especially to see the Da Vinci Machines exhibition. In the photo above you can see the children built a bridge using Da Vinci's design. There's no glues, bolts or nails here. The wooden pieces are just woven together.
There were lots of machines to try out in the hands-on gallery.
People powered tank
Siege engine
Pumping water
Hammering machine
"Car"
We also had a tour of the submarine.
Torpedo tubes and escape suit
Around the rest of the museum the mega-mouth shark in alcohol was our favourite exhibit.
Of course there were plenty of boats and other hands-on exhibits.
Merchant trading gems
Spice traders
Grinding and smelling and spices
Winding in the sails
Huge sail-boat
The children liked these statues outside the museum:
The children have spent hours over the last few days designing these fusible bead patterns. You can get the beads and base boards at IKEA. When the design is complete just iron over them (protect the iron with baking paper) and the design fuses together. It's clear to me that the kids have understood the concept of symmetry.
No pretty pictures for you this time I'm afraid. Today we attended the Perth Writers Festival schools day. We went to 3 talks by authors of children's books. All the talks were very entertaining, funny and inspirational.
First up was Alice Zaslavsky talking about her TV show Kitchen Whiz and her book Alice's Food A-Z. The highlight of the day was Andy Griffiths talking about his Tree House series of books. There was lots of audience participation as we invented a crazy story of our own. Lastly we discovered a new author Katherine Rundell who talked about the process she goes through to write a story. The children got to meet the authors and have their paperbacks signed. We learnt loads about how to write our own stories and were inspired by the enthusiasm of all the speakers.
