Monday, 28 January 2013

Bronze Arts Award: Fulham Palace And Kingston Palace

This term we are doing an art course so we can get a certificate in arts from the UK Arts Council. We are doing the course through the Orleans Gallery in Twickenham.

We have gone on quite a few outings to museums and galleries. We then do art at the gallery based on what inspired us on the outing.

The course is being run by two artists. The one works at the gallery and the other is a professional artist.

One visit was to Fulham Palace in London. This palace was historically the home of the Bishops of London. It is now a museum and the bishop lives in an apartment in London.

This is the floor of the chapel. I like the pattern it makes.

Cameron showing us the  frozen fountain.

More floor patterns.

This is a jar that I designed. We hung all our jars in an apple tree in the orchard. You can see Amy (one of the artists in the background)

Here are all the other people we are doing the course with. They are also all home educated.

The Chapel window.


Me eating biltong in the snow (it gives much needed energy). We can buy biltong from the South African shop in Wimbledon.

This is the tree which we hung our jars on.

A chair carved from a tree.


Another outing was to the Kingston Museum.

This is a skeleton of a young boy killed in combat. It was found during an archaeological dig in Kingston.

This is a jar that belonged to Queen Victoria. It is a mosaic made from small tiles.

A roman artifact. 


These paintings were in an exhibition of aeroplanes.

Cameron and I are looking at a photo album of a famous Kingston photographer. It is a very rare album and only 9 are known to exist. Kingston museum has two of them.

We had to handle it very carefully with special gloves.

This is an example of some of his photos from the album. He was interested in taking photos of movement. This was before motion cameras were invented.



A workshop at the Orleans Gallery in Twickenham.



We are learning how to print our own designs onto ceramics.

Cameron working on his design to print on a ceramic plate.

Snow 2013

Last week we had almost 30cm of snow in London!



This is what the meadow near our house looked like.




Snow ball fights.

Sitting under a tree for a photo

This is our garden.



After three days of snow it melted just enough to get to London for the Arts Awards.















Wednesday, 5 December 2012

Christmas tree

On the first we put up our christmas tree. 
It was Lawrence's turn this year to put the star on the tree.


The tree without decorations


The tree with decorations.







Science

Here are some photos of some of the work that we do for science.
Lately we have been learning about crystals.


For this experiment we made model of a geode.
We made molds out of grape fruit skin and plaster of paris.
Then we made a saturated solution by dissolving alum salt in water and adding food colouring.
We than poured the solution into the mould.
Then we waited for it to evaporate and form crystals.


Here is the result of the experiment.

Here is a real geode




Here we are looking through a microscope at bacteria that we grew in a petri dish.

We have also been looking at food science.
In these photos we were testing for starch in different foods by using iodine drops which is normally a dark orange colour. If there is starch in the food it turns black.



The other test was testing for fats by rubbing the food on brown paper.
If the food leaves a mark it contains fat.



Digging for fossils...





Testing different soils for erosion...


We have had a busy term and we are looking forward to the holidays in 12 days time.




























Snow!

Today is the first day of winter to have snow! 

I woke up hearing Lawrence shouting "SNOW!"

When I went to my window I saw huge snowflakes!

I looked at the weather report and it said that it would warm up during the day.

So we went for a walk to make the most of it. Here are some photos:




First Snowman of the winter.











When we got home most of the snow had melted but there is more to come this winter.
(Hopefully!)