Rain, Glorious Rain

It's bucketed down for most of today, much to my delight. Now this is more my kind of weather!

Emily "doodled" this portrait of Henry VIII at bedtime last night whilst Jon was reading to her. We were very impressed!



We finished reading the last of the Terry Deary Tudor Tales books this morning. Emily found Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem about Anne Boleyn, Ye Old Mule, which she thought was hilarious - it's inspired much fun today, that one. She's copied it out onto a scroll and pretended to be Henry giving it to me (Anne), then we also spent some time thinking up other insulting poems about Henry's various wives...interesting, if not exactly politically correct!

We've sort of brought the "formal" bit of the Tudor project to a close now. We'll still be playing lots of Tudor stuff, and Emily can carry on drawing, colouring, "scrolling" and reading about Tudors to her heart's content, but I don't think we'll do any further "work" (for which read "writen stuff to show for all that learning") for the time being. We don't have as much "stuff" to show for this one as we had for the Egyptian project, but that's fine by us, since it was entirely Emily's choice to produce so much Egyptian written work in the first place. Looking back over the last couple of weeks, she's learnt an amazing amount, regardless of whether much of it has been written down or not! At the beginning we were obviously in a Manuel-esque "I know nothing" position. Now she knows Henry's family tree back to front and inside out, understands the reasons behind his marriages and the consequences of them, knows and understands why he broke with Rome and formed the Church of England, grasps the consequences of that very well indeed, knows about the reformation, Tudor exploration, Mary Queen of Scots, Tudor food, dress, entertainment, education, medicine, housing, the different lifestyles of the rich and poor, and has an exceptional feel for what these people were like, what made them tick, and their place in the grander scheme of British (and world) history, as well as having developed a real interest in Shakespeare. Not bad, I reckon.

A look at the Tower of London's website this morning prompted a fascination with the Crown Jewels, so Emily then spent ages googling for images of different crowns, and collating them all together in an MS Word collage... as well as finding a series of collectable miniature crowns she's got her eye on, and succesfully and independently searching ebay to see if she could find them cheaper (no luck, but full marks for trying!).

This afternoon, with no sign of the rain abating, we went for a wander at Normanby Hall. Apart from a soggy school trip, we had the place to ourselves, so we had a good long ramble, spent ages in the Walled Garden with the resident cat Albert and played Tower of London in the adventure playground....it's amazing what a good torture machine the roundabout makes!! Back home, as if she wasn't soggy enough, Emily and Jon spent ages playing outside in what was, by then, pretty heavy rain. I'm always glad to see she's not bothered by the rain....no school-type "wet play" stuck indoors days here!