Titanic

Well, Emily's completed her little mini Titanic project. She's worked really hard on it. She has:

• Produced a lovely timeline of events
• Written letters from both first and third class passengers describing their experiences
• Examined the arguments surrounding who was to blame and written pieces about to what extent she believes the disaster was or wasn't the fault of the following: Captain Smith, the shipbuilders in general, Bruce Ismay (MD of White Star Line), Thomas Andrews (MD of Harland & Wollf)
• Examined the reasons why the lifeboats weren't filled to capacity
• Looked into the class structure of the time and how it related to the Titanic (with far more third class passengers being left to die than first class etc)
• Examined evidence to support - or not - White Star Line's assertion that they never claimed the ship was unsinkable, and looked into why people believed it to be unsinkable even if the builders/owners never said so
• Learnt a great deal about using primary and secondary history sources and judging the reliability of evidence by what, if anything, the person speaking/writing had to gain from pushing their side of the story
• Written about the lessons learned from the disaster and how various laws and regulations were changed afterwards
• Considered the arguments for and against raising the Titanic wreck
• Read about the heroes and heroines of the event including famous names like the Unsinkable Molly Brown and also considered the actions of the less brave...for instance discussing why most of the empty-ish lowered lifeboats didn't turn back to rescue those in the water and why the nearby Californian (if indeed it was the Californian, about which there seems to be some dispute) may not have come to the rescue
• Read about and written about some of the premonitions of the disaster including the book Futility et al
• Created some great collages in Word of images related to the Titanic
  

Think she covered quite a lot there in 2 days!

Meanwhile, we've also done lots of maths; perimeter, area and various assorted word problems as well as bits of maths involved in the Titanic. A friend of ours also made Emily's day today by sending her a link to an online Titanic game :-)

Last night Emily went to yoga and passed her level 4 test; she'll have her level 5 test just before Christmas and then it's onto the 8 years plus levels.

In other news, our business bank has won the award for least-helpful-financial-institution-of-all-time (and let's face it, the competition is fierce)....they chose to bounce a cheque to a major supplier yesterday even though they obviously knew full well that several thousand pounds was due to clear into that particular account of ours less than 24 hours later which would have amply covered it. Business wise, life is frantic. And the BBC are now five weeks late in paying me, due to a switch over to a new contract system, which has caused ample chaos of its own, cash flow wise. My lovely contacts are doing their best to get payment expedited to us, but alas to no avail. I'm seriously tempted to withold the work due on Monday to them unless they've paid by then, but that will only inconvenience the people whose fault it isn't....and the people who get to choose who gets the work in the first place....probably not a good move.