We went to Fishbourne Roman Palace today. I went with the school when I was very young along with a trip to Bignor Roman Villa which is also local-ish and another place I’ve been meaning to take the children at some point.
We got there just before midday, having learnt that Chris and Helen were running late and had time for a quick play on the ‘match the symbol to the god’ game and were then invited into the audio visual presentation. It wasn’t really suitable or designed for small children, with Scarlett announcing to the room at large that she was bored about five minutes into it, but I pulled her onto my lap and whispered into her ear my own Scarlett-tailored commentary which seemed to help. 🙂 We then went back round the museum and they were interested in most of the various bits and pieces – mosaics which had been restored to show the patterns, some early tools and jewels and a skeleton as there had been four burial sites discovered there too. We were looking at the mosaic floors and talking about the various different patterns when The Beans arrived so we went back to the picnic area and had lunch. Well we had lunch, the children mainly ran around like loons playing some sort of monster game. They also hooked up with some other children, which was initially fun but ended up being upsetting to Tarly after they seemed to take the game a little more seriously than our four and were being quite scary monsters apparently! 😆 We sat and discussed whether you can indeed tell if children are home educated just by looking at them. I don’t think we reached a conclusion on that but maybe we could have some sort of controlled experiment 😆
We then went back in, Davies and Scarlett got sent back out again as they had now decided to eat their lunch, so we waited outside and then caught up with The Beans inside once they’d finished eating. I have to say Helen is the best person I can think of to visit a Roman Palace with as she was able to answer all the questions from the children – and me! 🙂 and also have an impromptu biology lesson when they were looking at the skeleton. I was glad we’d had that half an hour or so to look at stuff properly as Davies and Scarlett went all crazy the moment they had friends with them and just wanted to run and shriek really, but they enjoyed the roman-ness of the setting regardless and we get a season ticket for our entrance fee so can go again any time in the next year and do the bits they were too giddy for this afternoon 🙂
They did some stuff in the activity bit, matching modern day things to Roman equivalents which we called on Helen for again, some mosiac pattern building, some coin rubbing and some blocks building etc. before they felt the need to run around again so we went out into the gardens for a while. They played hide and seek, found some things to be spotted from a sheet and then requested to play on the hills outside again. So we sat back on the bench, they hooked up with yet more children and had a final play before we parted company and we drove home listening to the Rotten Romans cd all the way home. 🙂
Once home we let the chicks out for a free range wander, the children had tea and then we walked Davies round to Beavers – the last one of the term and a teddy bears picnic theme. I only found out when we arrived that it was ‘bring a guest’ so Scarlett could have stayed, but never mind. We came back and taught the chicks some new tricks – like jumping to get a bit of bread held above them and eating out our hands. Reading on forums it appears eating out of your hand is a big deal for non-hatched by you chicks but all of ours are very used to it. And no, still no idea what they are. With the exception of Wobble – the black one, who looks huge to me but someone said could be a fast growing breed indicating it’s a hen, they all look identical which suggests they are all boys or all girls. Ady reckons they’re all hens today, I’m still undecided.
Ady came home and I popped back to collect Davies and his bear and witness an incident of the Beaver leader shrieking at the boys – which she does all the time- and one of the dad’s pulling her up on it and checking his son was ok. He was really cross – and rightly so, but I’ve done my fair share of ranting at extra curricular activity providers already this week so I just watched and listened. That’s it til September now but he can do a Beaver Hobbies badge over the summer if he wants on a hobby of his choosing that he needs to participate in and tell the group about when they go back, so we’re putting some thought into that one.
The children played with the chickens for another half an hour or so before we shut them in for the night and the children went off to bed. As reported below Davies spent time at his window, but Scarlett was asleep very quickly.
Tomorrow we have lots of people here and if we’re up and about early enough I might take Davies and Scarlett off to the library to sign up for this years summer reading game – Big Wild Read which launched today and is apparently going to blow me away this summer with how mad crazy busy the library will be, so it would make sense to beat the rush of the children breaking up from school and get in there first.
I just love Fishbourne. Are they still showing that wonderfully dated film called ‘Voices of Fishbourne?’ I swear I saw that on a school trip when I was about eleven! P was inspired by that strange film when she was about eight and it prompted a serious project.
Knowledgable people are great on trips. I like D’s dad for this purpose!
Comment by Allie — 17 July 2007 @ 9:30 am