Christopher Loyd!

Us standing in front of the "What on Earth Happened?" Wall Chart!

Yesterday, I went to Gamlingay to see Christopher Loyd! He's a historian who writes history books for kids but he also home-educates his children! He gave me and all of the other home-educators three talks, though some of the kids left in between the talks.

The first talk was about the Magna Carta.
The Magna Carta was the first ever list of laws to give King John 1st's people more freedom because King John was raising taxes and stealing everyone's money to keep fighting the war in France. He wasn't a very nice King at all!  King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, 80 years ago! The Magna Carta was written on parchment, which is sheepskin soaked in lime. Parchment was very expensive so  you had to write very small on it. Magna Carta is Latin for Great Charter.

The second talk was about Shakespeare.
To make it easier to understand, and a lot more interesting, he showed us a massive timeline of every Shakespeare play all together, with the year on the bottom. He also let us try acting in Macbeth! Me, Elise and Grace were witches! It was really fun, but really difficult to read the script! If Shakespeare was alive still alive today, he would be 450 years old! I bet you he'd be really proud of himself if he knew people were still talking about his plays today!

The last talk was about the Beginning of the world to the present day!
It was really interesting!Did you know the earth is 4.5 billion year old? He asked us a very difficult question that I actually didn't know the answer to... where did water come from? Some kids said it came from the river but then he asked, where did the river come from? Apparently, massive clumps of ice hit the Earth 4 and a half billion ears ago. The ice melted, forming the  rivers and oceans. But that didn't explain where micro-organisms came from that lived in the oceans? If the micro-organisms came from the ice comets, doesn't that mean that there is life on other planets? Maybe we'll never know...All of life on Earth that we have today, all the plants and animals, insects and birds ALL evolved over billions of years from those very first bacteria!


Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble!

A good thing about Christopher is he always wears a large black coat with loads of colourful pockets. Inside each of the pockets, there's an item to do with what we're talking about. He always uses simple items, like rubber rats and bottles of water instead of anything really complicated. It's a lot easier to remember what he's talking about if he shows you the items!
Also, in every talk he shows you the book he's written that's about the talk. He also has a massive timeline-type poster that he puts on the wall behind him so that he can show you when a certain thing happened.


Tilly had her hand up for ages, but he never chose her. :-(

After the three talks, I played in the park for a bit with Tilly, Lavinia and Liv-Astrid's brothers. We only got to play for about half an hour, but it was still really fun!

Tomorrow, me, Tilly and Lavinia are going to London! We'll have to get up really early to catch the train but I can't wait!!