Grade 3:Fibres Lesson 5 & 6

Fibres lesson 5: Silk

Introduced the concept of silk by talking about how we get many material/fibres from animals and one such fibre is silk.  I got out several of our play silks and we felt them and compared them to our other fibres. Basically we had a touchy feely session with much rubbing of fibres on our faces.

I then explained that silk is a very special fibre that comes from a moth and was invented by the Chinese about 3000 BC. We then talked about how many thousands of years ago that was and I explained that the Chinese guarded the secret of silk making for many thousands of years. I also explained that when silk was reserved for the emperor and the highest nobles only. I then told a very embellished tale about the Yellow Emperor's wife and how she discovered silk when a cocoon dropped in her tea. I could not find a suitable story for this so I just drafted one around the aforementioned tale. 

We also discussed that the silk moth will only lay its eggs on a mulberry tree. We will go and look at one at the botanical gardens tomorrow.

After all of this I asked Noah to copy the image from the chalkboard into his main lesson book:

MLB page for silk. 

The top picture is my 9yr olds and the bottom one is my 6yr olds,she always puts to mummy on them.lol.x


Anyhoo after the drawing task I got out some actual silk cocoons ​that I had ordered from Amazon.  The children were amazed that the play silks came from these cocoons and we estimated how many it make take to make one single silk.   We then immersed them in boiling water to try and get them to unravel, there was no continuous thread but definite fibres coming off, which delighted the children!

Fibres lesson 6: silk

I asked Noah to recall what we discussed yesterday about how silk was made and where it comes from. We then constructed a paragraph added in all of the grammar and he then copied it into his main lesson block. 

Well after a visit to the botanical gardens which was lovely but alas no Mulberry trees! So I went to the health food shop and we bought some dried black Mulberrys to make muffins with. They were very nice, sorry no pics as this was home ed on the fly.xx