Day 4 in England: Mudlarks and Southwark

The day's agenda:

• 8:30 mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust
• walk across Millennium Bridge
• Borough Market
• Southwark Cathedral
• Tate Modern
• original location of The Globe

Probably the most unhinged thing that I did while planning our trip was make this map. It consists of EVERYTHING that I want to do in England. Like... EVERYTHING. All the forts along Hadrian's Wall. Every castle. Every museum. Isaac Newton's apple tree. All the barrows and standing stones that Google could tell me about (I've since purchased a giant map of the sites of Ancient Britain that will come in handy for my next trip!). All the thrift stores and bakeries and curry stands. 

So when I was planning out our days, if we had a specific place that we were definitely going to be on a specific day, like our tickets to Six or our special tour of Stonehenge, I could then look on my map and easily see all the stuff I wanted to see near that area, or stuff that would be on the way to or from that place. 

That's how our mudlarking excursion on this day would lead right into spending the rest of the day in Southwark: they're neighbors!

Mudlarking is now officially one of the best things that I've done in my LIFE. For a two-week trip, England now holds quite a lot of my most favorite memories!

This two-hour mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust was fortunate in timing, early enough that after it was over we still had nearly the entire day to spend in Southwark; it was less fortunate in regards to the fact that I, personally, got absolutely pig-filthy while larking around in the mud, and had to spend the rest of the day looking at Jackson Pollock paintings and buying fancy doughnuts in pants with muddy knees.

Our tour met at the Millennium Bridge obelisk, where the tour guide took us through the history of England from Neolithic times, showing us mudlarked finds to illustrate her history. We saw Neolithic artifacts, bones, pipes, fossils, and pottery from the Roman, Medieval, Tudor, Elizabethan and more more modern periods, all of which helped us know what to look out for when did our own mudlarking. Bartmann jugs from Germany are tan with a speckled brown glaze, even if you don't get part of a face. Clay pipe stems are older the thicker they are, and they used to be essentially disposable so there are literally millions of them on the banks now. Medieval pottery is also quite thick, and often--but not always--has a green glaze. Roman roof tiles could have evidence of charring from the Great Fire, or, rarely, could have the imprint of an animal's paw. Willowware, my favorite, began in the Victorian period but never stopped being produced so could be quite modern. 

We were in the location of the former Trig Lane, an area that has been in heavy commercial use since at least Roman times. In the 70s an excavation uncovered an entire Medieval quayside that proved its popularity for small boats... which probably explains the thousands of pipe stems on the shore! Tobacco was expensive but clay pipes were cheaply made, so often the pipes were considered single-use, packed with just a bit of tobacco and discarded when done. Pubs would have pipes for patrons to use, and it was considered sanitary to nip the tip of the pipe stem off with every use so that your lips wouldn't touch where someone else's lips had been. 

Here are some of the pipe stems I found:

Look how narrow! A wire was pushed through the hand-rolled clay to create this channel.

The "best" finds are the longest pipe stems, or ideally a complete pipe with an intact bowl. Later pipes had maker's stamps that can be used to date them. The teenagers with their sharp teenager eyes found some pipes with partial bowls, but I was ecstatic with every single utterly basic pipe stem fragment that I found. 

Below, I've got a fragment of a Bartmann jug, a bit of pipe stem, a piece of Willowware, two pieces of Medieval pottery with the green glaze, and a piece whose provenance I can't recall, but I do remember our guide showing me that it's the lip of a vessel, with a gap through the middle where the edge of the clay was folded under:

The college student has some lovely bits of Medieval pottery... and a sheep's tooth!

There were a LOT of animal bones on the foreshore, speaking to the area's history--where better to slaughter animals than a riverbank, where the blood can just wash away? The teenager immediately dove right in and settled into making decorative piles of bones. She thoughtfully even brought the nicest ones to me to admire!

You can sometimes find cut marks in the bones, because of COURSE the best part of a bone is the delicious marrow inside!

To show you the treasures that we were walking on, I zoomed in on this photo in Photoshop and circled every artifact I could see. Most are pipe stems, of course, but I also saw part of a pipe bowl, a piece of a Bartmann jug, more Willowware, some pottery I can't identify but that has embellishment... and, of course, consider that I barely know what I'm looking at, so what other treasures did I miss!

This is why the advice given by serious mudlarkers is to settle down and spend time closely examining one small area. I was WAY too excited to do that, and was pretty much in roomba-mode the entire time. 

More finds!

Some Roman and some Willowware, along with a couple of pieces I don't know.

Here's our tour guide helping the college student identify some of her finds:

One time, she picked an object out of my hand and threw it down the shore. "Asbestos," she said.

Another time, she told me that what I had thought was a marble was actually a MUSKET BALL!!! It was too good for me so she kept it, and I didn't realize until hours later that I hadn't even taken a photo of it! So guess who bitched for the ENTIRE rest of the England trip about the time our tour guide stole my musket ball and I didn't even take a photo? 

She also handed out this ID guide for us to use. No musket balls, but it did help quite a bit with the pottery:

We mudlarked our way steadily east--

I love the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern in the background!

--until we came to our turnaround point, Queenhithe, where you can see this Anglo-Saxon dock at low tide:

You're not allowed to mudlark in that area, so we started mudlarking our way back again:

I did not keep track of time AT ALL, and finally our guide had to tell us that we were the last people left on the shore, and the tide was coming in quickly. Oops!

After climbing back up the Trig Lane Stairs, we took a quick peek at St. Paul's Cathedral--

--then walked across the Millennium Bridge to Southwark:

I was most excited about seeing Southwark Cathedral, but my family of hungry raccoons was most excited about Borough Market!

Here's a couple who went to Borough Market on a day that was a LOT less crowded than the day we went...

I'm super jealous of them, because we barely had space to move of our own volition in Borough Market! In each aisle there was a crowd going one way and a crowd going the opposite way, and you just sort of nudged yourself into one of the crowds and let it carry you along. 

We still ate, though! We bought a loaf of bread--

--pain au chocolat--

--more bread--

--veggie pies--

--and the teenager even found the specific doughnut place that's gone viral on Tiktok:

Sitting on the filthy ground in a parking lot, with our backs to some construction fencing... you know, as you do!

And then FINALLY, when even the most crowd-tolerant of us had grown frustrated and claustrophobic, we went to look at Southwark Cathedral!

Statue of Minerva in the foreground

I didn't go inside even though I'd have liked to have seen John Gower's tomb, but I DID spend quite a lot of time pretending to start my Canterbury pilgrimage from here:

Shall we ride donkeys to Canterbury together? We can entertain ourselves by telling tales!

On a previous trip to England, Matt and I had LOVED the Tate Modern, so we were both excited to see it again. I think we were all really worn out from the mudlarking and the traipsing through Borough Market, though, because none of us were really into it on this trip. We wandered a bit and saw some famous artists--

--but the only thing I was really revved up about seeing was this genuine Gee's Bend quilt!!!

I don't think I've ever seen one in real life before! Aolar Mosely pieced and quilted the above log cabin quilt, and her daughter, Mary Lee Bendolph, pieced and quilted the basket weave quilt, below:

I love how the techniques are similar enough to speak to each other, but the look is so different. 

You can graduate the homeschooler from the homeschool, but you cannot graduate the homeschooler from sitting herself down at the preschool art table every place she sees one:

For a change, we didn't close this museum down--instead, we went to the Marks and Spencer Simply Food for more noms--Cadbury Popping Jellies! Chocolate-covered ginger Borders! Rekorderlig Strawberry-Lime ciders! Haribo Tangtastics!--then sat and people-watched and passed judgment on the traffic while we ate popsicles. I don't know why I kept getting the Twister because I didn't really like it, but it kept looking so delicious on the package!

We were all more than ready to take the bus back home, but fortunately the last stop on my wish list was just down the steps from the bus stop, across the street from a construction site, and on the other side of a locked gate...

It's Shakespeare!

This private courtyard between two apartment buildings is the original site of Shakespeare's Globe. We'd walked past the reconstructed Globe, just a few blocks to the Northwest, a few times that day. I'd looked into getting us tickets for a performance, because Matt and I saw Hamlet there 20+ years ago and it was EPIC, but I didn't think the kids would like the current show and that would spoil the whole concept of Shakespeare for them.

Right now they're doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, which the kids would have freaking LOVED. Grr!!!

Aww, look at us clinging to the bars like old-fashioned zoo monkeys. We wanted IN!!!

This day felt sooo long, and I was frankly also VERY excited about our bus, because it was the same bus that stops right by our AirBnb, which means NO transfers!!! It was a 45-minute trip, sure, but with no transfers we could plop ourselves down on the top level of our double-decker bus and sightsee (or, let's be real here, nap) the whole way back.

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

"A Sad Tale's Best for Winter": The Winter's Tale in our Homeschool High School

My teenager took this pic of the empty stage before The Winter's Tale began. Lots of clock imagery and candles!

As you might recall if you hang out on my blog's Facebook page with me, I have... opinions about how Shakespeare's plays should be explored with high school students:

Considering that Shakespeare didn't even write the plays as we currently read them, and they were instead reconstructed from the actual materials that the actors and other theatre personnel used, often with typos and undoubtedly with/without elements included in the production of the plays but perhaps not written down, I don't place value on "reading" the plays, other than the ability to reference them for citations. 

If that's all you've got access to, then obviously go for it, but that's not all you have access to. DVDs and the internet are the best resources for exploring Shakespeare's plays, because there you can see the plays how they're best seen, interpreted through the eyes of actors, stage managers, dramaturgs, costume designers, hair and makeup artists, and and lighting technicians. 

In my homeschool, we study approximately one Shakespeare play a year this way, usually through a student production at our local university. I don't know about the local theatre options anywhere outside of my small city, but our local theatre productions are AMAZING!!! They're generally equal to anything professional that I've seen, and I can name several of their productions off the top of my head that were better than a professional show. 

This recent production of The Winter's Tale wasn't as exciting as last year's Macbeth, done in the round in a converted formal dining hall, or my favorite, a years-ago female-only production of Julius Caesar, but my teenager liked the costumes (so many underbust corsets!), and all the acting was perfect, and the plot is so bonkers that you can't not have an opinion. 

And, of COURSE, the whole point of even going to the production is to see in real life the world's most famous stage direction: "Exit, pursued by a bear." I gripped my teenager's arm tightly in anticipation of this moment, which was acted by a group of modern dancers. During intermission I was all set to provide my teenager with a lecture on Elizabethan England's obsession with abducting bears and holding them hostage while being mean to them, but it turned out that she already knew this... because she remembered it from Magic Tree House. 

Thank you, Stage Fright on a Summer Night!

We'll be studying more about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare later this Spring, so for this particular unit, watching the play and discussing it with each other (with an emphasis on how the costumes aided/hindered meaning) was sufficient, but there's a ton more history, geography, literary analysis, comparative analysis, and research that you could do to flesh this one play out into a larger study. 

For a simple and easy to follow plot summary, I like these three-minute animated plot summaries from The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Here's the one for The Winter's Tale:

I like to have my kids watch these before we see the play, because it's no fun if you can't follow the plot!

And more importantly, not only is it no fun, but your brainpower won't be available for more sophisticated analysis and thoughtful opinions if it's busy struggling to figure out what on earth is even going on every minute.

Along with the plot summary, it's important to know the characters and how they're related to each other. I'll download any infographic I find that's attractive and accurate--

via the Illinois Shakespeare Festival

--but I also like to pull from the millions of educational guides to specific plays that various theatres have made available online. They're usually written to classroom teachers and so will include a lot of classroom activities that you may or may not want to modify to suit your homeschooler (discussion questions make great essay topics!), and a lot of background info on different topics that's usually written at an appropriate level for students to read and enjoy independently.

Here are some good ones for The Winter's Tale:

• A Noise Within. This is my favorite study guide, with tons of contextual information and some quite solid student activity suggestions. 
• Seattle Shakespeare Company. I like the way that the character map is divided by Act in this study guide, although the suggested student activities are corny.
• Yale Repertory Theatre. Along with the character map, I really like the Actor's Notebook section in this guide. It shows students how to read and interpret the play as an actor would.

For more in-depth resources, the Folger Shakespeare Library has articles and lesson plans, and full-text downloads of the play in various formats. Even if you're reading the full text of the play with your homeschooler, it's good to have the full text so you can reference lines that interest you and find scenes and quotes to illustrate, etc.

Here are some other hands-on activities to incorporate into any Shakespeare study:

• Globe Theatre. Understanding the layout and infrastructure of the Globe is crucial to understanding how Shakespeare's plays were originally meant to be experienced. Kids who like hands-on activities, puzzles, models, and imaginary play might like to build this paper model of the Globe... or you can build it for younger kids, make them a set of mini paper dolls to go with it, and let them create their own small world productions.
• stick puppet theatre. Another fun way to get kids involved in reading and reciting Shakespeare is to help them turn part of a scene into a puppet theatre. Kids can draw their characters, color in line drawings, or just help choose images, and then they get to memorize their lines and put on a play!
• historically-accurate recipes. Because cooking is a great way to homeschool! I wish there was an excellent Elizabethan England cookbook that I could recommend, but at least there are plenty of historically-accurate recipes shared around the internet by various historical societies and museums. The one below is from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust!

• The Game of Shakespeare's Life. This game would work best after reading a biography of Shakespeare. Bonus points for asking the kids to research more historical or biographical events to fill in the rest of the spaces!
• Shakespeare-themed Poetry Tea. We love our poetry teas!

Depending on what your kid is into, there are also all kinds of creative ways they can explore, analyze, and interpret Shakespeare's plays, including writing fanfiction, staging and acting out scenes, creating dioramas of a scene or the theatre, making trading cards of the characters, drawing a book or program cover, illustrating a quote, creating infographics, etc. 

Add on a nice little analytical essay to finish it up, and you're all set!

Homeschool European Geography: Zooming In On Ukraine

I haven't written much about our European Geography study, but I assure you that we have been steadily working on it for several months now.

Our spine for European Geography is Draw Europe, supplemented with lots of fiction and non-fiction, YouTube and DVDs, hands-on activities, live radio...

...and an international snacks subscription box that I bought for Will's last birthday! I bought her a year's subscription to Universal Yums, and it has been SO FUN. Each month she gets a box from a different country, and when her box if from a European country we treat it as a bonus chance to dive deep into that country.

This month's Yum Box was from Ukraine:

Here are some of the snacks that she received:

Ukraine is VERY into potatoes.

These boxes are a LOT of fun for adventurous eaters, and they're how I know that I super love smoked plum candy. NOM!

Anyway, although we've already covered Ukraine in our study, spring is an especially good time to revisit the country, because one of the traditionally Ukrainian crafts is the making of pysanky eggs for Easter. We don't make pysanky eggs every single year, but it is a surprisingly accessible kid craft, and I do recommend it. Don't they turn out cool?

Here are some other great projects to add into your study:

• Print, color, and label a map of Ukraine. We use the free Owl and Mouse maps for all of our geography studies--I love them SO MUCH because you can print them up to several feet across. Color and label the printouts, or use them as templates to make salt dough or cookie maps. 
• Print and color Ukraine's flag. The kids really loved coloring flags when they were early elementary, but even now, we still get out the pin flags and maps sometimes. 
• Make and memorize fact flash cards. Even if you're focusing on history, politics, or culture, it is useful to have some basic facts memorized. I like the templates here because kids learn more when they have to research the facts themselves.
• Learn a little of the language. Some languages have fun flash cards that are easily found via Google search, but I didn't have a lot of luck with Ukrainian. Nevertheless, one or two lessons through Mango Languages is enough to give a kid a glimpse at what speaking Ukrainian is like--it will at least teach them how to say hello!
• Read about Chernobyl. This is a good way to get a science-focused kid interested in geography. Here, for example, is a quite readable explanation both of nuclear fission and the chain of events that led to the Chernobyl accident.
• Study Sevastopol. There were important sieges there during both the Crimean War and World War 2--which gives you opportunities to also delve into studying both of those wars, too.
• Listen to Ukrainian music. We like CDs of folk music from the library, but currently our favorite ways to experience a country's music are by streaming live, local radio stations on Radio Garden and by searching the playlists on Spotify--seriously, don't you want to listen to Ukrainian rap?

When the kids and I are searching YouTube for resources on a country, we always look for Geography Now, Eurovision, and Rick Steves videos. Geography Now and Rick Steves haven't covered Ukraine yet, alas, but Ukraine does participate in Eurovision, and they have some great performances. This one is our favorite, sort of because of the costumes and the dancing, but mostly because the lead singer has the best hair EVER, and every time we watch this video we mostly just spend the time talking about how nice her hair is and wondering how she got it so nice and shiny and tangle-free:

It's REALLY nice hair, right?

Although we didn't find many YouTube resources on Ukraine (please let me know if there's something that you love that we should know about!), we found loads and loads and LOADS of great books. I'm extra happy that Will's Yum Box led us to this review, because there are so many good books that we didn't get nearly through them the first time:



Now that we've experienced a few snacks from Ukraine, I'm longing to hit up the giant international grocery up in Indianapolis to see if they have any of our favorites, or something new to try.