Homeschool Science: Periodic Table of the Elements Resources

Quick Pick Six Elements with my ten-year-old. I miss those long-ago days of literally homeschooling around our big family room table!

Throughout our entire homeschooling journey, I always LOVED studying the Periodic Table of the Elements with the kids. And tbh, I don't know if we came back to it so often because it was really always coming up in our studies... or because I was always making an excuse to come back to it!

For instance, in that same homeschool year as the photo above, we studied the Periodic Table of the Elements as part of a chemistry unit, a geology unit, and a history of science study. We came back to it over the years every time studied biology, every time we studied geology, that one time that we did the history of science study... and this last homeschool year, my high school Senior and I took one last spin through the Periodic Table as part of her Honors Chemistry lab science.

You won't be surprised, then, to learn that I've amassed a lot of resources relating to the Periodic Table of the Elements. Here are some that we've used over the years:

We have worked this PTOE puzzle SO many times!

• Quick Pick Six Elements. I printed the playing cards on card stock and the kids colored them; I don't usually put that much effort into a handmade material, but we have used the snot out of this game! There are some other element flash cards that are already colored in available here.
• Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements. Click on one of the elements, and you can see images and descriptions. It's probably better for younger kids. This interactive Periodic Table of the Elements is better for older students.
• Periodic Table of Mistakes. After your kids have learned how the Periodic Table is organized, present them with this and see if they can spot all of the mistakes!
• PTOE Cookies. You know how we love baking delicious things for school! I really want to make cookies or cupcakes of the entire Periodic Table.
• Element Collection. How large of a collection can you accrue? I also think it would be fun to organize this as a scavenger hunt--how many elements do you already own?
• Lewis Dot Diagram of the Elements. Try this one instead of your standard Periodic Table.
• Build a Periodic Table of the Elements. Here's a big project for the semester--build your own wall-sized Periodic Table! If you don't need as much hand-holding, here's a free download that shows you how to set up this assignment.
• Egg Carton Periodic Table. Make your own Periodic Table of the Elements out of egg cartons.
• Periodic Table of Videos. TED-Ed has a lesson for every element in the Periodic Table.
• Cartoon Elements. Need your elements anthropomorphized? Here you go!
• PTOE Battleship. Here's a great way to get kids comfortable with pronouncing (or trying to pronounce!) the names of the elements.
• Periodic Table of the Elements Lapbook. My kids never got into lapbooks, although I do sometimes have them complete some of the smaller elements to include in the notebooks that they do keep.
• Chemical Element Trump Cards. Here's another card game, this one available as a free download.
• Element Coloring Pages. You can only get a few of the pages for free, but if your kiddo enjoys them, you could buy the book!
• Montessori Three-Part Cards of the Elements. A Montessori kid would adore these.
• Blank Table. Why not just write in your own?
• Cross-stitch Elements. This probably isn't for the kids, but I now deeply desire to make an entire cross-stitch Periodic Table of the Elements. Or maybe Perler beads?
• Cheater quilt. You can print the table, itself, onto quilting cotton via Spoonflower, and then sew it yourself, or use it as a beginner sewing project to do with the kids. Kids love hand-quilting! This one, on the other hand, is more of a patchwork sewing project, but you lose the element info. 
• Poster. We have always LOVED our large-format anchor charts over here. The bigger they are, the more room the kids have to draw and glue things all over them!

We also watch a lot of YouTube videos when we study something. When the kids were little I pre-screened videos before I watched with them, but I always had several go-to sources that I knew would be good. You might want to add these to your Watch List sooner rather than later, because you know how things are with YouTube--today's video is tomorrow's static!

And here are our FAVORITE favorite resources--THE BOOKS!!!!!!!!!

• The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements
• The Disappearing Spoon
• The Stardust That Made Us
• The Periodic Table: A Visual Guide to the Elements
• The Secret Life of the Periodic Table
• The Periodic Table: Elements with Style
• The Elements Book: A Visual Encyclopedia of the Periodic Table

Although all my kids are officially done with all of their homeschool studies as of this week, you're probably still going to find me doing my own little PTOE crafts now and then. I want to find a way to make a Periodic Table quilt that is both patchwork AND has the info for each element, for instance... I guess when both the kids go off to college in the fall, my partner and I can spend our lonely evenings designing element quilt blocks for Spoonflower to print for me!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool High School Biology: The ProtistsThat Live in the Local Lake

You will never want to even touch pond water again after completing this biology lab.

But you WILL want to have an aquarium full of pond water living in your home so you can keep hundreds of thousands of microscopic protozoa pets!

This lab is a companion to CK-12 Biology 8.4, which is the chapter on protists.

Observing prepared slides of protists is a good preliminary lab, because it allows your high schooler to review proper microscope usage and how to make microscope drawings, and to get an idea what the live protists might look like. 

Here are the lab instructions that I wrote for my teenager, and here are the materials that we used for the lab:

• packaged sterile sample container
• eyedropper
• microscope
• (optional) microscope digital camera and software
• protist diagrams
• blank microscope slide and blank slide covers
• lens cloth

There was a blast from the past on the package of microscope slides:

I used to shop in that independent educational toys and teaching supplies store ALL THE TIME when my children were wee. The dollhouse I bought one toddler to celebrate her toilet training came from there, as did the PlaySkool circus set that the other kid picked out for her sixth birthday present, about an hour before she broke her leg on the playground and it turned out that a huge Playskool set was absolutely the perfect thing for a kid with a cast on her leg to play with for a solid month!

Fifteen years after picking out that dollhouse, my teenager collected water from a local lake, brought it home, dropped a single drop onto a microscope slide, and put it under the microscope to see what lives there.

A lot, it turned out!

In the above video, I think I see an amoeba, but I think that all the larger creatures are perhaps nematodes? I haven't even looked to see what the teenager identified them as in her lab notebook, but I'm sure her guess is better than mine!

The next video is by far my coolest:

I'm pretty sure those are stalked ciliates! The teenagers and I have done this lab several times, and I've only seen these particular critters once! I'm think all the critters swimming around them are Euglenae. Or maybe Paramecia? 

Those two videos are taken at just 100x, so you can see how much you can see even at that low magnitude. 400x, below, gives you more detail, but we don't use any additives to slow down our protists, so anything speedier than that oozy amoeba at the bottom right is hard to see.

This is a different water sample on a different day. I think that might be another Euglenoid because of its chloroplasts, which perhaps makes the critters that I previously thought were Euglenae actually Paramecia. I should probably get off my butt and go see what the teenager identified everything as, because I'm sure that she did more research than I'm currently doing!

The identities might be a bit sketchy, but the point of this particular lab isn't specifically to correctly identify every protist. Think of how much the teenager learned about sample collecting, microscope usage, and protists in general, as well as the practice that she got writing a lab report, problem-solving in science, and making decisions about identification. 

And most importantly, she got to see all the magic that lives out of sight in our local lake!

This protist lab pairs well with this macroinvertebrate identification lab, as well as this larger Water unit. 

Day 12 in England: It All Begins at Tintagel

 

It was definitely a Bank Holiday weekend! Breakfast was packed, and the hostess was freaking out. People kept trying to change up the combinations of their full English breakfast even though she admitted she had no way to keep their orders straight, and the Australian couple behind us kept making her go back and put more scoops of coffee in their coffee press, because "British coffee is weak."

Here's my dutifully complete full English breakfast, black pudding and all!

See my delicious orange juice? We kept sneaking back up to the community carafe for refills every time the hostess went into the kitchen to cry, so that she wouldn't be additionally distressed at how much we were hydrating. Everyone else in the restaurant barely touched the juice!

Here's the rest of our day:

• Tintagel Castle
• Dartmoor National Park
• Lyme Regis

Thanks to Matt attempting to ask for only ham, sausage and eggs for breakfast and therefore working the hostess into a dither, we didn't arrive at Tintagel right when it opened, and OMG it was crowded. We learned that not only was it the Bank Holiday Weekend we'd been hearing about, but also the next week was a nation-wide school holiday... we had lots of company everywhere we went for the rest of our trip! 

Much of the Tintagel site is on a headland whose access point to the mainland has mostly collapsed, so you walk across a beautiful pedestrian bridge towards the ruins of a 13th century castle built by the Earl of Cornwall:

There's the bridge connecting us to the mainland.

The tide was high during our visit, but during low tide you can explore the beach and walk into many of those caves: 

Some of us had a wonderful time exploring this headland, taking in the views and the vista and enjoying the height:

Others did not enjoy this, and huddled as far away from the views and the vista and the height as they could:

I'd been inspired to check out the logistics of this drive all the way to Cornwall solely because of its connection to Arthurian legend, which is one of the teenager's current Special Interests. In Le Morte d'Arthur, which we read together last semester (and in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which we're going to start this week!), Arthur is conceived inside Tintagel Castle, where Igraine is hiding after Uther Pendragon takes a rapey liking to her. Igraine's husband Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, got his wife the hell out of that party where Uther first noticed her, which pissed Uther off, so he used their departure without his permission as his excuse to wage war against Gorlois. 

While Gorlois was off fighting and Igraine was hiding, Merlin figured out a plan to get Uther inside Tintagel Castle so he could rape Igraine. His price: why, only their firstborn child, of course!

Uther had NO problem promising their firstborn child to a magician whose father was an incubus, so he was completely on board with Merlin's plan to magically disguise him as Gorlois. Wearing his Gorlois skin, Uther rode right up to the gates of Tintagel. His servants were shocked to see him, since he was supposed to be literally fighting a battle really far away at the moment. His wife was equally shocked, but Uther got his booty call.

He would have gotten away with it, too, except that the real Gorlois was actually right that second dying in battle...

Anyway, Igraine actually did come around to marrying Uther after her husband (and therefore all means of support and defense against a predatory, powerful king) died, and she, too, had no problem giving baby Arthur up to Merlin. Merlin sent Arthur to live with Muggles, and The Once and Future King is my favorite continuation of that story. 

This is the perfect spot, then, to pay our respects to the birth of the legend that's brought so much magic and beauty into my life:

Matt was so embarrassed to take this photo, lol, but the teenager and I were VERY into it! We're being real knights!

Also, cheese!

Also on the headland are the remains of a beautiful Medieval garden that the Earl of Cornwall may have had constructed to mimic the garden from the story of Tristan and Iseult. 

As you walk around the perimeter of the garden, stepping stones tell you the story:

After exploring the headland, we walked down the path--

--under the bridge--

--past the beach and Merlin's Cave, and then up the long, steep road back into Tintagel... and Cornish pasties!!!

This was our best meal of the entire trip. These Cornish pasties were DELICIOUS!!!

I wanted to be in Lyme Regis in time for the late afternoon low tide, but fortunately we had just enough wiggle room in our schedule for a quick drive and a short hike in Dartmoor National Park. 

The parking lot was teeny-tiny and tight, so the college student and I, the two who were the most revved up about hiking in Dartmoor, bailed and started our hike while Matt waited in the car in case anyone left the lot and he could squeeze in. The disinterested teen stayed with him, and to be honest, we didn't expect to see them at ALL. Imagine our surprise, then, when we saw these two figures on the horizon!

We were technically hiking towards Scorhill Stone Circle, but there wasn't any signage or really any paths, so what we actually did was wander up towards Hound Tor and simply admire the endless moor all around us. Here's a nice rock, though!

People live in Dartmoor National Park, as well, and our walk back abutted someone's sheep field and this very old wall to demarcate it:

Driving through Dartmoor National Park was some of our most terrifying driving yet. And it wasn't even the sheep that were often snoozing in the middle of the road, because we were only going about 5mph so we had plenty of time to stop for them.

Instead, it was THIS!

This is not a road. This is a HEDGE MAZE!

It is a single car-width hedge maze, complete with all the twists and turns that make it impossible to see what's coming from the other direction.

Fortunately, the one time we did encounter a car, we were near enough to someone's gate that Matt could back up, squeeze over against it, and the opposing car could squeeze up against the hedges on their side and creep past. I have NO idea what you're supposed to do if a car wants to pass you here:

At least it made the highways after Dartmoor National Park seem less terrifying by comparison!

We made it to our hotel in Beer with just enough time for us to throw our bags in our rooms and for some of us to head right back out again (others of us took that time to catch up on their socials and pretend like we don't exist). We were going to be in this area for two low tides, and I didn't want to miss a single second of either of them!

We weren't exactly fossil hunting at a Mary Anning level, ahem, but we did find plenty of pretties to weigh down our luggage and distress airport security:

And here are some huge pieces that we admired on our walk:

We got back to Beer around 7:00 to discover that although the town was HOPPING with vacationers, there was absolutely no food to be found. The pubs were overflowing and were all serving drinks only at that point, no food whatsoever. Matt walked around and checked a couple out while the teenager and I hung out on a bench and did some people-watching. The best thing we saw was a group of about four drunk guys, walking down the middle of the road with their arms around each other, singing "We are the cheeky lads!" When we travel, we're always on the lookout for local color, lol!

And that's how we all ended up back in our hotel, bingeing a reality show about people who vacation in caravan parks and supping on only slightly smushed crisps and chocolate bars from our bag of road snacks. 

• 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!

Day 7 in England: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich

The teenager woke up fever-free and without a sore throat on this morning, but we decided to have her kick back and hang around the AirBnb for the day just in case. So it was just three intrepid adventurers who attempted to figure out how to get ourselves back and forth to Greenwich by boat. It went... not well.

Here's our day's agenda:

• Thames Clipper to Greenwich
• Royal Observatory
• Greenwich Market
• National Maritime Museum
• Greenwich Foot Tunnel
• Thames Clipper to Battersea Park

In theory, the Thames Clipper Uber Boat is the coolest idea ever. You buy a ticket, hop on the boat, and travel the Thames to your destination. I. Was. STOKED!!!

In actuality, the routes are completely incomprehensible to ascertain, the boats are mostly unlabeled so you can't tell if you're getting on the correct one without asking, and even when we asked, the employees couldn't seem to actually tell us how to actually get on the correct boat for the correct route. It was absolutely miserable. I could have literally walked to and from Greenwich in the time it took us to get to and from Greenwich on this day. 

So what I thought you were supposed to do was check this route map to see what color route you're supposed to take--

--and then cross-reference it with the timetable to see when your boat will arrive:

We wanted to go from Battersea Power Station to Greenwich, so we wanted an RB1, but what I think we ended up getting on was an RB6? Because it dumped all of us off at the Canary Wharf stop and went back the way it came from. So then we had to figure out 1) what our Oyster cards had been charged for that trip, since we'd put money on them specifically for this, 2) if we had enough money on the Oyster cards to continue the trip with a second ticket, because there wasn't a place to top up Oyster cards at the pier, and 3) what freaking boat were we actually supposed to take to finish getting to Greenwich.

If only any, you know, EMPLOYEES had been around to offer assistance! 

We thought about bailing and just riding the Tube out to Greenwich, but damn it, I wanted my boat ride, so we turned to Plan B, generally known as Throw Money at the Problem. Matt got us new paper tickets from the ticket machine, which was a waste of money if our Oyster card tickets were still good, but the advantage was that they at least said which pier we were going to in case we got thrown off the boat early again, and we got back in line to wait for the next random boat that came by going in the proper direction. 

At least the trip was pretty (although--another disappointment--all the seats have a dirty window in between you and the pretty things)!

Fortunately, I don't think there was any way to screw up going east from Canary Wharf to Greenwich (stay tuned for the evening, when we'll screw up our westward trip!), so when we FINALLY got back on a freaking boat, that boat at least took us straight to freaking Greenwich.

From there, it's just a 15-minute walk straight uphill to the Royal Observatory!

There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to see here, but first, we had to see the Main Attraction:

It's the Prime Meridian!

Check me out encompassing ALL the hemispheres!

The rest of the day will consist solely of me finding Prime Meridian markers and insisting on having my photo taken with them.

I thought the historical meridian markers were also interesting. There were several!

Apparently, astronomers spent quite some time dithering about whether the meridian should be here, or perhaps over here five feet to the right, or maybe just scooted over another couple of feet right here. It's like moving a coffee table, only you have to remake all your plaques and inform the entire world that you changed your mind.

I hadn't come to see them, specifically, but I loved the exhibits that showed examples from the history of astronomy. Here are some children's lacing cards from the 1820s, with the lacing holes being the locations of the stars that make up the constellation:

This globe is really cool, too, because the constellations show up as shadows on the wall behind it:

There are also artifacts here from the interesting history of timekeeping and measurement of all kinds. Here's the Time Ball, which still falls exactly at 1:00 pm daily so that ships on the Thames, households across the river, and anyone who happens to be looking in the right direction at the right time can synchronize their clocks:

And yes (because I looked it up), the New Year's Eve ball drop in Times Square DOES trace its history back to this very ball.

The Royal Observatory is on a hill, so check it out--you really can see it from a LONG WAY! Probably not during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and its coal smog, though...

Here's the original entrance, with all the standardized measurements on display for the general public to reference at any time. The clock is especially important, because it reflected the real, actual time from the official timekeeper inside the observatory (there's a replica in the gift shop that I SUPER wanted, but even before I realized that my entire carry-on was going to be full of rocks, I knew I wasn't going to have room in it for a giant analogue clock...):

Oh, look! I found another Prime Meridian marker!

Once upon a time, Matt and I both read and were, for a pretty hot minute, obsessed with Longitude. So when we came upon an entire gallery devoted to chronicling the development of the ability to calculate longitude on ocean voyages, we both went SQUEEEEEE!!!!!

This below work was a star catalogue meant to define positions and orbits so exactly that ships could use it to calculate longitude... if only their ships were sitting on a perfectly flat ocean during a perfectly clear night, of course. It's got a super dishy backstory, though! John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, spent literal decades on his observations, and flat-out refused to publish them until he'd spent further decades refining and correcting. So Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley--as in, THE Isaac Newton and THE Edmund Halley--sneaked into his workplace, stole his documents, and published a pirated version. So then Flamsteed went around and picked up all the pirated copies he could find and destroyed them. This edition is the official one, published posthumously because that was the only way he'd stop messing with it:

Here's one of the timepieces made on the path to an accurate calculation of longitude. It's got dueling pendulums to hopefully counteract ship movement, and a variety of metals to hopefully counteract temperature changes:

It didn't work great.

Here's the real winner!

This watch keeps perfectly accurate time no matter how much it moves, what the temperature is, what the humidity is, or how much salt gets on it. Combine that with an accurate astronomical chart, and you'll never be lost again!

This exhibit below inspired me and Matt to explain to our college kid all about the good old days, when could call Time and Temperature on your landline. 

The teenager thought that this was absurd, and that calling to hear the movie listings and to request songs on the radio sounded equally absurd. But now we know why BBC Radio kept beeping at us every hour!

Found another Prime Meridian marker!

Even though Borough Market had been so crowded we all thought we were going to die it had also been really cool, so after watching the 1:00 Time Ball drop we left the Royal Observatory and walked over to check out Greenwich Market:

I swear to god I could take these two to the pits of hell and they would manage to find a churro stand:

I think the teenager who we'd left at the AirBnb would have liked Greenwich Market a lot, but just between us I'd rather have stayed at the museum and looked at stuff. 

After lunch, we walked over to the National Maritime Museum, where I had several things I wanted to see.

But first, the toddler playground!

They're deliberately ignoring the sign that says that only small children should ride the boats, and I'm pretending I don't know them.

There were so many exhibits that I wanted to see that we ended up just wandering, directionless, through the galleries. Fortunately, we happened upon all of my must-see sites!

This double hull outrigger canoe reminded me of Moana.

It's a real Marshall Islands stick chart!!! We learned about these at the very beginning of my kid's AP Human Geography study, so it was fun to see one in person.

The Atlantic Worlds gallery had an exhibit on Africa that felt kind of sketchy:

I mean, I guess they're not factually incorrect, but it feels very... dispassionate, I guess? Maybe that's my perspective as an American, where we're literally still having to tell people that Black lives literally matter, but I feel like the lede of this intro should have been something like "Enslaving people and trafficking them across the Atlantic, raping, torturing, and murdering them along the way and at their destinations, was all very bad, and we shouldn't have done that."

The exhibit did have a lot of artifacts from the history of African enslavement that I'd never seen before, but they also felt dispassionately presented and I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures. Like, this label shows the most emotion, and even it sounds like they're describing something from another planet:

I did send my teenager this pic of a guillotine used to execute 50+ royalists on a West Indian island, though, because eat the rich:

My obsessive reading of the Aubrey/Maturin novels have given me a taste for the Napoleonic War-era Royal Navy, so I was very stoked when our wanderings finally led us to the gallery I was most excited to see: Nelson, Navy, Nation! I outlasted even my poor college student in this gallery, as not only did I have to look at every single artifact and read its label twice, but then I had to go back and see my favorites a third time, then find something else I hadn't looked at closely enough, and then take another set of photos in case my first three sets hadn't turned out correctly:

Should I get desperately into model shipbuilding? I kind of think I should!

This is the first letter Nelson wrote with his left hand after having his right arm amputated:

Sooo... I know it's a kind of running joke in the Aubrey/Maturin novels, but I did not realize how very, very, very much everyone in England reveres Lord Nelson? They are REALLY into him! It made me realize that I am missing a lot of context for the novels, and a lot of references and imagery is likely passing right over my head. Like, now I think O'Brien is purposefully putting in similarities between Aubrey and Nelson, right?

Anyway, here's the coat Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded. You can see the bullet hole there at his left shoulder:

And here are the underthings he was wearing when he died. All that blood on his stockings belongs to a shipmate, though--he just fell in it:

In the same gallery, here's an unrelated photo of sailors shooting walruses. It was so fun to be in the Navy!

I'm sorry to say that I DID have to be dragged out of that gallery at closing time...

I'd sort of wanted to tour the Cutty Sark, but the ridiculous amount of time it took us to make our way all of the six miles to Greenwich that morning meant that I couldn't work it in, alas. Here it is from the outside, at least!

We were pretty footsore by this time, and we probably could have headed back to my kid and my AirBnb, but I'd seen this place on Tiktok--

--and I could not sleep easy at night until we'd experienced it for ourselves.

So we did!

On the other side of the tunnel, you get a lovely view back to where you came from:

Look VERY closely and you can even see the red ball at the Royal Observatory!

By the time we'd walked back through the tunnel we were EXHAUSTED, which was just the awesomest time to figure out how to get back on my new personal very least favorite mode of transportation ever, the fucking Thames Clipper Uber Boat OMG. If I'd had a brain cell left in my head I would have found a Tube station instead.

Determined that this time we were NOT going to fuck this up, Matt found an actual human to buy our return tickets from, and this human told us which boat to get on. So we got in line for that boat. And then that boat reached capacity, so we all had to walk back up the gangway and get in another line for the next boat... which was not set to arrive for forty freaking minutes. We should have tried to return our boat tickets and found the Tube station. But instead we waited in line, and when an employee came by Matt showed her our tickets, asked her if the next boat was the correct boat for our tickets, and she said it was.

So finally, FINALLY the next boat comes and we all get on it. We get to about here--

--and then the boat stops at Canary FUCKING Wharf AGAIN, dumps us all out AGAIN, and turns around AGAIN, because it was not the right boat.

So, y'all, I feel like a few times on this trip, some random employee deliberately gave us the wrong information, and I feel like they did this because they did not want to have to tell us bad news. Is this a British thing, or an us thing?

At least there were a ton of tourists on this boat, and we were all irritated and tired and confused, so I wasn't the only one not happy when we all got dumped off. There were a LOT of people griping, but the guy emptying the boat kept saying, "The next boat will be here in just a few minutes! Just wait for the next boat; it will be here in a few minutes!"

By "few", he meant forty.

When the next boat finally came, the guy letting us on was bemusedly very patient with me when I stopped the entire line to be all, "Does this boat go to Battersea? This very boat? I'm on the boat that will take me to Battersea?"

And hallelujah, it did!

Fine, it was worth it to be able to go UNDER the Tower Bridge, even if my view of it was through a dirty window.

...and then after all that, and then walking to our bus stop, to get the bus that would let us out a block from our AirBnb, the bus never came. It kept saying it was coming on Google Maps, then it would say it was delayed, then that bus would disappear and Google Maps would start saying the next bus would be here in five minutes, then it would say it was delayed, and so on and so on. We played that out for about 30 minutes before I was finally like, "OMG guys I think we're going to have to walk."

Well, we HAD been living just a few blocks from Battersea Park all week without having stepped into it once, so a mile walk straight through the middle was a least a good chance to take it all in...

• 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!