Today is the 23rd April; it’s Shakespeare’s birthday, and it is St George’s Day. Since most of us know who Shakespeare is, I thought I’d investigate a bit more about St George as I have to admit that I’m not very knowledgeable at all when it comes to our patron saint.

St George is really very old indeed and we celebrate him on the 23rd April because it is thought that the 23rd April AD 303 was the day he died. As far as records show, the first St George’s day celebrations took place in 1222 when the Synod of Oxford declared St. George’s day a feast day in England.

St George is famous for three main reasons: the St George’s cross flag, for slaying a dragon and because of the line ‘cry God for Harry, England and Saint George’ in Shakespeare’s play Henry V. But who exactly was St George…?

St George was a Roman soldier from Syria Palaestina who was born at some point in the latter years of the third century AD. According to legend a dragon once made a home for itself in the spring that provided water for the city of ‘Silene’ (thought to be Cyrene in modern Libya). In order to get water from the spring, which the citizens desperately needed to do, they would sacrifice a sheep to the dragon. However, soon the dragon got bored of sheep and took a liking to eating young maidens. For obvious reasons, this was far from ideal and highly unsustainable and luckily one day St George appeared and killed the dragon. The citizens were so thrilled that they all converted to Christianity.

Thanks to this legend St George is now most frequently depicted on a white horse killing the dragon and rescuing a distressed maiden. The dragon is often seen as an allegory for Satan or paganism.

In AD 303 the Emperor Diocletian decided that every Christian soldier in his army should be arrested, and all the other soldiers should offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods. This outraged George and he stuck by his faith and refused to be arrested. Diocletian did his best to convert George by bribing him with land and gifts, but George refused to abandon his faith. Eventually he was executed for his disobedience.

Between 1400-1700 St George’s Day was particularly widely celebrated, and although it is still marked in England, the festivities have waned somewhat over the past few hundred years. However you might still see some St George’s flags around today, and in Salisbury there is still an annual St George’s Day pageant. It is also seen as a good day to do very traditionally English things like have afternoon tea, watch Punch and Judy shows, go morris dancing and sing the hymn Jerusalem.

Are you doing anything to celebrate St George’s day? Let us know if you are, we’d love to hear from you!

It’s nearly Easter weekend, hurrah! And everyone should be on holiday now, so we hope you’re having a great time. At Enjoy Education we love themed projects, and here’s a great few suggestions for things to do this week…
If you’re keen on arts and crafts, and want to do something with an Easter twist, then grab some eggs, glue, paint, old tights and some tea bags…
See if you can make a winning decorated egg. When I was at primary school we had an egg decorating competition and I once received a special commendation for one entry, which was an egg box converted into a little car with two eggy drivers in the front and ‘eggcelerate’ written across the top of the box. Can you think of an eggy pun and make something delightful?
For something not quite as silly, but just as enjoyable, blow out an egg so that you just have the intact shell. Then wrap some leaves/bits of lace/material around the egg to create a pattern. Put the egg in the toe of an old pair of tights and secure the tights with an elastic band. Cut off the excess material. Now boil the parcel in some very strong tea. After a while take out the egg and allow to cool before peeling off the tights and whatever it was you placed on the egg to create a pattern and the tea should have helped to stain a gorgeous decoration on the egg.
If you’re an arts and crafts fan and a chocolate lover you could decorate a chocolate Easter egg with icing from those little squeezey coloured icing tube that you can buy in the baking sections of supermarkets.

Let us know if you have any other fun eggy projects that you want to share… Have fun!

What a glorious weekend we’ve had! I have been so enjoying admiring all of the gorgeous daffodils that have sprung up all over the place and have also been munching (probably too many) hot cross buns.

If you’re looking for some fun things to do and make over the holidays, here are some suggestions for you…

-Make your own daffodils using green straws, card and yellow crepe paper.

-Make a family of Easter bunnies by cutting rabbit shapes out of card, decorating them with beads, bits of material and sequins.

-You can create delicious Easter nests by melting chocolate, mixing in mashed up shredded wheat cereal and then forming little nests in cupcake cases. Once they’ve set, put in some small chocolate eggs. Yummy!

-Here’s a great hot cross bun recipe adapted from one by the Guardian’s Dan Lepard:

Ingredients: 150ml apple juice at room temperature, 1 7g sachet fast-action yeast, 75g wholemeal flour, 150g double cream, 4 tsp mixed spice, 2 medium eggs, 50g honey, 300g mixed dried fruit, 400g strong white flour, 25g cornflour, 1 tsp salt, Oil for kneading
For the cross: 150g plain flour_50ml sunflower oil_125ml water
For the spice glaze: Half a tsp mixed spice and 25g caster sugar
Mix the cider, yeast and wholemeal flour in a bowl and leave to bubble for 30 minutes. In a saucepan, whisk the cream, spice, egg and honey, put over a low heat and stir until just warm, about blood heat. Pour into the yeast mix and add the dried fruit. In another bowl, stir the flour, cornflour and salt, add the yeast mixture, combine to a soft, sticky dough and leave for 10 minutes.
Lightly oil a worktop, and gently knead the dough for 10 seconds. Return to the bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm for an hour, until risen slightly. Divide into 12 roughly 100g pieces, shape into balls and put on a tray lined with nonstick paper. Cover and leave to rise somewhere warm until almost doubled.
Mix the cross ingredients and spoon into a piping bag with a plain 0.75cm nozzle. Heat the oven to 220C (200C fan-assisted)/425F/gas mark 7, pipe crosses on the buns and bake for 15-18 minutes. Remove and leave until almost cool. Boil the spice, sugar and 25ml water until syrupy, brush over the buns and they’re ready to roll.

-Make some beautiful decorations by boiling an egg and then painting it with jolly patterns.

-Set up an Easter egg hunt for your friends. Make sure you remember how many eggs you’ve hidden though!

Enjoy!

Today is a very special day indeed… it’s February 29th, a date that only crops up once every four years in the Gregorian calendar. As it’s so special, I thought that it was probably worth a little explore. Here’s what I have discovered about this very unusual day…

February 29th happens in almost all years that are easily divisible by 4 and 400 but not evenly divisible by 100. So there was a leap year in 2000, but not in 1900.

The extra day is added to account for the fact that over four years an extra 24 hours have happened in the sun’s journey around the earth. It’s easier to add 24 hours every four years than add six every year. In fact getting my head around how the latter would work is starting to make my mind boggle somewhat.

In some countries children born on the 29th February are considered to have their official birthdays on non leap years on 1st March (UK and Hong Kong), whereas in others the legal birth date is the 28th February (New Zealand). So if your birthday is the 29th Feb, if you were in New Zealand on February 28th and Hong Kong on 1st March you could officially celebrate your birthday twice!

Sir James Wilson, Premier of Tasmania is thought to be the only person in history who was both born on a leap day and died on one too. He was born on February 29th 1812 and died on February 29th 1880.

There are some funny traditions surrounding leap years and marriage and it is widely thought that a woman may propose to a man on February 29th. However, if he refuses he is obliged to give the woman some money or buy her a dress. According to some tales, a man must buy 12 pairs of gloves to save the woman the embarrassment of showing that she isn’t wearing a wedding ring. In Scotland, women who propose to their boyfriends on February 29th are supposed to wear red petticoats for luck. However, over in Greece it is considered unlucky to marry on February 29th. Although I can’t seem to find out why!

A ‘leap year’ is so called because hundreds of years ago it was overlooked in English law and was just ‘leapt over’ and ignored. As the day had no proper legal status a break in tradition was allowed, hence why women are permitted to propose to men.

A few weeks ago I found myself walking through the streets of east London, from St Paul’s to the Barbican and then on to Smithfield Market. As well as discovering all sorts of amazing buildings and brilliantly named streets, I chanced upon a London museum I’d never heard of before: the Clockmaker’s Museum. The museum lodges in the Guildhall library and holds an amazing collection of horological instruments. You can find out about extraordinary clocks made in London since 1600 and see watches belonging to many famous historical figures. For more information click here.

This curious discovery led me to wonder about all the other unusual museums that must be tucked away in our wonderful city. Here are a few I’ve found out about that are on my ‘must visit’ list for the next few weeks. If you’re looking for somewhere unusual to go this weekend, why not try out one of the following…

Medical students and aspiring doctors might want to go along to the Royal London Hospital Museum in Whitechapel, where you can see all sorts of early pieces of medical equipment.

They say that the ‘eyes are the windows to the soul’, and at the British Optical Association Museum you can find out all about your peepers, the history of spectacles and even see some eyes belonging to Egyptian mummies!

The Foundling Hospital was supported by many great philanthropic figures such as Handel and Hogarth and it looked after many thousands of abandoned children. Although the original hospital has long been demolished, there’s a museum near the original site, where you can discover stories about London’s abandoned children and see an amazing collection of art and Rococo interiors.

Children and the adults who are young at heart will be delighted and tickled by Pollock’s Toy Museum.

‘Money, money, money, must be funny…’ went the lyrics to the famous ABBA song, and at the Bank of England Museum you can find out all sorts of things about the history of British currency.

The Cuming Museum in Southwark showcases the collection of the Victorian Cuming family, who gathered a fabulous variety of treasures on their travels.

Animal lovers, explorers and historians will adore the Grant Museum of Zoology, which holds hundreds of creatures and specimens, including the skeleton of a Dodo and the corpse of a Tasmanian tiger.

Have you found an exciting and unusual museum or building? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

After years of build up, London 2012 is almost here. In a few months’ time the games will begin and the city will be sports crazy. Having never been terribly adept at PE at school my sports knowledge is pretty terrible, but as a resident of this year’s host city, I felt it my duty to find out a bit more about the Olympic sports…

There are 26 different Olympic sports, which are broken down into 39 individual disciplines. There are some famous ones, such as athletics, rowing and swimming, and some more unusual sports such as handball and canoe slalom. Cycling breaks down into four categories: BMX, Mountain bike, road and track, and there are three different types of gymnastics: artistic, rhythmic and trampoline.

The event that sounds most impressive (and exhausting) to me is the Modern Pentathlon. Contestants have to swim, fence, ride, shoot and run! The Modern pentathlon was championed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin (the founder of the games as we know them) and is inspired by a 19th-century legend. According to the story a French cavalry officer had to deliver an important message and in order to do so ended up riding, fencing, shooting, swimming and running (it must have been a very special message!).

One of the more unusual venues this year is the Horse Guards Parade, which will play host to Beach Volleyball. Beach Volleyball began in the 1920s and became an Olympic sport in 1996. Out of the eight gold medals awarded so far for the sport, five have gone to Americans.

Although canoes have been around for hundreds of years, the 200m-canoe sprint race is making its Olympic debut in London this year. The canoe sprint is one of the fastest races and can be over in no more than 30 seconds!

Olympic sports are full of all sorts of jargon. Here are some new words that I’ve discovered…
‘Piaffe’: a trotting movement, performed almost on the spot (to be found in Dressage)
‘Judogi’: A judo uniform
‘Parry’: A defensive move found in fencing.

I was tickled to discover that ‘Taekwondo’ translates into English as ‘the way of foot and fist’. This martial art is all about powerful kicks and punches, so it seems it is a very apt name after all.

The Iranian athlete Hossein Rezazadeh, who lifted a staggering 263.5kg in Athens in 2004, holds the Olympic weightlifting record.

According to the official London2012 website, the organisers are estimating that 2,400 footballs will be used in the Olympic football matches!

If you want to find out more about the Olympics this summer, check out the official website, which is packed with lots of great info.

Hurrah! We love half term! If you’re staying in London this February, there are lots of wonderful things to see and do. Here are a few of our favourite opportunities…

Are you excited about the imminent arrival of the new James Bond film? If you need a bit of 007 in your life before then you can go on a themed Bond Duck tour.

Cadogan Hall is just a hop and a skip away from Enjoy Education HQ and the venue is putting on a special sea-themed family concert.

Celebrate Chinese New Year at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich. They’re putting on lots of fun activities to help you celebrate in style.

Keen swimmers and artists might want to attend an event at Dear Lido where you can decorate swimming caps, make bunting and attend a tea party in Tooting.

Budding musicians have got a great chance to go to workshops led by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at the Barbican.

Celebrate the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth by going to the fantastic Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London.

Curious scientists should pop along to the Grant Museum of Zoology to take a peek at some fascinating skeletons and weird and wonderful creatures.

It’s a big year for the monarchy with the Queen’s diamond jubilee and you can find out more about the famous Household Cavalry (the Queen’s official guards) at the Household Cavalry Museum.

Are you a fan of the magical and fantastical? Maybe Balthazar’s Bazaar of the Bizarre is the show for you.

Young adventurers might want to go along to Holland Park where you can go on thrilling scavenger hunts.

Have fun!

It’s impossible to know everything, and during your lifetime you have to be selective about the things you want to learn; picking GCSEs, A Levels and then university degrees for example, all end up narrowing the subjects that you’ll be studying. Of course there are also all sorts of extra-curricular activities you can do, or adult learning courses in order to expand your horizons. From hieroglyphics to playing the xylophone, there’s pretty much a course for everything out there somewhere and new classes seem to be popping up all the time.

Most recently, Kensington and Chelsea College has announced that they will offer a course in ‘iPhoneography’, which is a course solely dedicated to teaching people how to use the camera on their iPhones. Professional photographer Richard Gray, who said to the BBC, “all you need is a passion for photography and a creative mind” and “with the right apps and skills, the iPhone can be a powerful creative tool”, will lead the course. The course is thought to be the first of its kind. If you’re a keen photographer and the owner of an iPhone, then maybe this is the extracurricular activity for you.

While there are plenty iof unusual courses on offer in the UK, America is usually credited with having the most unusual and esoteric education courses on offer and at the University of California you can study underwater basket weaving, at Pitzer college you can take a course in YouTube and Georgetown University offers a course in Philosophy and Star Trek. My favourite sounding course is The Science of Harry Potter, which is offered by Frostburg State University.

Back in the UK, here’s a link to some lessons in delicious things such as pizza making, cheese tasting and vegetable growing.

Have you heard of or attended some unusual courses? We’d love to hear from you if you have.

Leading biographer Claire Tomalin has boldly stated that she believes that most children do not have the attention span required to read Charles Dickens’ novels. 2012 is a big year for Dickens, as we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the writers’ birth, but Tomalin said in an interview with the Press Association that children are unable to appreciate Dickens’ work because they are ‘being reared on dreadful television programmes’ and reading novels such as Bleak House requires a great deal of attention, which many children are just not used to.

Dickens’ corpus of work is so rich that it would be a shame indeed if young people today did not engage with such brilliant novels as Great Expectations, Little Dorrit and Nicholas Nickleby. There are also lots of brilliant adaptations of Dickens’ work, which could serve to grab children’s interest before they move onto tackling the novels themselves. My particular favourite was the BBC’s television adaptation of Bleak House with the excellent Gillian Anderson, Anna Maxwell Martin and Burn Gorman.

Dickens was born on February 7th 1812 in Portsmouth and to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth there are a great deal of exciting things taking place. The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall kick started celebrations by laying a wreath at Dickens’ grave in Poet’s Corner and then visited the Charles Dickens Museum. A 24 Hour ‘readathon’ is taking place across the world. The UK stage of the readathon will be held at the BFI, Southbank.

Members of the Cabinet are being given copies of the writers’ work by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but maybe we should also be giving copies to children as well and encouraging them to read Dickens’ novels. Dickens is famous for his many colourful characters which should inspire children’s imaginations.

If you’re interested in joining in with the celebrations, why not visit the Charles Dickens museum. And very soon a new film version of Great Expectations will be released, which might be another good way to dive into the wonderful world of Dickens this year.

As regular readers of the Enjoy Education blog will know, we are very interested in students’ wellbeing in all areas of their life, not just in terms of academic work. We also care a great deal about the link between a healthy lifestyle and a healthy mind. Although it came as no surprise, it was interesting to hear this week that there have been some major studies by City University in London and the School Food Trust to show that if children learn to cook at a young age, they are more likely to have a better diet and be healthier when they grow up.

The studies have shown that children who attend cookery classes start to eat healthier foods once their understanding of ingredients improves and that children are more likely to want to eat healthy food once they know about the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables.

It is well known that as a nation we are getting fatter and unhealthier every year. Childhood obesity is a major problem, and we need to do all that we can to encourage people to eat well in order to protect their health in the long term.

The government had been planning to include more lessons on cooking in schools, but these plans have been put on hold while there is a major review of the curriculum. However, in light of these latest studies, perhaps there is now enough evidence to show how valuable teaching cookery skills are.

A charity called Let’s Get Cooking has been helping thousands of pupils to learn how to make healthy meals and a survey has shown that 92% of the pupils use their newly discovered skills at home and that they have been eating much more healthily now that they understand food better. With no evidence to suggest that learning how to cook is a bad thing, we should all get into the kitchen as soon as possible!

Cooking can be a lot of fun, as well as satisfying and good for you. If you have children, why not try and make some meals together, or children and teenagers could ask their parents to show them some basics, or perhaps ask for some cookery lessons as a birthday present.